I’m angry all the time. Yet I love the one I’m angry at deeply and profoundly.

I carry around a rage I didn’t think was possible. Yet the source of that rage is my greatest comfort.

For more than a decade, I have felt a betrayal that runs so deep that in all these years I have not reached the end and don’t know if I ever will. Yet the one who betrayed me is also the one in whom I have tremendous faith – including faith that my betrayer’s better self will someday emerge.

These contradictions are how I feel as a Black Catholic woman and scholar of Catholicism at the end of the second decade of the 21^st century. These contradictions are why it was so difficult to write this essay, but they are also why I had to write this essay. While I do not yet know the full depth of my pain, I am acutely aware that mine is only one among numerous types of hurt caused by the same betrayer.

I’ve spent my professional life studying systemic racism within the U.S. Catholic Church and how that racism impacts African-American Catholic identity. For the last four years, I have been researching and writing a book on this subject. Spending so much time and energy on something so difficult has tested my resolve and my faith. Studying the repeated and abject failings of an institution I love, talking with people about how it has failed them, processing their stories, and working through how the institution has failed me takes its toll. Nevertheless, I am still a member of this Church—as of now.

I come to this essay not as an expert on the sex abuse crisis, but as a scholar of race and racism in Roman Catholicism. I needed to write this essay because there has been woefully little engagement with race in both academic and public discourse about the sex abuse crisis. Until recently, I have avoided writing about the sex abuse crisis. The work I do is hard enough; it poses a threat to my continued participation in an institution I love, but which continues to disappoint me. But that’s not the only reason I’ve avoided writing about the sex abuse crisis. I’ve avoided it for selfish reasons. You see, I come from Philadelphia – a city and archdiocese that has been profoundly impacted by this crisis, the consequences of which are deep and widespread. So, for me, this is personal.

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It was personal as I sat in a Starbucks in September 2005, having just purchased a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I bought the newspaper that day because it not only listed the names of the priests identified in the first Philadelphia grand jury report, it also published their photographs. It was personal as I cried in that Starbucks, looking at the faces of men who possessed deep and abiding trust they had not earned but that came with the Roman collar they wore. It was personal when I realized just how many of them had lived, worked, or both at my home parish. This included a former pastor who was one of the most egregious offenders and came to my parish after archdiocesan leaders had known about his crimes for DECADES. I won’t give him the dignity he denied to so many others by writing his name. That would be a betrayal to those who survived his crimes. That’s the last thing I would ever want to do.

Reading that newspaper in 2005 made clear what had been murky in my parish during the early 1990s: A former pastor’s hasty departure without explanation in 1991 – mere months after his arrival – finally made sense. The subsequent years with a parish administrator instead of a pastor made sense as well. Because our priest refused to resign as pastor (it would be six years before the archdiocese forced him to do so), another priest was appointed parish administrator to run the day-to-day operations. Ultimately, after his resignation, the priest was allowed to leave the area with a certificate saying he was a retired priest in good standing from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. That certificate allowed him to perform priestly functions while in retirement in Florida until he was finally defrocked in 2005. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia – my archdiocese – knowingly put more children in danger.

From that moment in Starbucks fifteen years ago, I also knew that what we were seeing in Boston and Philadelphia was just the tip of the iceberg. My sociological training coupled with my professional and personal knowledge of the Catholic Church told me the sex abuse crisis was far more widespread than we were initially led to believe.

First, I knew these heinous crimes against children were more than a U.S. problem; this was a global injustice and widespread sex scandal that involved abuse of power and position, appropriations of funds that were questionable at best, and a massive cover-up. Time has borne that out as we have seen numerous countries confronting decades of betrayal and a reckoning with the truth.

Second, I knew that white Catholics were not the only ones impacted by this scandal, a reality that is only now coming to light. My research, and that of my colleagues who focus on racism within Catholicism, shows how time and again Black Catholics are marginalized, ostracized, or just plain erased from the Catholic Church. The same is true in the sex abuse crisis. It is only now, eighteen years after the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team broke open the sex abuse scandal, that we are starting to see the impact on people of color. This is yet another instance of systemic racism targeting African-American Catholics, a community that has already endured so much and about which I have written for twenty years.

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What we are beginning to see is that Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Catholics’ already marginalized statuses left them vulnerable to an additional layer of discrimination. It has taken nearly two decades to center people of color in discussions about the broader crisis. To understand why it has taken so long, we have to acknowledge just how intricately systemic racism is woven into the fabric of the Church. We see it in a myriad of ways. We see it in the miniscule number of bishops, priests, and members of religious orders who are people of color, particularly from African-American and Indigenous communities. We see it in the ways all communities of color are disproportionately targeted by church, school, and social services closings. We see it in how racism factors into a child’s isolation at majority-white schools and makes that child more susceptible to predatory behavior. We see it in the actions of diocesan leaders and religious superiors who sent priests – with credible allegations against them – to areas where they would interact almost exclusively with poor African-American and Native Catholics. Such priests had access to Catholics who were already marginalized because of their race and socio-economic status and who were less likely to be heard or believed if they came forward with abuse allegations.

In an ongoing series called “The Reckoning,” the Associated Press has started taking on the issue of race and the sex abuse crisis. In a story from 2019, the AP profiled members of the Love family from the Mississippi Delta. Two brothers and their cousin have accused two members of the Wisconsin-based Franciscan Friars of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary of years of physical and sexual abuse beginning when they were young boys. The AP details how Father James Gannon, in his role as provincial minister, reached a settlement with the Loves. Fr. Gannon, on behalf of his community, settled the lawsuit “on the cheap” and required the three men to sign non-disclosure agreements as a prerequisite for their miniscule financial settlement. Gannon did this knowing that the non-disclosure agreement was in violation of directives from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and, therefore, unenforceable. When the three men asked for more money, Gannon told them that they would need to hire a lawyer who would have to communicate with his legal team. He implied that the process would take years with no guarantee of results. With bills to pay and limited resources, two members of the Love family signed the agreement. Joshua K. Love described the settlements he and his cousin, La Jarvis D. Love, received by saying, “They felt they could treat us that way because we’re poor and we’re black.” The third member of the family, Raphael Love, rejected the settlement.

In the AP article, Father Gannon justifies his actions by saying, “We’ve hurt them tremendously and no amount of money would ever account for what happened to them.” Since a financial settlement cannot make up for what happened, Fr. Gannon believes the three Black men should take the small sum he offered and be grateful they’re getting anything at all. The $15,000 that the Loves each received is a fraction of typical settlements. For example, the Jackson, Mississippi diocese settled lawsuits with nineteen survivors – including seventeen white survivors – for $5 million, resulting in an average payout of more than a quarter-million dollars per survivor, or seventeen times as much as the Loves received.

Black survivors are further victimized by outcomes such as this. These settlements exacerbate the racism people of color already endure in the Church. White survivors wouldn’t be expected to accept such disrespect on top of the trauma they have endured. But Black survivors are expected to be grateful they received any settlement at all.

This shouldn’t need to be said, but clearly it does: African-Americans, or any people of color for that matter, are not going to be grateful for meager recompense and stay silent after bearing the burden of years, decades, and centuries of trauma. Nor will a paltry sum serve as a first step toward atonement to those who have endured so much. The Loves are evidence of this by going public with their story.

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In the fall of 2019, I wrote about how the Catholic Church can do right by its African-American members if it has the will. The sex abuse crisis is yet another instance where the Church has not shown it legitimately supports people of color. Supporting survivors of color can take a number of forms, such as no longer using unapproved and unenforceable non-disclosure agreements, and keeping records of survivors’ race to ensure survivors of color receive settlement amounts equal to white survivors.

I began this essay by saying I had to write it. I had to write about race, racism, and the sex abuse crisis. The gravity of the situation demands attention from all who have expertise and a platform to share it. Yet I know this is the point where I have reached my own “Come to Jesus Moment” as a Black Catholic scholar who studies the experiences of Black Catholics. The anger, betrayal, and contradictions I opened this essay with mean I’ve drawn the proverbial line in the sand when it comes to depth of filth I’m willing to wade through in doing what a colleague recently described to me as “the difficult work of truth telling.” So, I plan for this to be the first and last time I write about the intersection of race, racism, and the sex abuse crisis. I will continue to fight for racial justice in the Catholic Church. Because I need to know and respect my own limitations, I just can’t see the sex abuse crisis as the front where I will engage that fight. For my own peace of mind and any hope I have of retaining my faith and my religion, this needs to be where I start and where I stop.

To survivors both known and unknown, I am awed by your courage. I am deeply sorry I cannot accompany you on this road in the way I wish I could. I don’t want to be yet another person who has let you down in your struggle. My wish, my hope, and my prayer is that being a professional agitator on systemic racism in the Church will move the needle in all areas where racism impacts members of the Church and that, in some small way, will help.

 

Tia Noelle Pratt, Ph.D. is a sociologist and the President and Director of Research at TNPratt & Associates, an Inclusion and Diversity Consulting Firm in Philadelphia, PA. Dr. Pratt has researched systemic racism in the Catholic Church in the U.S. and its impact on African-American Catholic identity for more than 20 years. She is currently working on her first book, Faithful and Devoted: Racism and Identity in the African-American Catholic Experience.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.