Undocumenting Abuse: Migration, Power, and the Production of Invisible Victims

Presented by Susan B. Reynolds, Ph.D., Winner of the 2024 New Scholar Essay Prize for Catholic Studies in the Americas.

Clergy sexual violence in immigrant communities is an understudied dimension of the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Yet records reveal how immigrant-serving parishes were regularly treated as dumping grounds for serially abusive clergy. There, abusers targeted children from poor, vulnerable, and undocumented families, silencing victims with threats of deportation and further violence. This lecture will call for a reorientation in the study of clergy sexual abuse toward these peripheries. Drawing on archival records from the 1960s to 1980s, it will interrogate the complex politics of documentation at work in migrant abuse cases. It will further examine how a post-Vatican II theological and pastoral imagination of intimacy with the poor, refracted through prisms of state, ecclesial, and clerical dominance, helped to create conditions for the production of invisible victims.