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.”

When it comes to sexual abuse, the Catholic Church is no different, said Nuala Patricia Kenny, MD, SCH.

“I love the church. I do not love when members of the church have not been witnesses to the healing and reconciling mission of Jesus, especially in relation to the protection of children,” said Sister Kenny, who spoke on March 10 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

“I’ve met so many Catholics who still don’t want to talk about this, who believe that any conversation about this is disloyal,” she said. “Ridiculous. When you see evil, you have to in fact begin to grapple with it if you are going to turn it towards good.”

Her talk, “Healing the Church: Some Systemic, Cultural and Legal Considerations” was sponsored by Fordham Law School’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work.

It relied on many of the revelations she shared in her book, Healing the Church: Diagnosing and Treating the Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal (Novalis, 2012), but with updates to reflect developments such as the Oscar-winning film Spotlight.

Sister Kenny’s experience with sexual abuse in the clergy dates back to 1989, when an extensive pattern of abuse was revealed at the Mt. Cashel Orphanage in St. John’s, Newfoundland. A pediatrician by training, she called her involvement with the official investigation more painful than the end-of-life care she’d done with children.

In some ways, the movies Doubt and Spotlight exemplify the ways society has shifted from denial of the problem to focusing on the individual to focusing on the systematic failures of church hierarchy. She divided the modern day phenomenon in the United States into three categories dating back to 1984, while noting that the issue is has never been a new one.

“You can’t say this is a recent event when it was addressed at the Council of Elvira in 306. The first council of the church in which there is a discussion about the morality of clerics involving themselves with young boys,” she said.

“You don’t like that one? How about the Book of Gomorrah, written by St. Peter Damian in 1051. Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom. Sodomy.”

Sister Kenny laid some of the blame for the denial, minimization, secrecy, marginalization of whistle blowers, and protection of offenders on church leaders’ misdirected priorities. Although the word scandal is associated with a loss of reputation, the Greek word scandalon actually refers to an obstacle. In the Bible, creating a scandal means putting an obstacle in someone’s way to God.

“Many of these victims were never able, are never able, and will never be able to turn to God. For whatever other reasons people lose faith, this trauma has spiritual abuse at its heart,” she said.

Sister Kenny said that church leaders deferred too much to experts in medicine when they allowed the priests to return to parishes after as little as six-month stays at “Houses of Affirmation.” This showed how out of step society was at the time when it came to sexual abuse—and it was hardly confined to Roman Catholic circles.

These offending priests became “what Phillip Jenkins has called an example of moral panic—that is, the offenses committed by priests became a moral scapegoat of sorts, so that if we focus on pedophile priests, then we don’t have to focus on the societal issues,” she said. “Of course, the reality is, it’s both in the church and in society that we need to deal with the issue.”

Lawsuits by lawyers brought the scandal to light, brought compensation for victims, focused on institutional failure, and spurred action from both law enforcement and from church officials, she said. On the other hand, there is now more fear of disclosure because of the threat of litigation, and there has been immeasurable damage to innocent priests’ reputations.

“Priests will tell me they will not wear their collar in places because if they wear their collar, they see people walking away,” she said. “These are the good guys, the men who are trying to be men of god.”

Defense lawyers deserve blame too, for promoting interpretations of the law that completely contradicted bishops’ pastoral responsibilities. She suggested lawyers examine how a 1917 Canon Law was updated in 1983 to make it harder to remove a priest from his post.

“The empirical research I know on the dynamics of sexual abuse and on the crisis as it unraveled in the West, identifies both individual risks and systemic and cultural beliefs and practices,” she said.

“It’s about the way we think and act about truth, obedience, silence, and sexuality. The way we think about these things all plays a part in abuse.”

That was the consensus of an April 29th panel on “Pope Francis and the Vocation of the Lawyer,” held at Fordham Law School and co-sponsored by the school’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work. Panelists included Lucia Silecchia, professor of law at the Columbus School Of Law at Catholic University of America; Michael P. Moreland, vice dean and professor of law at Villanova University School of Law, and; Richard J. Sullivan, United States District Judge, Southern District of New York.

Silecchia said that Pope Francis sees both promise and peril in the law.

“When he discusses law throughout his writings, there seems to be a powerful ambivalence—best analogized to the ambivalence that we might have to fire and water,” she said. “Both of these are highly beneficial and necessary to the existence of life itself, but when misused, [they]can be two of the most destructive and deadly forces that we know.”

Francis has cited, for instance, the ancient legislation regarding lepers that dictated that they be kept apart from the community. Given the lack of knowledge about leprosy and the horrors of the disease, it was an understandable law at the time.

And yet, Silecchia said Francis criticizes those who would follow the law and remove the danger by casting out the person. When Jesus goes to the leper and cures him, he is not disrespecting the law, but showing value for those to whom God gave the law.

“In this way, the pope urges us not to reflect on the intention of the law … but its impact in concrete situations,” she said.

Moreland focused on the pope’s background, and how it shapes his ideas: Argentinian, Jesuit, spiritual director, taker of the name Francis, and post-Vatican.

He showed slides of three of Francis’ favorite paintings, including Mary, Untier of Knots by Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner, which hangs in the Jesuit residence in Cordoba, Argentina. The painting features sinners handing up their knots to the blessed mother, who is untying them; it is one that the pope has spoken of reverently.

“I think this would make a great painting for a lot of lawyers’ offices. I like that idea of lawyers as untier of knots [and that]Francis thinks that all of the work of the church is to untie these knots, while under Mary’s protection,” he said.

Sullivan he was intrigued to hear that Pope Francis prays to St. Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers. He said More is also an excellent role model for lawyers and judges. In addition to being a martyr who was beheaded by King Henry VIII, Sullivan said, More was a man of the world who served as the lord chancellor of England.

As a judge, Sullivan said he has to be very much in the world when he has to impose harsh sentences. When he does, he tries to remind defendants that even in jail they can be sources of charity, goodness and kindness.

“In this, I feel a great solidarity with Pope Francis,” he said, citing Francis’ writing that ‘The mercy of God is his loving concern for each one of us … this is the path which the merciful love of Christians must also travel.’

“This is Pope Francis at his best. Mercy is not opposed to justice, but rather expresses God’s way of reaching out the sinner [and]offering him a new way to look at himself.”

The panel was moderated by Susan Whelan, delegate and legal expert at the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations and was co-sponsored by the Guild of Catholic Lawyers of the Archdiocese of New York, and the Catholic Lawyers Guild of Brooklyn.

Guilty or not guilty? The arguments made in a court of law are often complicated, but the decisions made often aim at certainty and finality.

In Fordham Law School’s annual Wolff lecture, Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard, scholar-in-residence at the school’s Institute for Law, Religion & Lawyer’s Work, will explore how the Jewish legal system as a whole and over time appreciates and values multiple positions and approaches to both cases and issues of law.

“Undecided Verdicts: Jewish law’s respect for doubt, uncertainty and ambiguity”
Monday, Jan. 12
6 p.m.
Costantino Room, Fordham Law School
150 West 62nd St., NY NY

Rabbi Blanchard, who is also the director of organizational development for CLAL—the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and the Meyer Struckmann Professor of Jewish Law at Humboldt University School of Law in Berlin, will dwell on texts mostly from the Babylonian Talmud.

They deal with issues as varied as the meanings of weapons and war, the Sabbath, and sexuality. In civil, family and religious law these texts illustrate an open and tolerant quality, he said.

“The corpus of Jewish law texts constitutes a sort of spiritual document that, properly understood, reveals the hidden depth in human experience,” he said.

“More importantly, it also shows us the wisdom available in the details of what is probably the activity that most defines what it is to be human—creating meaningful culture,”

Respondents for the lecture will include Arthur J. Jacobson, Max Freund Professor of Litigation & Advocacy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University and Alyssa Gray, the Emily and Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman Chair in Rabbinics and Associate Professor of Codes and Responsa Literature, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. It will be moderated by Ethan J. Leib, professor of law at Fordham Law School.

It is free and open to the public.

For more information, visit the center’s website, or contact [email protected] or (212) 636-7699.