Abstract
In 2013, filmmaker Alex Gibney released Mea Maxima Culpa, a film documenting the case of sexual abuse of deaf children in a Catholic residential school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and, perhaps more importantly, the alleged involvement of members of the Church hierarchy right up to the Vatican in the prolonged protection of priests who committed abuse. When, just a few days after the release of the film, Pope Benedict XVI made the unprecedented move of resigning, Gibney suggested that the resignation was ‘inextricably linked to the sexual abuse crisis’.1 His conjecture may or may not have been true, but the tide of evidence and disquiet about the history of sexual abuse in the Church is without doubt precipitating a demand for a far more comprehensive response than has been seen.
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Notes
For our purposes, I am defining transitional justice as that field of inquiry and institutionalisation developed to attend to systematic and institutionally sanctioned human rights violations committed by or in the name of nation states and to assist both victims and the perpetrating states to move forward. See Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Frawley-o’dea refers to this as an ‘omertà’ in the priesthood. Mary Gail Frawleyo’dea, Perversion of Power: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2007), 182.
For an excellent conceptual discussion see Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
On the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in relation to moral reparations see Ignacio Alvarez et al., ‘Reparations in the Inter-American System: A Comparative Approach’ (Conference Report), American University Law Review 56 (2007): 1375–1468.
Nancy M. Hopkins, ‘Congregational Intervention: When the Pastor Has Committed Sexual Misconduct’, Pastoral Psychology 39, no. 4 (1991): 247–255.
Paul M. Kline, Robert McMackin and Edna Lezotte, ‘The Impact of the Clergy Abuse Scandal on Parish Communities’, Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 17, no. 3–4 (2008): 290–300.
On the socio-cultural context of priestly authority in Ireland, see Claire McLoone-Richards, ‘Say Nothing! How Pathology within Catholicism Created and Sustained the Institutional Abuse of Children in 20th Century Ireland’, Child Abuse Review 21, (2012): 394–404.
Thomas P. Doyle, ‘Clericalism: Enabler of Clergy Sexual Abuse’, Pastoral Psychology 54, no. 3 (2006), 190.
Vivek Dhareshwar, ‘Self-Fashioning, Colonial Habitus, and Double Exclusion: V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men’ in Reading with a Difference: Gender, Race, and Cultural Identity, ed. Arthur F. Marotti, Jo Dulan, and Renata R. Mautner-Wasserman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 339.
Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).
All references to Jaspers are from this text. Hannah Arendt, ‘Guilt and Responsibility’ in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005).
Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction’, in Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt, ed. Bernd Naumann (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966).
Even corporate criminal liability rests on this logic insofar as liability exists through the intention and action of an employee of the corporation committing illicit acts within the scope of her employment and where the corporation has provided authority. Cynthia E. Carrasco and Michael K. Dupee, ‘Corporate Criminal Liability’, American Criminal Law Review 36 (1999): 445–473.
David Miller, ‘Holding Nations Responsible’, Ethics 114 (2004): 240–268.
John Stuart Mill articulated the classical form of the logical refutation at work here when he wrote: ‘[H]uman beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual man’. (A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation ([1865] London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1925), Book 6, Chapter VII, section 1.)
Joel Feinberg, ‘Collective Responsibility’, in Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility, ed. Joel Feinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 247.
Larry May, Sharing Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 46.
Iris Marion Young, ‘Responsibility and Global Labor Justice’, Journal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 4 (2004): 365–388.
Norman K. Denzin, ‘Reading Cultural Texts: Comment on Griswold’, American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 6 (1990): 1579.
Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 1 (1984): 154.
For a discussion of prosecutorial options see Laura Russell, ‘Pursuing Criminal Liability for the Church and its Decision Makers for Their Role in Priest Sexual Abuse’, Washington University Law Review 81, no 3 (2003): 885–916.
The watershed case in the US was against the Boston archdiocese for sexual abuse committed by Father John Geoghan. For a discussion, see Timothy D. Lytton, ‘Using Tort Litigation to Enhance Regulatory Policy Making: Evaluating Climate-Change Litigation in Light of Lessons from Gun-Industry and Clergy-Sexual-Abuse Lawsuits’, Texas Law Review 68 (2008): 1837–1876.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era’, Interventions 2, no. 2 (2000): 171–186.
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission [HREOC], Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Sydney: HREOC, April 1997, recommendation 5a.
The distinction was made by Austin in J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).
Celermajer, Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), in particular Chapters 3 and 4.
Christian Duquoc, ‘Real Reconciliation and Sacramental Reconciliation’, in Concilium Religion in the Seventies Volume 61: Sacramental Reconciliation, ed. Edward Schillebeeckx (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 36.
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© 2014 Danielle Celermajer
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Celermajer, D. (2014). From Mea Culpa to Nostra Culpa: A Reparative Apology from the Catholic Church?. In: Mihai, M., Thaler, M. (eds) On the Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies. Rhetoric, Politics and Society Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343727_4
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