Experts in history, philosophy, sociology, political science, psychology and education came together at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University April 17-19.

They presented talks including: the effects of mass violence waged by colonial powers; the misuse of the memory of the Holocaust; sexual predation in the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages; and slave holding by Jesuits in the United States.

Jesuit slavers

Jesuit Father David Collins, a professor of history at Georgetown University, presented a case study of his order's work in the United States.

This described "large communities of descendants of those who were held in slavery by Jesuits to develop programs of redress, repair and racial healing."

Their work started because a building on the Georgetown campus was being remodeled and people thought it would be opportune to change the building's name, he told Catholic News Service April 18.

The building had been named after an early 19th-century Jesuit who had played a role in the sale of hundreds of slaves in 1838.

The university's president could have, "with a swipe of the pen," changed the name right then and there to "something wholesome and edifying," Father Collins said.

He said the president saw "that would be sort of erasing history, making it disappear,".

He instead decided to make the name change "an opportunity to bring this history to the university's attention" and get the wider community involved in the process.

This resulted in the 2015 creation of the working group on slavery, memory and reconciliation that Father Collins chaired.

The benefit of time

"How do good people become involved in bad things?

"How do good people have blindnesses that make them incapable of seeing something that we're seeing with a certain amount of clarity a hundred years later?

"Those are important things to preserve," Father Collins said.

Memorials, for example, are just "partial stories" that select and tell one side of an historical event, he said.

A city like Rome, he said, is "full of memorials that are about the exercise of power and for the good,".

However, "these very exercises of power have had their victims and have done their violence.

"We need to understand that better than we have" and "to add to the part of the story that is neglected, which is that it's come at a cost."

The abuse crisis

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and former director of its Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, spoke to CNS.

She said part of her work is "to think about saints as a way to … think about who we remember and why.

"This is also occurring in the backdrop of a conversation we're having in the United States" and elsewhere about "who do we honor and why through our memorials and monuments," she said.

Her talk to the conference, she said, wove together clerical sex abuse in the United States, "how this is impacting the saints we remember and the saints we're making and the saints we're not making, and how that is connected to public enshrinement."

One example of reinterpreting existing saints, she said, is looking at the life of St. Maria Goretti.

She died in 1902 at the age of 11 after she was stabbed by a 20-year-old for refusing his sexual advances and attempted rape.

"When I was growing up in a Catholic high school, the suggestion was that she was resisting temptation. She was being chaste," Sprows Cummings said. More to the point, "she was a child."

Today, the patron saint of chastity and purity is more often upheld as a patron saint of abused children and rape victims.

Furthermore, she said, "some dioceses call her the patron saint of safe environments for their training."

The abuse crisis has affected not only how people see saints from the past, but also future candidates, "perhaps saints who were whistleblowers or saints who did what they could," she said.

For example, she said, there is a change.org petition for the cause for canonistion of Sister Catherine Anne Cesnik, a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

She was found dead near a garbage dump in Baltimore in 1970. Her unsolved murder was featured in the Netflix documentary series, The Keepers.

"I don't think she's going to be canonised but the very fact that they're calling for it is indicative of a search for heroes," she said. Read more

Carol Glatz is a Senior Correspondent at Catholic News Service, Washington DC-Baltimore Area

Synodality, therefore, has an ad extra dimension. It is an ecclesial response to populist leaders who "hijack" religion by sowing division and exploiting the anger of those who feel excluded, as Vatican Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle noted recently.

Of course, synodality has specific ad intra dimensions, too.

In an interesting article published a few months ago in Vida Nueva, Spanish Jesuit Alejandro Labajos pointed out that, according to the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, four percent of these religious communities had undergone an apostolic visitation (basically a Vatican investigation).

Such visitations are made to look into reports of abuse or serious problems with faith and discipline.
Seduction, spiritualization and blind obedience

Labajos summarized the root problem of the abuse of power in Catholic communities in three points.

First, it usually involves seductive charismatic personalities, often marked today by a strong media profile.

Second, it entails the use of spiritualized language that, on many occasions, is capable of creating ambiguous perceptions of reality and justifying evil by resorting to words such as dedication, the gift of oneself, sacrifice, community, mission and so forth.

And third, it almost always capitalizes on the bond of obedience.

The abuse of power is not found only in the long-established religious orders and institutes. It is also present in the new ecclesial movements and Catholics communities founded and led by seductive charismatic personalities.

Such personalities often attract members through spiritual seduction. In the worst cases, this fosters blind loyalty and total surrender to the will of the leader.

It's especially operative in communities where institutional systems aimed at preventing such spiritual seduction are absent or frowned upon by the members of those communities.

The wave of revelations of abuse and misconduct of different kinds (included sexual) in lay-led ecclesial communities is one of the new elements of the latest phase (since 2017-2018) in the history of the Catholic Church's abuse crisis.

It's no longer just the clerical institutes like the Legionaries of Christ, which was founded by the serial abuser Father Marcial Maciel.
Not all abusive power is linked to clericalism

Now we are discovering abuse in movements that are not identified with a clericalist, anti-modern ideology. It is also present in a Catholic culture open to the modern world, such as Schoenstatt, the Focolare Movement, and L'Arche.

Other recent cases have emerged that have revealed the troubling past of certain Catholic charismatic leaders, such are Father Jean-François Six in France.

There has been a growing awareness of the scope and seriousness of the abuse of children, women, and vulnerable adults. The well-known MeToo movement is one result of this.

As we begin to more carefully appraise the complicated contribution made by new ecclesial lay movements, the Church is already reeling from the scandals caused by charismatic leaders - some long deceased, others still living.

This is one of the reasons why the pope's push for a synodal Church is so important.

Francis is demonstrating once again that he believes history is truly a magistra vitae- a teacher of life.

He's a Jesuit whose real genius is spiritual direction. And in light of the last few decades, he's aware of the risks that the Church runs when it blindly follows the charismatic leadership of individuals.

In his pontificate, Francis has repeatedly warned all-new ecclesial communities and movements to avoid the risks of sectarianism and respect the personal and spiritual freedom of its members.

He issued a motu proprio last November called Authenticum charismatis that amends canon law (no. 579) and requires bishops to get authorization from the Holy See before they approve a new religious institute at the diocesan level. Continue reading

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University.

Through research, pastoral experience and interviews with F Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, Cucci has formed a picture of the abuse.

For the most part the abuse does not take the form of sexual violence and does not involve minors. Instead, it is mostly an abuse of power and conscience.

Abuse in women's congregations "includes multiple cases of different severity" and which all need to be addressed if the voice of the Catholic Church is to be credible, Cucci says.

At the same time, Cucci notes such abuse does not negate the importance of the work carried out by so many women religious in the service of the least. Nor does it reflect all the leadership and styles of authority in women's congregations.

Cucci, who is a professor of psychology and philosophy at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University, explains his purpose in speaking out about the abuse.

"It's not only a question of dealing with such painful cases - although this remains a priority and indispensable task," he says.

"It's also about preparing effective interventions to verify and supervise the manner in which government is exercised, so that such abuses will not be repeated."

"This way, those who wish to consecrate themselves to the Lord may be offered a more evangelical style of living authority and communal life."

Cucci says "the great attention rightly paid to the abuse of children should not prevent a proper response to these situations, even if they will not receive the same media clamor. It is a matter of giving a voice to those who have no voice."

Source

• La Civilta Cattolica
• The Arkansas Democrat Gazette