The burden of disclosing sexual abuse by Catholic clerics and its cover-up by religious leaders has fallen almost completely on victims. Most church insiders who have witnessed misconduct have chosen not to report it. Fortunately, there have been remarkable exceptions. BishopAccountability.org is pleased to present the first database of church whistleblowers – priests, men and women religious, and other church employees and volunteers who reported colleagues to church or civil authorities and fought their superiors’ concealment of abuse. We have defined “whistleblower” broadly: our table includes both those who spoke up internally and those who went outside the church. Many of the individuals profiled below have experienced retaliation and grief in some form – defamation, job loss, career derailment, ostracization, pressure by superiors to admit to mental illness, and in at least one case, suicide. By documenting this overlooked aspect of the crisis, we hope to raise awareness that whistleblowers…
The global Jesuit order issued a notice in early December that it had placed restrictions on the ministry of Jesuit Fr. Marko Rupnik, an internationally known religious artist, after accusations he had abused several adult women. While remaining deliberately vague about the reasons for the move, the Jesuits seemed keen to stress that “no minors were involved.”
While the Jesuits and the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith avoided further comments on the case, some Italian blogs reported that Rupnik, a charismatic star in certain circles, had been accused of spiritually and sexually abusing consecrated women of the Loyola Community, a religious community he had co-founded in Slovenia in the early 1980s.
Only at a press conference with journalists later in mid-December did the Jesuit superior general, Fr. Arturo Sosa, confirm rumors that Rupnik had been excommunicated in 2019 as a result…
The mission of BishopAccountability.org is to collect the documents and other sources of information that are needed to understand the Catholic clergy abuse problem. The files of accused persons form the core of our collection, and various other archives support those fundamental documents. On this page, we provide an introduction to our various archives. For your convenience, we start with links to some of our key document collections – large and small. Then we get into the details. The list below provides links to 43,772 pages of files – about 50% of the total that we offer online, and 20% of our public archive. Our entire holdings, including files that we are preparing for release, total more than 1.5 million pages.
[Please share the original URL of this open source article with others who are interested. This article and related ones appear in Sexual and Spiritual Violence against Adult Men and Women in the Catholic Church, a special issue of the journal Religions.]
Abstract
Disproving assumptions to the contrary, this article clearly shows how and why adults can become victims of abuse in church contexts. It does this by focusing on the pastoral care context and the interdependent potential risk factors lying within. As previous studies suggest, this context is especially susceptible to perpetrating abuse. Approximately three-quarters of all cases of abuse occur or begin in the context of pastoral care or spiritual counseling. Often, theories of pastoral care do not address this danger and tend to idealize the practice of pastoral care. In contrast, it is necessary to recognize a specific power to victimize due to the theological and structural…
