Dear Revealer readers,

One summer in college, while I was working at a Jewish camp in the north Georgia mountains, my mom called to tell me that a beloved teacher at the Jesuit high school I had attended had been arrested for having sex with a minor. While I am not a survivor of sexual abuse, hearing about what he did upset me greatly. That teacher taught the required World Religions course for first-year students and was the person who first ignited my interest in the study of religion. A few years later, I learned that a former president of my high school, a priest, had abused multiple students before becoming president of a Jesuit university. More than a decade after that, my high school released the names of all the priests and religious leaders who had been accused of sexual abuse within the school’s history. By that year, 2018, stories about abusive priests had become both routine and shocking—routine in that Americans were accustomed to such reports, and shocking in that there seemed no end to new revelations about abusive clergy and the institutions that protected them.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

Although clergy sexual abuse is not a new issue, conversations about the topic remain difficult. Our discomfort with this subject, though, should not silence us. If we are going to understand this pervasive problem and change our culture, we must address this issue directly, hence the reason for the Revealer’s first themed special issue: “Religion and Sex Abuse Within and Beyond the Catholic Church.”

Our special issue addresses the Catholic Church first because the abuse crisis remains a profound problem within this particular institution. Even after countless victim testimonies, grand jury reports, and lawsuits, the Church has still not sufficiently dealt with the crisis. And as some of the articles in this issue highlight, we are only now beginning to understand how the sex abuse crisis played out differently in communities of color than it did in predominantly white parishes.

The special issue also explores religion and sex abuse “beyond” Roman Catholicism because the Catholic Church is far from the only religious institution that has protected abusive religious leaders instead of the people who put their trust in them. Too often, exclusive focus on the Catholic Church has led us to overlook problems of sexual abuse elsewhere and, worse, to assume other religious communities are inherently safer than Catholic ones. While the Catholic Church deserves scrutiny, we need to expand our understanding of how sex abuse has taken place within diverse religious communities.

Our special issue opens with Brian Clites’s “The Problem with Spotlights: Rethinking Our Response to Clergy Sexual Abuse,” where he writes about what happens to survivors when the media showers them with attention and then moves on when the news cycle shifts to a different topic. His article asks everyone to consider how we can better support survivors of abuse. Next, in “Priests that Moved: Catholicism, Colonized Peoples, and Sex Abuse in the U.S. Southwest,” Kathleen Holscher reports on the higher rates of clergy sexual abuse in parishes populated with Native Americans and Latinos. She also explains Catholic theological ideas that allowed the sex abuse crisis to proliferate. Likewise, in “Black Catholics, Racism, and the Sex Abuse Crisis: A Personal Reflection,” Tia Noelle Pratt explores how Black survivors of clergy sexual abuse have been treated differently than whites, and she shares her own struggles as a Black Catholic who studies the Church’s racist practices. Kaya Oakes similarly reflects on her relationship with Catholicism in “On Forgiveness, Clergy Abuse, and the Need for New Understandings,” where she writes about the harm done to survivors when the Church asks them for forgiveness without first taking steps towards legitimate atonement. And we are publishing an excerpt from the “Forum on Catholic Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion” first published in the American Catholic Studies journal where Julie Byrne argues in “The Distortions of Exceptionalism, Again” that sex abuse is not unique to Roman Catholicism but common throughout patriarchal cultures. Stopping sex abuse, Byrne argues, means we must examine other institutions like universities and the military with the same scrutiny we bring to the Catholic Church.

Although clergy sexual abuse has received substantial attention in the twenty-first century, sex abuse within religious communities is neither new nor an exclusively Catholic phenomenon. In “A History of Sex Abuse in the Protestant Imagination,” Suzanna Krivulskaya explores how journalists handled allegations of sexual misconduct differently when Protestant pastors were accused rather than Catholic priests. In “Jews, Sex Positivity, and Abuse,” Sarah Imhoff considers the dangerous assumption that sex abuse does not happen within Jewish communities because of the common idea that Judaism is a more sex-positive religion than Christianity. And, in “The Guru-Disciple Relationship and the Complications of Consent” Amanda Lucia questions how we are to make sense of sexual relationships between a Hindu guru and their disciples when disciples are expected to cede all authority to the guru.

Given the insidiousness of sexual abuse throughout our culture, I hope this special issue encourages more people to discuss this widespread problem. Silence keeps the status quo in place. May these articles embolden more people to demand action, support survivors, and make ending sexual abuse an urgent priority.

Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.