Tag: Roman Catholic Church

Not all Sex is a Scandal

Posted on by

Cain, Sandusky, Catholic Priests. Sex has been in the headlines a lot lately. But some important distinctions are getting lost in the rush to categorize offenses, blurring the difference between crimes against marriage with those against women or minors, or the crimes of institutions with those of individuals.

So much commentary about the cover up of sexual abuse at Penn State has wrongly made comparisons of the University to the Catholic Church. While both are large, patriarchal institutions, both have kept the long-term abuse of children under wraps for the sake of those in leadership positions, and both have all the ritualistic trappings that inspire devoted followers and protect strict hierarchical structures, Penn State is not the Roman Catholic Church. Continue Reading →

Keeping the Patriarchy: Sex as Dominance in the Catholic Church

Posted on by

by Amanda Marcotte

To quickly summarize a recently- released,  five-year study funded by the Catholic Church on the priest sex abuse scandals: “We’ve investigated ourselves and concluded that it was the hippies that did it.”  It may be easy to be hoodwinked into believing the report isn’t as dodgy as it is, as the researchers did offer some concessions to the critics, both in denying that homosexuality is the root of the sex abuse scandals and suggesting that the church failed to deal with the problem effectively, but it’s important to look beyond these concessions and at the larger conclusions reached.  Doing so demonstrates that the Catholic Church has no interest in addressing the toxic, patriarchal culture that breeds sexual abuse and the subsequent cover-ups.  Instead, the researchers have gone out of their way to suggest that the sex abuse was a historical anomaly caused by a lascivious 1960’s culture, and that no real changes need to be made in order to prevent future incidents of abuse of children and teenagers by priests. Continue Reading →

Much Love to You Always, Dorothy

Posted on by

All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day; Marquette University Press (2011), $35

Reviewed by Jack Downey

The acclaimed Catholic University of America professor, John Tracy Ellis, once said that you can’t be a good historian unless you enjoy reading dead people’s mail. Happily for anyone who considers herself a Dorothy Day aficionado but has neither the resources nor the particular inclination to hoof it out to Milwaukee to visit the glorious Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Archives at Marquette University, the universe has given us the Orbis Books editor-in-chief and Day historian extraordinaire, Robert Ellsberg. His new anthology of Dorothy’s letters, All the Way to Heaven, joins its brick-sized companion volume of her journals – The Duty of Delight – to give anyone with a public library card or an few extra bucks in his pocket a glimpse into the intimate thoughts and correspondence of this icon of progressive American Catholic activism. That said, if you’re looking for an excuse to visit the birthplace of affordable hipster-friendly light beer, then a trip to the archives might be just what the doctor ordered.

David O’Brien, the eminent American Catholic historian and professor emeritus at Holy Cross, has called Dorothy Day “the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.” Continue Reading →