In 2018, the Catholic world was reeling from the one-two punch of abuse allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the scathing Pennsylvania grand jury report exposing Catholic clergy sexual abuse of over 1,000 children over the previous 70 years. That reckoning prompted a group of researchers from 10 Jesuit institutions to mobilize to look for ways to stem a crisis of clergy sexual abuse that is now reaching its fourth decade.  

At Georgetown University, a priest began studying the healing effect of abuse survivors’ stories; an ethicist at New York’s Fordham University began investigating how Black survivors had been erased from the clergy abuse crisis; in Milwaukee, an interdisciplinary team at Marquette University started a workshop for Catholic teens on abusive power dynamics.

These projects are three of the 18 funded by an unnamed foundation and whose findings are published in Taking Responsibility, a 68-page report from Fordham University released in January.

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