Between 2019 and 2020, I became familiar with the story of the Love family in Mississippi, several of whom were sexually abused by a Catholic priest. This was not only the first time I had heard about Black survivors of clerical abuse, but it also marked a drastic alteration in my understanding of Catholic clerical abuse in the United States.
The articles I read discussed the abuse experienced by La Jarvis Love and his two cousins, Joshua and Raphael. They also tell the story of how their abuser was held to account. In January 2017, at an IHOP in South Haven, Mississippi, La Jarvis and his family met with a leader of the Franciscan Friars in Wisconsin and were offered a settlement of $15,000. This settlement was contingent on their agreement not to discuss the experience of their abuse publicly.
Given their financial hardships, La Jarvis and Joshua Love accepted the offer, while Raphael refused. They would subsequently learn that their settlements were substantially lower than most of the White survivors of Catholic clerical abuse in Mississippi. In 2006, the Diocese of Jackson settled lawsuits for $5 million with 19 survivors, 17 of whom were White. On average, the White survivors received $250,000.
In an interview, Joshua Love said, “They felt they could treat us this way because we’re poor and we’re Black.” Joshua’s powerful declaration of poverty and anti-Black racism as an explanation for the betrayal he experienced from the Catholic Church haunted me for days. I was left with the lingering question of how many survivors look like me.
As the years passed, the question lingered. As I began my doctoral studies, it evolved and assumed new dimensions. I began to wonder: How many survivors have looked like me? Their stories not only highlight the urgent need for accountability but also bring race and the insidious nature of anti-Black racism to the fore in the ongoing conversation. It urges society and the Church to recognize the relationship between race, hierarchical authority, and clerical abuse.
For Catholics and non-Catholics alike, across the racial divide, the scandal of clerical abuse has left a mark on the history and social legacy of the American Church. After the release of the Boston Spotlight reports near the turn of the millennium, followed by state-led investigations across the nation, scholars of Catholicism and American religion more broadly have begun to grapple with the issue of clerical sexual abuse.
What are the systemic causes of clerical abuse? What are/were the motivating factors in the decision of superiors of religious communities and Catholic hierarchs to hide abusers? How can we change Catholic cultural norms that sustain a culture of secrecy and gross neglect? These are some of the questions that have governed the historical literature and Church policy around the topic. As valuable as these inquiries have been, however, they tend to focus squarely on recent phenomena, as though clerical abuse is a very recent development. In conceiving the issue of clerical abuse as a recent phenomenon, the issue is seen as a modern crisis brought about by the mismanagement of bishops, rather than a systemic historical issue.
Until recently, historians have relied heavily on internal ecclesiastical and diocesan documents—often obtained from bishops and religious superiors under legal pressure—to construct narratives of clerical abuse. However, this reliance imposes significant limitations on both the analysis and the historical accounts of such abuse. These constraints have, in turn, marginalized the voices of Black people and other racially marginalized groups, effectively rendering the role of race in clerical abuse cases invisible. Additionally, the chronology of clerical abuse, shaped by the periodization imposed on these very documents, remains constrained.
Historians have largely overlooked racial issues in their investigations, as ecclesiastical records typically fail to document the race or ethnicity of survivors. As a result, the study of clerical abuse has been framed within an assumed and normative Whiteness, shaped by the long-standing perception of U.S. Catholicism as a Eurocentric institution. In light of these limitations, the argument can be made—and defended—that the history of U.S. Catholic clerical abuse is a much older history than normally discussed, and that race is a pivotal and often under-discussed factor in the conceptualization of that history.
Fr Bryan Massingale, a Black Catholic priest and professor at Fordham University and a leading advocate for survivors from marginalized communities, has written about the limitations of using the framework of silencing and erasure. As the principal investigator for the “Clergy Sexual Abuse in African American Communities” project at Fordham, he highlights the profound silencing and erasure of Black survivors.
He identifies these issues as stemming from how Catholic theological ethics compartmentalize race and sexuality, treating them as “siloed” and “stand-alone categories.” Massingale contends that denying an “intersectional understanding of racialized sexuality” ultimately impedes “the ability to be both conscious of and concerned about the unique victimization and trials that result when the perpetrators of clergy sexual abuse (overwhelmingly white) prey upon victims of color.” He continues:
“Lacking an intersectional understanding of sexuality creates a blindness to the cultural barriers that may inhibit persons of color, particularly African American men, from reporting sexual abuse inflicted by white men.”
As a burgeoning historian, I find this framework useful for understanding the history of clerical abuse in the colonial and antebellum periods and throughout the historiography of Catholicism in the Americas.
Dr. James Sweet, the author of “Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the Afro-Portuguese World, 1441-1770”, elevates some stories of clerical abuse during the early modern period among enslaved Africans. Two of the most haunting describe the attempted assault of a 14-year-old Angolan-born enslaved boy, Cristóvão, by a priest known simply as Fr Antônio, during an Atlantic crossing from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon in 1626. The second chronicles the abuse of another Angolan-born enslaved boy, Banyom, at the hands of Fr Antônio de Serisa in 1646. Banyo is reported to have said his abuser “was not a priest but a devil.”
While these cases may not have occurred in what would become the United States, these stories illustrate how the shared vulnerabilities of people of African descent to acts of violence were undergirded by anti-Black social sentiments, which clerical abusers used in concealing their crimes.
Dr. William G. Thomas III further enforces this notion of vulnerability in his book “A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War.” It explores the story of Susanna Queen, an enslaved Black woman who sued for freedom on behalf of her children with a Jesuit priest, John Ashton. While Thomas admits that archival evidence does not directly confirm the relationship between Queen and Ashton, he does admit the likelihood that Ashton assaulted Susanna as a teenager. Moreover, according to a description of Ashton’s will, “During [his] life, priests in the region surmised that he maintained an illicit relationship with Queen and had fathered her children.”
Although the stories of Cristóvão, Banyo, and Susanna Queen are separated by time from those of La Jarvis, Joshua, and Raphael, their accounts all expose the severe neglect of racial issues and the experiences of people of African descent within the history of Catholic clerical abuse, presenting a long-standing and continuous pattern of neglect.
When centering Black people in the history of clerical abuse, we are obligated to construct a broader narrative beyond the 20th century, consider the historical limitations to recourse and justice, and recognize how racism and clericalism inform the exercise and construction of “authority” in U.S. Catholic culture. In asserting the importance of the Black perspective and serious consideration of race, we claim that historical context and societal evolution are crucial to understanding how the crisis came about and what ought to be done to address it.
With the election of Pope Leo XIV, the Church is entering a new chapter, and the question of race and ministry looms large. One of the open questions is how he will handle the scourge of priest misconduct and racial discrimination, especially as a man himself descended from the African diaspora. The answer is yet to be known, but it is sure his legacy as pontiff will include his words and actions on the matter of clerical abuse.
Christopher S. Gurley Jr. is a Ph.D. student in religious studies and a Master of Arts student in American history at Stanford University. He specializes in race/racialization in American religious history, with a focus on African American history and Catholicism. He holds degrees from Tennessee State University, Vanderbilt Divinity School, and Yale Divinity School.
