Child Sexual Abuse & the Catholic Church: Gender, Power, and Organizational Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this work, Marie Keenan, researcher and lecturer at the School of Applied Social Science, University College, Dublin, has done an outstanding service to those who wish both to analyze and to understand the sexual abuse crisis that has marked the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, England, Canada, the United States, and Australia. She begins by carefully stating the limitations of her clinical research base: the narrative of seven Roman Catholic priests, one religious brother, and one Christian brother, as detailed in both the introduction and in a helpful appendix. She also carefully presents her own methodological presuppositions: her desire to move beyond the standard analysis of an individual pathology toward a more holistic systemic analysis that relates the behavior on the microclinical base to the macro structures of social and church institutions. Ten dense chapters create a strong argument for her multidimensional approach. Chapters 1–3 describe the international scope of the problem, particularly in the English-speaking world; the general characteristics of the organizational culture of the Catholic Church, which provides the anthropological and sociological context for both the behavior of individual offenders and the reactions of those in authority; and a very illuminating comparison between clergy who have lived successfully with the institutional and personal tensions involved in being a priest and those clergy who have been identified as sexual offenders. Chapters 4–6 take the reader on a rich tour of the best analytic studies that might inform our understanding of clergy sexual abuse on an individual, societal, and gender-power level. Particularly informative is chapter 5, which deals with language, the construction of types, childhood and family institutions, labeling, social violence, and cultural meaning. The author returns to the themes of these chapters in her concluding discussion of the operative and tension-laden seminary model of "Perfect Celibate Clerical Masculinity" (pp. 243–50). In a thematic approach, chapter 7 utilizes the insights gained from the clinical examination of the sexual abusers whose narratives she has studied. Although this might appear to be a thin empirical basis for conclusions, Keenan integrates the material with the much broader picture provided by other studies. Chapter 8, a partner to chapter 2, again turns to a detailed examination of the institutional culture that provided the context for the abuse. There are insightful passages on loneliness, fear, obedience, the use of the confessional, and the gap created between the ideals professed and the lived experience and emotional conflicts of the clergymen.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".