The project was spurred by a 2018 report by the Society of Jesus that publicly disclosed the names of its members who were credibly accused of sexually abusing minors, as well as a report that year by a Pennsylvania grand jury that found similar findings in diocesan priests. It was funded by a $1 million gift from a private donation.

On Thursday, Jan. 26, the group released its final report, featuring research projects conducted by 18 teams from 10 Jesuit universities. In addition to Fordham, the initiative included lay and clergy faculty from Creighton, Gonzaga, Georgetown, Loyola Chicago, Loyola Maryland, Marquette, Rockhurst, Santa Clara, and Xavier universities.

The research projects addressed topics connected to the Society of Jesus, but were not limited strictly to it. There was often overlap with other parts of the Roman Catholic Church, such as specific parishes. They covered six themes: Jesuits and Jesuit Education; Education; Institutional Reform; Moral Injury and Spiritual Struggle; Race and Colonialism; and Survivors and Survivor Stories.

In addition to team projects, the initiative featured a three-day conference hosted at Fordham in April 2022 as well as eight webinars, four of which were devoted to historically marginalized U.S. communities.

Bradford Hinze, Ph.D., the Karl Rahner Professor of Theology and director of the initiative, said after two and half years, he is more impressed than ever with how much time and energy scholars have devoted to try to address past wrongs and prevent future ones. Their dedication has been “a bit overwhelming,” given how painful the subject is, but is also a source for optimism.

“My big take away is that we need to find ways of building greater relationships of collaboration and more transparency,” he said, “because here we have a lot of lay people—not all are lay people, but most are—who are committed to the Jesuit identity and mission.”

That commitment manifested itself in reports that varied from one about an individual abuser by the team at Creighton University to one examining the best way to tell survivors’ stories by Georgetown University’s Gerard J. McGlone, S.J. A report from Fordham professor C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., that focused on reforming Jesuit schools noted that “pastoral care principles influence disciplinary processes.”

“There is an emphasis on being patient and merciful that allows for inferior performance and outright misbehavior,” he wrote.

“As a member of a religious order told us, there is confusion between what is simply sinful and what is criminal.”

Key Findings and Recommendations

The report includes six key findings and specific recommendations for learning and action.

The first of the group’s findings is that there is “a divide emerging in research and practice between those focused primarily on “safeguarding” and those focused on what the group is calling “historical memory work.” Safeguarding is focused on preventing present and future abuse, while historical memory work produces research on what happened in the past, in many cases performing a very close analysis of instances of abuse.

Hinze said the group chose to emphasize the importance of historical memory work in response to the forward-facing nature of the Society of Jesus’ most recent Universal Apostolic Preferences, which are in essence the religious order’s list of priorities. He noted that representatives from the Society of Jesus in Rome had been very cooperative, but the group still felt the need to highlight the importance of looking to the past.

“The Apostolic preferences all aim to start from right now and look forward. But if you only do that, you don’t really spend time pondering, reflecting upon, and truly meditating on what were the causes and contributing factors that led up to this, and what were the historical, institutional, and cultural repercussions,” he said.

Another finding highlights the fact that although the first sexual abuse cases in the United States were widely reported as early as 2002, very little research has been done to examine how much abuse was committed against Black, Latin American, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American populations.

Fordham Faculty Perspectives

Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D., the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham, contributed in this area; his study, “Clergy Sexual Abuse in African American Communities,” will be published in October. He surveyed the literature about the sexual abuse crisis to see how many church dioceses tracked the race and ethnicity of survivors and found that only one did, and it only started doing so in 2015.

This is a glaring omission, he said.

“We know for a fact that in many cases, dioceses and religious orders deliberately sent priests with problematic histories into Latino and Black communities, precisely because these communities would be the least likely to report instances of abuse,” he said.

It’s for this reason, Massingale said, that although 4% of American Catholics are Black, it’s fair to assume that more than 4% have experienced sexual abuse. Compounding the problem, he said, is the fact that Black people may not relate to the ways others are processing their abuse. In the course of his research, he spoke informally with two Black men who’d experienced abuse, and discovered that they refused to accept the popular “victim survivor” label.

“They said ‘I’m not surviving anything. I’m coping.’ And it struck me that maybe another reason why we need to pay attention to this is because even the language we use doesn’t resonate universally across human communities,” he said.

Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., associate professor of mental health counseling and spiritual integration at Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, said her future teaching will forever be informed by the work she did with the initiative. In her research project “Bearing Witness When ‘They’ Are Us: Toward a Trauma-Informed Perspective on Complicity, Moral Injury, and Moral Witnessing,” Cataldo attempted to answer a question she asked herself when the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was published: Why am I still shocked?

“We’ve been hearing about this since 2002, if not before,” she said.

“I realized that this cycle of being OK, and then being overwhelmed with shock and horror, and then having the feeling sort of recede into the background, is the same cycle that a trauma survivor experiences.”

No solution to a trauma-based problem can work unless it addresses the trauma, she said.

“All the safeguarding that has been put in place has been very effective, and it’s absolutely vitally important. I’m not discounting any of that, but you will never heal without addressing the trauma, and that means having accountability, responsibility, dialogue, honesty, and truth telling,” she said.

“It’s like closing the barn door after the horses are out.”

Telling It Like It Feels

Cataldo suggested that a crucial part of the healing process should involve people who Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit dubbed the “moral witnesses.”

“In order to really stand up for and call attention to the suffering imposed on one group by another group of people, the moral witness has to be someone who speaks the truth,” she said.

“But the moral witness doesn’t just tell it like it is. The moral witness tells it like it feels. To be a moral witness, the person needs to have been either a survivor themselves or have something at stake. You have to have skin in the game.”

The participants in Taking Responsibility fit that bill, she said, by virtue of working for Catholic institutions and working to highlight the painful truth.

The project has inspired Cataldo to do more herself. This fall, she will oversee the unveiling of GRE’s Advanced Certificate in Trauma-Informed Care program. Importantly, she said, the certificate program explores how spirituality can be both a balm for people healing from trauma and a shield that prevents them from acknowledging their own trauma.

“It’s very important to understand how unexamined religious practices and religious structures like the Catholic Church can sometimes re-traumatize or compound the trauma of people if they don’t understand how trauma and faith intersect,” she said.

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.”

The interdisciplinary initiative, called “Taking Responsibility,” is a partnership between the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies and the Department of Theology. Bradford Hinze, Ph.D., the Karl Rahner Professor of Theology, directs the project with leadership assistance from Patrick Hornbeck, Ph.D., special faculty advisor to the provost for strategic planning; Theology Department Chair Christine Firer Hinze, Ph.D.; Michael E. Lee, Ph.D., director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies; and Catherine Osborne, Ph.D., GSAS ’13, as coordinator for the program.

“The projects and studies being supported by the Taking Responsibility initiative reflect current trends in interdisciplinary research,” said Hinze. “By focusing on Jesuit educational institutions in the U.S., these efforts will make an important contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon of clergy sexual abuse in this particular setting. The Taking Responsibility website will provide an active center for those interested in the current state of research and practical resources on these issues”.

The effort has been collaborative from the start, said the project staff. The steering committee was composed of various Fordham faculty truly invested in taking responsibility and faced the painful issue head-on internally. Members did not shy away from exposing abuse, but many also believed that institution and its structures were ultimately about faith and personal responsibility.

“The project acknowledges that not only is there a need for a multidisciplinary approach, but also and especially the victim-survivors of abuse, must be at the table to help Jesuit schools, colleges, and universities become safer, more transparent institutions,” said Hornbeck.

While the project’s website has been launched, the real activity begins this fall when announcements will be made about upcoming panels, webinars, reading groups, and a variety of events that will highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the grantees’ research.

Some of the funding tied to the four partner-institution projects will go toward established research, such as Georgetown University’s work with survivors that will “inform, educate, and foster institutional change” through the university’s Initiative on Catholic Thought and Public Life and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

Gonzaga University will use its funding to create an inaugural conference for researchers to be held during the 2021-2022 academic year. That project will home in on cutting-edge research that exposes sexual abuse in the Jesuit West Province, where Native American and Alaskan Native communities were disproportionately abused. Though the conference highlights abuse in a specific region and on a particular population, the Gonzaga conversation will likely widen to explore why the abuse often affects under-recognized communities nationwide, including, but not limited to Black, Latinx, and working-class populations.

Other partnering universities include Santa Clara University and Xavier University in Cincinnati.

Those outcomes will include creating literature reviews and other resources intended for administrators, staff, faculty, alumni, and students at Jesuit institutions. Another expansive goal is to create a Jesuit partner network dedicated to confronting the causes and legacy of clergy sexual abuse.

“Equally important, the initiative is an occasion for the formation of a network of Jesuit universities and high schools that can promote among participants in these institutions open discussion, deeper understanding, and shared practical wisdom about how these issues can be addressed by all those involved,” said Hinze.   

A quick glance at the Fordham research projects reflects participants’ deep and varied understanding of the Society of Jesus as well as organizational structures. One study’s cross-disciplinary investigators include C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., professor of Christian spirituality at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education; Henry Schwalbenberg Ph.D., professor of economics and director of the graduate program in International Political Economy and Development; and Michael Pirson, Ph.D., associate professor of humanistic management at the Gabelli School of Business. Their exploration is unflinchingly titled “Identifying and Reforming Institutions in Jesuit Schools and Universities That Foster Sexual Abuse and Its Concealment.”

“The causes of the Catholic sexual abuse crises are multiple and intersecting.  Understanding the pathologies that motivated both abusers and those who concealed their crimes requires us to draw insights from the study of religion, psychology, civil and criminal law, organizational theory, communications, and many other fields,” said Hornbeck.

Scholarship has long had the ability to help expose structural inequities and abuse. Project staff noted that the academy took on structural racism many years before the nation began to seriously examine its role through the Black Lives Matter movement. Likewise, scholarship can help expose structural sex abuse within the Jesuit order and beyond. Not only will the project take on how clericalism may have fostered the abuse, but it will also examine how that same culture could spill over to create an environment of abuse among lay faculty and staff.

“We need to look at the patterns of behavior that may make bad behaviors seem OK; this is about power,” said Osborne. “It’s also about the Catholic Church, our religious orders, procedures, and structures. Not every instance of sexual abuse at Jesuit institutions is committed by priests, so in the Jesuit tradition of taking care of the whole person, we need to deal with this sinful part of us is in the same way.”