But Raúl E. Zegarra, Ph.D., says that’s all wrong.

“We’re not seeing the decline of religion, but the transformation of religion into new forms and the building of new sacred spaces,” said Zegarra, the winner of the Fordham Curran Center for American Catholic Studies’ fourth annual New Scholars essay contest.

“And liberation theology has been essential in the process of building those new spaces.”

It’s an argument that Zegarra, an assistant professor of theology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, makes in his winning essay, “The Preferential Option of the Poor: Liberation Theology, Pentecostalism, and the New Forms of Sacralization.”

The article was published in the journal  European Journal of Sociology (Cambridge University Press) in April. In addition to receiving a $1,500 cash prize from the Curran Center, Zegarra was invited to speak at Fordham. He’ll give his talk virtually on Nov. 13 at 5:30 p.m.

Zegarra said he wrote the paper because he knew the narrative about declines in religion clashed with reality on the ground, particularly in South America, where he has done research.

Latin America was where liberation theology flourished with the official blessing of the Catholic Church in the 1970s and ’80s, but the church’s support withered in the face of a backlash.

What Zegarra found is that the backlash might have forced the Catholic Church in Latin America to withdraw its support for the liberation theology movement, but the ideals behind it have lived on through secular institutions.

The New Sacred Spaces

“A lot of the work done for the poor and for social justice started to move to other areas of society—the universities, the nonprofits, human rights activists,” he said.

“For many of these [Catholics], these became the new sacred spaces to care for their neighbor and to love God in that way. The sacred doesn’t disappear; it just takes a new form.”

John Seitz, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology and associate director of the Curran Center, said Zegarra’s research is important because it fosters a conversation about Pentecostalism and Catholicism in Latin America and also features on-the-ground research from communities in Peru.

‘A Product of Religious Commitment’

Zegarra also helps loosen the definition of what counts as liberation theology, which Seitz sees as a positive sign.

“Raúl is pointing to secular organizations and saying that they’re made up of Catholics who are committed to liberation theology principles. We can think then about recognizing the sacred nature of these organizations, even though they’re not ecclesial organizations,” he said.

“How do we decide that religion is gone? It depends on how you define religion. Raúl shows that these organizations are a product of religious commitment and ideas oriented toward the advocacy of human flourishing and the uplift of the poor.”

That was one of the lessons of “A Theology of Voice: VOCAL and the Catholic Clergy Abuse Survivor Movement,” an article by Brian Clites, Ph.D., chosen by Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies in May as the winner of its third annual New Scholars essay contest.

Clites, an associate director at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and an assistant professor of religious studies at Case Western Reserve University, first published the paper in the journal U.S. Catholic Historian. In addition to receiving a $1,500 cash prize from the Curran Center, he was also invited to speak at Fordham. He’ll give his talk virtually on Sept. 29 at 1 p.m.

The article traces the origins of VOCAL (Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup), which was among the first and most prominent advocacy organizations for American survivors of childhood clergy sexual abuse. It was a predecessor of the currently active SNAP, (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), and was notable, Clites said, because its leaders explicitly recognized the spiritual dimensions of the abuse they suffered, which they called “soul murder.”

VOCAL and the Divine Powers of the Voice

VOCAL was founded in 1992 and was one of the world’s largest and most prominent communities of clergy sexual abuse survivors until the untimely 2002 death of its leader, Father Thomas H. “Tom” Economus. It sought to promote healing and justice through a systemic and distinctively Catholic discourse about “voice.”

Clites said that when he first began working on the paper, which is part of a larger book project, in 2011, he was struck by how little academic research had been devoted to the sexual abuse crisis, and how often the concept of the voice was referenced in contemporary Catholic survivor groups, such as “Voice of the Faithful” and “Speak Truth to Power.”

“I was thinking, ‘Why are Catholic survivors so invested in this term voice?’ It seems to mean so much more to them than I’ve read about or understood. I also really didn’t understand why they also put so much emphasis on the term “survivor.” That term is ubiquitous now for cancer survivors and Holocaust survivors, but they used it in such a personalized and spiritual way,” he said.

“In a way, this article is me reflecting after 10 years of being among survivors, reading their literature, and learning why those terms mean so much to them.” Clites was able to learn about VOCAL/Linkup through interviews with surviving members, as well as copies of the group’s triennial newsletter, The Missing Link.

Transforming from Victim to Survivor

What all those survivor groups shared was an understanding that a person’s voice is the foundation of the transformation from victim to survivor.

“Until you found your voice, you couldn’t be a survivor and were still stuck in victimhood. So voice was a way of reclaiming agency,” Clites said.

“[The VOCAL members] really weren’t thinking about it in terms of legal agency. They were much more focused on thinking about it in spiritual terms because they’d been abused by men who were God’s ambassadors on Earth.”

Many of the VOCAL members who Clites spoke with told him they’d lost the ability to pray and talk to God.

“It was, ‘I need to speak about my abuse so that I’m comfortable enough with it so that even if I can’t forgive my abuser, or pray the way I used to, I can still be open to that relationship with God and Jesus and the Blessed Mother,’” he said.

Inspiring and Being Inspired by Other Movements

One of his major findings was that when VOCAL/Linkup members formulated the “Theology of Voice,” they were informed a great deal by feminism, the LGBTQ movement, and to a lesser extent, the AIDS movement.

“Their understanding of voice has precedent, but they take it to a whole other level and make it spiritual and moral in a way that it was not in American popular culture before Catholic survivors started thinking about it,” said Clites.

“Look at the MeToo movement and the public outrage over non-disclosure agreements. The fact that there’s a debate about the wisdom of them anymore owes a lot to Catholic survivors. They were probably the most influential group in amplifying people’s sensitivity to the injustice of NDAs.”

Remaining Catholic

What surprised Clites the most was learning that in the very beginning of the sexual abuse crisis, survivors went to the church first to seek spiritual healing. The stereotype of them as people who are hurt and out for revenge is not accurate.

“What I learned is, survivors are still in the church. Survivors are Catholics sitting next to us in the pews, or forming and leading their own Eucharistic communities, or continuing to be ordained as nuns and priests.”

“This was a problem they sought redress from within the church, and they chose to stay in the church. There are survivors who are too angry at God to pray right now or abandoned their faith or moved to another, but the majority of Catholic survivors have remained Catholic. That was shocking because I didn’t see that in movie and book accounts of it,” he said.

John Seitz, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology and associate director of the Curran Center, said Clites’ elevation of survivors’ voices was a big part of the reason why the center chose to honor his work.

“It’s possible to get tangled up in lots of other ins and outs of the crisis, the functioning of the church, the intricacies of the coverups, and the policies that get implemented or not,” he said.

“But Brian has done a lot of on-the-ground research getting to know these survivors and their communities.”

Confronting a Culture of Secrecy

The Curran Center is a co-sponsor of the multiyear, multi-institution Taking Responsibility Project, making Clites’ paper exactly the kind of scholarship it wants to promote, he said

“When we take sex abuse on fully and realize its breadth and depth, we realize that the stories we told before about Catholicism need to be revised in light of a pretty widespread culture of secrecy in the church among leaders that’s trickled down into the community more broadly,” he said.

“Our narratives about subjects that don’t even have anything on the surface to do with sex abuse may have to be revised. It’s really a watershed moment in Catholic studies.”

In April, Fordham’s Curran Center for Catholic Studies chose Hoang—an assistant professor of Great Books in the Humanities/Teacher Education Division at Pepperdine University—as the winner of its inaugural New Scholars essay contest. For his paper Ultramontanism, Nationalism, and the Fall of Saigon: Historicizing the Vietnamese American Catholic Experience, (American Catholic Studies, Spring 2019), the Vietnamese native was awarded a $1,500 cash prize.

“It means a lot,” said Hoang, who noted that religious studies was something he became interested in only recently. “I came into this field a little bit later, so I was delighted to be recognized for filling in this important gap for Vietnamese Catholics in the U.S.”

John Seitz, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology at Fordham, said Hoang’s paper stood out because of its sensitive portrayal of an underrepresented group of Catholics in a historical period that has also been underrepresented, in terms of scholarly attention. Of particular note, he said, is how Hoang showed how Vietnamese refugees’ experiences parallel with those of 19th-century Irish immigrants.

“We were impressed with the contribution this makes to broadening the story of American Catholicism in the U.S. by including the voices and perspectives of people who usually aren’t in the story,” Seitz said.

“At the same time, there’s a kind of sensitivity to the way he treats their sorrow and loss as exiles. It’s a painful history that gives a new angle on the fabric of U.S. Catholics, and a new way of attending to the perspectives, agonies, and hopes of American Catholics—in this case, refugees from Vietnam.”

The contest, which is open to scholars who have received their doctorates in 2013 or later and have published in a journal in the last year, is limited to scholarship about Catholicism in the Americas. It also serves to create a network of like-minded experts that the Curran Center can tap into for future events and collaboration, said Seitz. The papers submitted covered topics such as women religious and the struggles they face with male authorities, objects of devotion, and Black Catholics.

“We’re always on the lookout for ways to support innovative scholarship, and this idea of running a competition for essays was just one way to encourage people to submit things they’d written on Catholic studies in the Americas, and show us the breadth of their scholarship,” he said, noting that the cash prize was a nice incentive since they are uncommon in the humanities.

“It’s an opportunity to celebrate young scholars and their work with a prize that doesn’t really have any real parallel in the world.”

For Hoang, his interest in highlighting Vietnamese Catholics living in the United States stemmed from both the fact that little has been written about them—despite copious source material existing in magazines, books, and devotional material—and the fact that even though Catholics comprise only roughly 10% of the population of Vietnam, about a third of the Vietnamese refugees who fled to the United States were Catholic.

“I was just curious about how the refugees who came to the United States in the ’70s dealt with the loss of South Vietnam on the one hand, and the adaptation to American society on the other hand,” said Hoang, who came to the U.S. when he was thirteen after spending over a year in refugee camps in Indonesia.

“The article makes the argument that these Catholic refugees adapted what I call an exilic identity. It means, essentially, they identify themselves primarily as a people who are Catholics but who also happen to have lost their nation, the Republic of Vietnam.”

He is planning to do continue doing historical research into many of the themes in the paper, such as national loss and family separation, and publish a book in the future. The prize money will probably go to a bottle of champagne and, when it is safe, to travel funds for further research.

Seitz said it was really tough to choose from the 12 submissions for the contest, which came from the United States and the United Kingdom.

“It really bodes well for the future of American Catholic studies to have received such strong essays for this competition,” he said.

As the parishioners exited to the sounds of Ave Maria on the organ, a crash caught their attention. Behind them, a statue of the parish’s patroness, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, had fallen to the floor of its own accord and broken.

Was it simply faulty placement on the pedestal?

Or, as some believed, was it a sign from God that the parish should stay open?

The events that followed—one of laity moving against the church hierarchy—are at the heart of No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston’s Parish Shutdowns (Harvard, 2011) by John C. Seitz, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology.

Seitz is a historian and ethnographer with an interest in Catholics’ connections to places and objects. He began the book as a doctoral student at Harvard during the early 2000s, when the Boston Archdiocese moved to close 82 of the area’s 357 parishes in the wake of its 2002 sexual abuse scandal. How, he wondered, would these Catholics deal with the loss of space, of place, in their religious lives?

When Seitz began visiting nine of the occupied churches, he realized there was a second, equally poignant question to explore.

Why, Seitz wondered, would Catholics risk being labeled as “backward resisters” in the universal Catholic Church by opposing their archdiocese’s closure decrees?

Over the next four years, Seitz addressed this question by conducting historical research and field studies through which he came to know resisting parishioners.

“Across the archdiocese, these parishioners had decided that their churches were worth protecting,” he said.

“They got their sleeping bags out, their rations of bottled water, their calling trees in place, and they changed the locks and moved into the parishes with 24-hour occupations that they called vigils—in the great Catholic tradition of nocturnal adoration of the Eucharist.”

To those Catholics, Seitz said, the attachment to a sacred place still mattered. There was the obvious sentimental attachment of wanting a child married there, or a grandparent buried there, or an attachment to having given gifts to purchase a plaque or a statue for an altar.

But parishioners also held the deep belief, Seitz said, that they were living out their Catholic mission through these occupations; they believed, in fact, that they were advancing post-Vatican II church theology and ethos through their actions.

“The people had been encouraged, as a result of Vatican II, to embrace the idea that ‘This is your parish,’” Seitz said. “The statement—the church is the people of God—moves out from Vatican II. That phrase was often used to encourage parishioners to give. ‘This is your church, the church is you,’ and therefore you must keep it going.”

Additionally, older Catholics, many of whom were first-generation Americans, had a relationship to their parishes that was founded on the idea of the place’s uniqueness, its permanence, and its inviolability. Those Catholics continued to think of their churches as citadels and holy sites, Seitz said.

In the closure process, the archdiocese had to undermine these traditions, he said. Officials told parish members that these buildings were not, literally, their churches and that what Vatican II really referred to when it said “people of God” was a universal set of people within the Catholic faith.

Parish priests were even furnished with a special closing manual by the archdiocese. They were told to emphasize through prayers and readings that the church is larger than one particular parish, and to emphasize detachment from the material and the “mobility of sacred objects.”

“The archdiocese was claiming that church rituals are really about a sacred presence in people, not the building,” Seitz said.

The result in Boston was that those supporting the shutdowns and those resisting the shutdowns believed they were drawing on Vatican II to make their cases.

Through his work, Seitz challenges the temptation to dismiss the resisters as backward holdovers or unreasonable rebels. He hopes the stories of the parishes also illuminate how people respond to loss.

“How do we decide what to hold on to and what to let go of?” he asked. “Detachment is not always the right choice. Some things are worth protecting.”

What eventually happened to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish?

The church is still occupied by the parishioners, Seitz said. They continue to identify themselves as Catholic and to hold communion with hosts secretly consecrated by sympathetic priests.