Anger, Lamentation, and Common Ground

This essay argues that the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, founded twenty-five years ago, needs to shift focus to deal with the pervasiveness of anger among American Catholics. Instead of striving to achieve agreement through rational dialogue, American Catholics should aim to find common ground in our sorrow by developing liturgies of lamentation to address the pervasive devastation arising from crises such as clergy sex abuse. Lamentation finds common ground in the common experience of loss, without insisting that everyone attribute the loss to the same cause or agree upon the same path toward renewal.

What Is Catholic about the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis?

This chapter explores a question often asked about survivors of clerical sexual abuse: do they remain Catholic? Such a question, this chapter argues, fails to account for the complex reality. Survivors were abused as youngsters so they were usually unable to determine this for themselves. The insistence of adults that children and teenagers who were abused continue going to church was another way of denying the reality of the abuse. (“They drove me to my abuser,” one survivor said of his parents.) Many survivors remained faithful Catholics into adulthood. But most survivors describe a moment when being at Mass became physically and emotionally painful. For many the decision to stay or leave was not simple or final. Some survivors developed strategies for protecting themselves from further fear and harm as they continued attending Mass; others found ways of being both inside and outside the church; still others made different choices over time. The struggle of many survivors with the church in which they were religiously formed, encountered the sacred, and were abused—abuse that always had religious context and significance—offers a revealing perspective on Catholics and Catholicism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.