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August 6, 2012, 10:07 pm
Posted by Eric Bugyis
The Immanent Frame has been continuing to post a series of articles from the “Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion” conference hosted at Yale by Kathryn Lofton last September. I commented on Lofton’s provocative opening post here. In that piece, she argued that for scholars of religion the perpetration and cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church ought to be understood, among other things, as a case of religious praxis. Given that the abuse took place in the context of theologically coded relationships, often occurred in ecclesial spaces, and was systematically covered-up by a hierarchy who claim a divine mandate to protect the institution from scandal, Lofton argued that an analysis of the abuse crisis that explains it primarily against the backdrop of secular culture, as the John Jay reports did, is short-sighted.
Not surprisingly, Lofton’s piece raised several difficult questions concerning the substantive role of theological rhetoric in the perpetration and cover-up of abuse. Was theology simply deployed by abusers to “rationalize” their behavior, or is there something problematic in some of the Church’s traditional theological tropes themselves that lent moral plausibility to such abuse? Did the clinical language of psychopathology give clarity or confusion to those charged with responding to cases of abuse? Was the perpetuation of abuse aided by the monarchical ecclesiology of the Church, or was it caused precisely by the more permissive, democratizing, and secularizing ecclesiastical influences of Vatican II? Mark Jordan addresses these questions in his recent contribution to the forum. Here’s a key paragraph on the first question:
The possibility of authorizing abuse theologically follows too easily from the always exceptional status claimed for modern church power. In modern Catholic contexts, official languages often pretend to be exempt from qualification, questioning, or appeal. They are absolute languages. They function in a state of exception. When that rhetorical character is extended to traditional images of a masculinized God or angel who ravishes—rapes—souls that are gendered as feminine, then erotic domination seems to receive divine blessing.
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