LITTLE ROCK (AR)
Bilgrimage blog
April 4, 2019
In today’s Tablet, a valuable reminder from historian Kathleen Holscher of the University of New Mexico that how we view the abuse story in the Catholic church depends on how we frame it — and on who is doing the framing: Holscher writes,
There have been two side-effects of the Boston and Pennsylvania reports’ ascendance in the US. One is the absence of non-white victims from coverage of abuse, and subsequently from scholarly conversations and – importantly – ecclesial responses to it. The other is the inattention to colonialism and white supremacy as interlocking structures that formed Catholic sexual violence in many parts of the United States, and created the distinctive and historically pervasive Catholic phenomenon of sexual abuse against Indigenous young people.
To read (or read about) the Boston and Pennsylvania accounts is to learn about a pattern of behaviour by Catholic priests that plagued white ethnic, urban, suburban and semi-urban Catholic communities in many parts of the US during the twentieth century.
This has led many Catholics, both laity and members of the hierarchy, to imagine that the abuse of children by priests has been a scourge of tightly knit Irish-American, Polish-American or Italian-American parishes that pepper East Coast cities, and of Catholic communities in the industrial towns of what now gets called the Rust Belt. They have fed the assumption that perpetrators and victims of sex abuse in the United States were white, and that almost everyone involved was Catholic.
Places such as Pittsburgh or Scranton, Pennsylvania, are a big part of the history of sex abuse in the Church. Today there are thousands of people living in those and similar places who are the survivors of predator priests. Their stories are important. But these places and communities are not the history.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.