As the world reels from another set of revelations of pervasive abuse of children by Catholic priests and the complicity of the Church hierarchy, I thought it a good time to return to "Sex Abuse and the Catholic Church," the reflections of an interdisciplinary group of scholars at Yale a few years ago. A new preface drew my attention to a chapter on the issue in a new book by Robert Orsi, one of the conveners of that research project, prophet of 'lived religion" and a leading interpreter of 20th century American Catholic experience.In it Orsi argues that this abuse was specifically Catholic and tries to understand its devastating harm and lasting consequences against the backdrop of his idea that Catholicism is a religion of "presence," offering believers "abundant events" which span, link and jumble heaven and earth, the human and the divine. Rapist priests thus inflicted on their victims a uniquely "abundant evil." Orsi spent time with survivors groups, the experiences of one of whose members - he calls her Monica - are described at considerable length. Here's one:
The horrific proximity of evil to holiness, most publicly on display when a predator priest took God's body in his hands and lifted it up to the congregation that included his victims, provoked in some of the abused the most visceral anger and an unsublimated desire for supernatural retribution, at the time of their abuse or later in their lives. Monica remembered being at a Mass said by one of her abusers and thinking at the elevation of the Host, "You can't keep holding that Eucharist [up over your head] without losing." She imagined the Host (now the body of Christ) getting heavier and heavier until it had taken on the weight of an immense stone, which the priest was no longer able to hold aloft. Then it fell and crushed him to death.
Nothing of the sort happened, of course, many of the priests having gone to their graves revered and protected by laity and clergy alike. Monica felt "skinned alive," at once exposed to other Catholics and invisible to a opaquely judgmental God. Like other survivors Orsi encounters, Monica suffered "years without speech," lacking any words for making sense of or even naming the experience, telling noone.
Here's another of Monica's experiences, from a later stage in her life, when she has found herself unable to go to Church or to pray to God and yet is drawn "back" to the presence of the Eucharist.
Sometimes she visited suburban churches and hid in her car in the parking lot, watching, and sometimes resenting, people going to Mass seemingly easily and without fear. She kept a close eye on the church's front doors. When a certain quality of rich and resonant silence fell over the parking lot - Monica identified it as a palpable shifting in the currents of the air that she was able to feel in her body - she knew it was the time of the Consecration inside the church. Then "in just those few moments," the outside walls of the church "didn't exist anymore" and "I would be close to God on the altar."
The heart breaks. All walls must come down.
History and Presence (Harvard, 2018), 220, 240-41
