Companions in Hope
Books
Crosses
by Carmine Galasso
Taken over a period of two to three years, these are the accounts of children, now as adults themselves and in their own words, of a childhood blighted by the violation and horror of sexual abuse at the hands of a member of the Catholic clergy. From countless interviews, emails and phone conversations they recall their experiences of an abuse of power - be they priest, monk, or nun - which has followed them into their adult lives.
Accompanying their words are black and white portraits of the survivors today, in places that for them echo where they are now, or where they were then. Each has a different story to tell.
Trolley Press, 2007
Rebuilding the Garden: Healing the Spiritual Wounds of Childhood Sexual Assault
by Karla McLaren
1.5 billion and counting..... One Quarter of all humans were or will be sexually assaulted in childhood; as such, molestation cannot be considered a gender-specific or singulare experience. Childhood sexual assault must be viewed as an unconscious universal tradition.
At the very core of the molest trauma lies not sexual predation, but spiritual predation. Physical and psychological therapies can address many parts of the trauma, but without a spiritual understanding, healing will be incomplete.
Rebuilding the Garden addresses the sexual, psychological, and spiritual wounds of childhood sexual assault. The invasion of the soul's home, the betrayal of the spirit - these wounds are explored and illuminated through a series of down-to-earth intuitive healing techniques.
With humor, empathy, and wisdom, spiritual healer and multiple-molest survivor Karla McLaren helps readers transform the experience of sexual assualt form a baffling personal tragedy into an engagement with the deeper spiritual and cultural issues of the world.
Laughing Tree Press, 1997
Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church
by Leon J. Podles
Sacrilege explores the deep roots of the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandal, revealing its full depth and breadth. As former Federal investigator Leon Podles documents, abuse is not limited to a few well-publicized cases in New England; it has occurred in every type of Catholic institution, in every time period, throughout the world. In the United States alone, some of the worst cases of abuse go back to the 1940's, remaining hidden until exposed for the first time in Sacrilege.
In horrifying yet necessary detail, Sacrilege surveys the full extent of the damage, showing how victims were failed by bishops, laity, therapists, police, courts, press, and even popes.
Examining the history behind today's headlines, Dr. Podles reveals how centuries-old theological errors encouraged blind submission to hierarchy, by making obedience to authority the highest virtue. He also shines a light on the new theological errors, popularized since Vatican II, that glorify every type of sexual expression - including pedophilia.
Sacrilege will prove an essential resource for all those concerned with the history and future of Catholicism.
2008; Crossland Press
"How Can I Forgive You? The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To"
by Janis Abrahms Spring, Ph.D.
Until now, we have been taught that forgiveness is good for us and that good people forgive. Dr. Spring, a gifted therapist and the award-winning author of After the Affair, proposes a radical, life-affirming alternative that lets us overcome the corrosive effects of hate and get on with our lives - without forgiving. She also ofers a powerful and uncoventional model for genuine forgiveness - one that asks as much of the offender as it does of us.
This bold and healing book offers step-by-step, concrete instructions that help us make peace with others and with ourselves, while answering such crucial questions as these:
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How do I forgive someone who is unremorseful or dead?
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When is forgiveness cheap?
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What is wrong with refusing to forgive?
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How can the offender earn forgiveness?
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How do we forgive ourselves for hurting another human being?
Perennial Currents, 2004
Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children
by Marci Hamilton
"Justice Denied is about one of the most horrendous offenses against children short of murder: child sexual abuse.... The author paints a vivid and shocking picture of child sexual abuse which should disavow the attitudes of those who think its limited to sinister looking street denizens in the dirty trench coats.... Marci Hamilton's book is short and to the point. Its last sentence sums up the book and the cause: "It is an either/or choice: we can either protect the predators or the children." This book concludes with the hope that it will be so for the right of children and their parents to live in a society without fear of sexual assault." - Review by Thomas P. Doyle
Cambridge University Press, 2007
An Irish Tragedy: How Sex Abuse by Irish Priests Helped Cripple the Catholic Church
by Joe Rigert
The story of how Irish immigrants helped to build the American Catholic Church is well-known. But the sad tale of how Irish priests later undermined the Church has gone untold, until now.
Investigative reporter Joe Rigert's search for the roots of the Catholic sex-abuse scandals led him to Ireland. There, he found that rigid sexual repression in both society and the priesthood had the opposite of its intended effect, fostering bizarre and criminal sexual expression.
Though a tiny country, Ireland has been a chief exporter of abusers to America. The cases Rigert documents range from a priest who as a youth was molested by priests in Ireland and then went on to abuse up to 50 girls and boys in America, to a bishop who had never dated a girl in his home country and later turned to boys for sexual satisfaction in an American seminary.
Ultimately, Rigert reveals that abuse by Irish priests mirrors a sexual disorder in the Vatican itself. The late Pope John Paul II looked to Ireland to maintain his strict view on sexual morality, but could not enforce it even in his own nation state.
2008; Crossland Press
Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church
by The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe
This groundbreaking book - one of the most significant works of investigative journalism since Woodward and Bernstein's reporting on Watergate - provides a detailed, devastating account of the Catholic Church's decades-long cover-up that has left millions of American Catholics shocked, angry, and confused. Betrayal brings into sharp focus the scores of abusive priests who preyed upon innocent children and the cabal of senior Church officials who covered up their crimes. Updated with a new afterword, this edition encompasses the story in its entirety, as it has unfolded in the U.U. and throughout the Church hierarchy.
2002 edition by Little, Brown and Company (hardcover), 2003 edition by First Back Bay (paperback)
And Justice for Some: An Expose of the Lawyers and Judges who let Dangerous Criminals Go Free
by Wendy Murphy
When Wendy Murphy was a young prosecutor, she learned that the deck is stacked in favor of criminal defendants. She has since made it her mission to help the victims who get the least protection from our twisted legal system. In And Justice for Some, she guides readers throught one horror story after another about judges and lawyers who bend over backward to let the worst offenders go free.
Sentinel, 2007
God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law
by Marci A. Hamilton
God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law challenges the pervasive assumption that all religious conduct deserves constitutional protection. While religious conduct provides many benefits to society, it is not always benign. The thesis of the book is that anyone who harms another perosn should be governed by the laws that govern everyone else - and truth be told, religion is capable of great harm.
This may not sound like a radical proposition, but it has been under assault since the 1060's. The majority of academics and many religious organizations would construct a fortress around religious conduct that would make it extremely difficult to prosecute child abuse by clergy, medical neglect of children by faith healers, and other socially intolerable behaviors. This book intends to change the course of the public debate over religion by bringing to the public's attention the tactics of religious entities to avoid the law and therefore harm others. God vs. the Gavel will bring much-needed balance to the contemporary, heated debate about religion and its role in society.
2005; Cambridge University Press
Our Fathers: the Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal
by David France
When, in early 2002, a team of Boston Globe reporters broke open the pedophilia scandal around Father John J. Goeghan - and then Paul Shanley, Joseph Birmingham, and hundreds of other priests in Boston and across the country - the entire American Catholic Church spun into crisis. But by that time, the damage was already done. Perhaps a hundred thousand children had already fallen into traps laid by their priests. Every Catholic in the country - and everyone who had ever set foot in a church - faced troubling questions: Why had this happened? How could the secrets of this abuse have been so widely held, and so closely protected? How could the church have let it happen?
David France takes us back to the church of the 1950's, a time of relative innocence, to look for answers. With deft nuance, he crafts a panoramic portrait of the faithful, encompassing the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and courage of numerous Catholic and non-Catholic families over the last fifty years. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, private correspondence, unpublished scientific probes and secret Vatican documents, and tens of thousands of pages of court records, he shows how ironically, the church's institutional suspicion of human sexuality lit the fuse on the crisis.
Our Fathers braids a heartbreaking narrative from the personal lives of good and bad priests, pious and heartless prelates, self-interested lawyers turned heroes, holy altar boys turned drug addicts, mothers torn between their children and their faith, hard-bitten investigative reporters reduced to tears, and thousands of church critics who, through this crisis, returned to their faith renewed and invigorated. He shows us the intense history of dissent within the ranks, especially regarding Catholic teachings on sexuality and homosexuality. He tells the heroic stories of whistle-blowing nuns, independent pastors, church insiders trying to do the right thing, and - ultimately - a group of blue-collar men, all molested by the same priest, who overcame their bitterness and took it upon themselves to try to save their church.
This book is a tribute to those ordinary Catholics called upon to make extraordinary contributions. Our Fathers is the sweeping, authoritative, and gripping work the scandal and its aftermath demand.
2004; Broadway Books
Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II
by Jason Berry and Gerald Renner
Going Deep behind the headlines about scandals in the Catholic Church, Jason Berry and Gerald Renner's Vows of Silence follows the staggering trail of evasions and deceit that leads directly to the Vatican - and taints the legacy of Pope John Paul II. Based on more than six years of investigative reporting and hundreds of interviews, this book is a riveting account of Vatican cover-ups and the tumult they have caused in the church worldwide. Both a profound criticism and a wake-up call to reform by two Catholic writers, Vows of Silence is not a book about sexual abuse; it is a book about abuse of power, throughout the Vatican.
The book cuts between the life story of Father Tom Doyle, who sacrificed a diplomatic career with the Vatican to seek justice for sex-abuse victims, and Father Marcial Maciel, and accused pedophile and founder of the militaristic religious order, the Legion of Christ. One of the most mysterious and powerful men in the Catholic Church, Maciel has built a network of priests, lay people, and elite prep schools in more than twenty countries, using the Legion as a fundraising machine to position himself as a favored figure of John Paul II.
In addition to accusations against Maciel of sexual abuse and of using Legion money for his own extravagant lifestyle, many ex-Legionaries claim that the order uses mind-control techniques to isolate seminarians and even priests from their families. And yet, because he enjoyed the protection of Pope John Paul II and members of the Roman Curia, charges against Maciel for sexual misconduct - all of which he denies - were blocked in the Vatican court system.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with Father Doyle and with ex-Legionairies who filed a canonical suit against Maciel, as well as interviews with Vatican insiders and an array of sources in Mexico, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, the authors provide a penetrating account of a hierarchy directly in conflict with its followers. With keen insight and scrupulous reporting, Vows of Silence is a powerful narrative that chronicles the church's struggle between orthodoxy and reform - going straight to the heart of one of the world's largest power structures.
2004; Free Press
A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church
by Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett
The relentless cresendo of revelations of sexual abuse in its Catholic churches has rocked this nation. Just how wide-spread is child sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy? And why hasn't the Catholic Church done more to stop it?
In A Gospel of Shame, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalists Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett provide the answers to these questions and more. The answers, however, turn out to be infuriating and heartbreaking, difficult to accept but impossible to dismiss. The authors thoroughly document dozens of cases across the country and reveal how this heinous abuse of trust has been tacitly sanctioned by the Church's silence.
Containing unforgettable accounts of individual and institutional cover-ups, as well as a new Introduction and Afterword by the authors that address the most recent crisis, A Gospel of Shame "will serve those who need and want an analysis of the scandal that is currently rocking the Catholic Church" (Booklist).
2002; Perennial
Ambition and Arrogance: Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston and the American Catholic Church
by Douglas J. Slawson
Driven by ambition, Father William O'Connell coupled cunning with Vatican connections to become cardinal archbishop of Boston. Arrogance prompted him to exploit his office for personal financial gain and to cover up sexual scandals in his own household, drawing the wrath of U.S. bishops. Undaunted, O'Connell was determined to become the most powerful person in the American Catholic Church.
Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church's 2000-year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse
by Thomas P. Doyle, A.W. Richard Sipe, and Patrick J. Wall
In some ways, this book is a sad book. It demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt that the sexual abuse of minors by priests is not a recent or a local phenomenon. Nor is the current crisis of clergy abuse just another pothole along the bumpy road in the history of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately this crime - and that is its proper name - has been an open wound on the Body of Christ for as far back as records are kept. History shows that in practically every century since the church began, the problem of clerical abuse of minors was not just lurking in the shadows but so open at times that extraordinary means had to be taken to quell it.
If there is anything new about the sexual abuse of minors by members of the clergy, it is that over the past fifty years a conspiracy of silence has covered it. Rather than stifle the practice, this pall of secrecy has provided an atmosphere where abuse could fester as a systemic infection. In the process, the lives of children, priests, bishops - and indeed, the credibility of the Catholic Church itself - have been shattered.
2006; Volt Press
Faith Dares to Speak
by Donald Cozzens
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Catholic Church is arguably the last feudal system in the West. Once the feudal structure of the church is recognized, the bishops' response to the clergy abuse crisis comes into focus. Bishops and other church authorities reacted to the scandal the only way their feudal culture allowed - with secrecy, denial, and a no-holds-barred effort to protect the reputation, authority, and resources of the institution. While tragic - and in many cases reprehensible - their response was consistent with the way feudal systems function.
In Faith Dares to Speak, Donald Cozzens addresses the laity's role in challenging a feudal church to embrace accountability and transparency, and to bring light where there is now darkness. Awakened to their dignity and responsibility as full, equal, and adult members of the church, lay Catholics in North America are finding their voice and daring to speak to church authorities long accustomed to deferential obedience and compliance.
Church life, Cozzens believes, will never be quite the same.
2004; Liturgical Press
Clericalism: The Death of Priesthood
by George B. Wilson
As members of the church, Wilson maintains, we are all responsible for creating a clerical structure and for that culture's transformation. Clericalism aids this transformation by helping us examine some underlying attitudes that create and preserve destructive relationships between ordained and laity. After looking at the crisis and establishing where we are not, this book challenges us with concrete suggestions for changing behaviors. Ultimately, this is a hopeful book, looking for the restoration of a genuine priesthood, free of clericalism, in which we become truly united in Christ.
Liturgical Press, 2008
Suffer the Little Children
by Mary Raftery and Eoin O'Sullivan
Review: Between 1868 and 1969, more than 100,000 Irish children were taken from their families by the state and placed in so-called industrial schools run by various orders of the Catholic Church. The conditions in these schools, as documented by [writer Mary] Raftery first in her award-winning TV documentary States of Fear and now in this book (Suffer the Little Children), were appalling. The documentary so shocked Ireland that the prime minister was forced to offer an apology on behalf of the state. Collaborating here with [Eoin] O'Sullivan, a lecturer in social policy at Trinity College, Dublin, Raftery presents a child welfare system out of control. Most of the children in industrial schools were placed there because of their parents' poverty. Then the state closed its eyes as the children were abused physically, mentally, and sexually by nuns and priests who were supposed to take care of them. The testimonials of the former students themselves are heart-wrenching. Mary Norris remembers being remanded because her mother, a widow with eight children, allowed a man to stay the night. Don Baker tells that, when he, aged 12, arrived at his school, the priest pointed at his groin and asked, "Do you play with that?" Baker remembers the school as something out of Oliver Twist old, filthy clothes, terrible food and repeated floggings. Interspersed throughout the testimonials are political details: which government and which minister either ignored allegations or quickly passed the buck. It is noteworthy that Father Edward Flanagan, founder of Boystown, on a visit to Ireland in 1946 condemned the highly abusive and punitive culture within the Irish industrials schools. Raftery and O'Sullivan perform and important service in recording the ugly story of these institutions. (From Publishers Weekly)
Read our List of Books on the Clergy Abuse Crimes in Ireland on our Idyllic Ireland page
More to Come.
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