In “Race Issues and Education in America,” a discussion hosted on Thursday, Feb. 11 by the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work with the support of Interfaith Youth Core, a group of experts harkened to past for guidance. Just as faith-led demonstrations and interfaith leaders came together to advocate against racial segregation and oppression during the Civil Rights era, they noted, so too can faith leaders play a role in making sure essential materials needed for teaching and learning still reach minority families and communities.

The discussion, which was moderated by John Mensah, LAW ’19, featured Debbie Almontaser, Ed.D., GSE ’16, CEO of Bridging Cultures Group Inc, and the author of, Leading While Muslim: The Experiences of American Muslim Principals After 9/11 (Roman & Littlefield, 2018); Terrance Sullivan, executive director of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights; and Sarah Diem, Ph.D., professor of educational leadership & policy analysis at the University of Missouri.

It was co-sponsored Center on Race, Law and Justice, the Feerick Center for Social Justice, Fordham Black Law Students Association, Fordham Latin American Students Association.

Watch below:

“What Happened? Why? What Now? Clergy Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church” brought together experts in law, psychology, and theology to talk about new developments in the ongoing crisis, such the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s August report detailing how more than 300 Catholic priests there sexually abused children over seven decades and were protected by a hierarchy of church leaders.

It was the first in what organizers said will be a series of events dedicated to the crisis, and was preceded by a full minute of silence in honor of the victims.

The End of Piecemeal Reforms

Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D., professor of theological and social ethics and the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham, called the Pennsylvania revelations, as well as those relating to the abuse and cover up involving former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, “sexual abuse crisis 3.0.”

The first highly publicized incident of abuse, involving a Louisiana priest who was convicted of pedophilia in 1985, was dismissed as an aberration, Massingale said. Then in 2002, the Boston Globe published a report showing the abuse was more widespread, but it was still seen as an American phenomenon confined to wayward priests.

Now, he said, victims are coming forward from around the globe, which is proof that the whole church hierarchy is to blame. The entire process of priest formation needs to be reformed, he said, with less emphasis on the virtue of obedience.

“What we’re seeing is an interrogation of a monarchical system of power, where the people who have power in the church are not accountable to anyone except the person above them, and there are no women in the chain of command, and no lay people in the chain of command,” he said, noting that few outside the church believe church leaders are capable of policing themselves.

“We have reached the end of piecemeal reforms.”

M. Cathleen Kaveny, Ph.D., the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor of Law and Theology at Boston College, concurred, and said it’s important that the church submit itself to appropriate legal procedures and use secular best practices to make sure the abuse never happens again.

“At the same time, its extremely essential that we use and develop our own theological and ethical language to understand why this is a problem, not just for citizens in the secular society who are harming one other, but also for fellow members of the body of Christ, to see how that is harming us as church,” she said.

Time to Rethink Priest Formation

The relationship between priests and bishops was a major point of discussion. Father Massingale noted that at its best, the relationship takes on a benevolent father-son dynamic. At its worst, a priest can become psychologically dependent on the bishop, thus becoming vulnerable to being used to cover up for him or for others.

Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D., the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics, professor of psychology, and director of Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education, echoed Father Massingale’s strenuous assertion that homosexuality is not in any way connected to the abuse perpetrated by priests.

Men who molest young boys are immature heterosexuals who find themselves identifying more as a child than as an adult, she said. She noted that national studies have found that priests who have abused children do not display evidence of mental illness or urges associated with pedophilia.

And covering up the abuse, Fisher said, has only compounded and spread the pain further.

“People who are deeply religious are more likely to believe in the power of forgiveness, however the severity of harm perpetuated on children, the violation of the clerics’ position of trust and moral authority, repetition of abuse by individual clerics, and the past unwillingness of the church to recognize these problems is making forgiveness difficult for many Catholics,” she said.

Why Now?

To the question of why, David Gibson, director of Fordham’s Center of Religion and Culture, added, “Why now?” For starters, he noted that in 2002, American bishops went after the “low-lying fruit,” by focusing on priests and exempting themselves from scrutiny.

“I remember talking to a bishop I’ve known pretty for a pretty long time. I said, ‘What about you guys?’ And he said to me, ‘I don’t even know how you fire a bishop,’” he said.

Gibson said that the Pennsylvania grand jury report added narratives to what had previously been dry statistics, and their impact was heightened by the revelations of Cardinal McCarrick’s conduct that had come out just a month before. Just as important, Gibson noted, is that conservative Catholics have come out in favor of investigations they’d previously resisted, and law enforcement officials are no longer turning a blind eye.

Finally, he said, it’s become apparent that the problem is not confined to Anglophile countries such as the United States, Ireland and Australia.

“It turns out we were the leading edge of a wave of that’s now breaking around the world, in places like Chili, Guam, Mexico, Poland, and Italy,” he said.

“This is all emboldening victims, empowering them, and more of them are speaking out. And when victims speak out, that’s more effective than any media investigation or grand jury report.”

The panel was co-sponsored by Fordham’s Department of Theology, Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, and Institute on Religion, Law, and Lawyer’s Work.

Amy Uelmen, a lecturer at Georgetown University, was one of those in attendance. Uelmen, who would join Fordham Law School in 2001 as director of the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work, said she knew something big was afoot at the time.

“There was this sense of, how do we carry forward this thirst for integrity in our personal lives and our professional lives? I had the impression that there was a seed of something new,” she said.

“If you work for the poor or the homeless, it’s obvious in some ways how Catholic values dovetail with that, but if you’re working for large companies or in a large firm setting, it’s not so obvious. So, I think there was an opening to go to these areas that are less clear, and in some ways, a little bit more difficult to thread out the connections.”

A Reunion for Scholars

Uelmen will rejoin many of the attendees of that 1998 conference on Thursday, as the Institute marks the anniversary of it and a similar conference in 1997, at Religious Lawyering at Twenty, a two-day event sponsored by Fordham Law at the Lincoln Center campus. She will join the Honorable David Shaheed, retired Superior Court judge and associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, for a panel, “Humanizing Legal Education.”

On Friday, Fordham Law professor Russell G. Pearce, will lead a panel discussion, “Religious Lawyering at Twenty: In conversation with the next generation.” Pearce, who is also the Edward and Marilyn Bellet Chair in Legal Ethics, Morality, and Religion, was instrumental in organizing the original conferences.

Uelmen said that while Pearce had taken Tom Shaffer’s 1981 treatise “On Being a Christian and a Lawyer” and applied it to the tenets of Jewish Law, one of the noteworthy developments to come out of the 1998 conference was the involvement of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers, which had formed just two years earlier. One of the founders, University of Wisconsin Law School professor Asifa Quraishi-Landes, will be on the panel with Pearce.

When it comes to the past, she said she was excited to honor Howard Lesnick, the Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Lesnick, who retired last year, wrote core texts such as Religion in Legal Thought and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Moral Stake in Education, (BookSurge, 2009).

“We’re going to celebrate how Howard brought his insight into the implications for teaching pedagogical practice and helped students become more human, basically,” she said.

Looking Ahead to the Future

The conference will not only be a retrospective; Uelmen said she’s hopeful that the conferences’ panels, celebrations, and workshops will also highlight the work of scholars who are just getting started. Their input is particularly important, she said, because they’re working in an environment that is very different from 1998. In fact, Uelmen returned to Fordham in 2016 to co-teach a workshop on having difficult conversations.

“We’ve spent, in many ways, the last 20 years becoming increasingly politically polarized, which makes it difficult to meet each other, hear each other, and figure out how to exchange stories and ideas,” she said.

“It’s a wonderful thing to get together in person, and make some personal connections and figure out how we can bring ahead a really humanized approach to having difficult conversations where we might substantially disagree on important questions.”

As part of Ignatian Week, on Nov. 1 Fordham Law students learned techniques designed to promote civility and reduce instances of talking past each other.

“Dialogue and the Difficult Questions,” a workshop held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, was conducted by Amy Uelmen, lecturer at Georgetown University Law Center and founder of Fordham Law’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work, and Charles Camosy, Ph.D., associate professor of theology at Fordham.

Camosy said he feels strongly about pro-life issues and animal rights, but said it is his goal to be in solidarity with those with whom he disagrees. He cited social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who says that the positions we hold on the most controversial, polarizing issues are not often based on evidence and argument.

Instead, most of us hold a particular position because that’s the position of our “team,” or social group.

“Because it’s based on teams, it naturally results in a binary,” said Camosy. “There are the righteous, who are on our team, and there are the heathens, who are on the other team. That dynamic, and not actually engaging with other people’s arguments, is what is foundational, and drives polarization.”

He said many people derive their identity more from being in opposition to the other “team” than from identifying with their own group.

“This cuts us off from our ability to listen,” he said. “Our identity is so invested in being against the other, that [it]produces the tendency to come up with caricatures and straw men.”

Uelmen said she was motivated to address the subject by the tears of her friends in her own religious community. During the 2004 presidential election, they tried to engage each other but were torn by the fact that some members felt the others were literally going to hell because of their political choices.

The presenters offered a five-step practice for starting and maintaining conversations that are difficult, in order to reach a point of peace and acceptance of the fact that understanding is not the same thing as agreement. Participants were instructed to engage one another about a controversial topic, and to:

—Approach the conversation from the perspective of basic respect, in the spirit of Pope Francis’ suggestion that “We remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other.”
—Unplug from social media and stay focused on person-to-person interaction.
—Give the person on the other side an “out,” by using phrases like “maybe I don’t understand” or “maybe I need more information.” That way you don’t box anyone into a corner.
—If you learn something new during your conversation, express your gratitude.

One student participant wondered what one should do when a person is not interested in meeting you halfway in any fashion. Camosy suggested that you decide ahead of time that you’re not going to try to “win” the debate. You can even inform the other person that you just want to understand what they think and why they think it.

“It does take a bit of discipline to say ‘I’m not in this to win the conversation,’” he said, “’[but rather]to listen to somebody, take my shoes off, and understand their experience.’”

Hear what students had to say about healing the nation’s political divide: