The Catholic Anatomy of a Dumping Ground: Thinking Across the Catholic-ness and the Coloniality of Sexual Abuse in Indian Country

About This Event

“What is Catholic about the clergy sex abuse crisis?,” asks religious studies scholar Robert Orsi. In this address, Dr. Kathleen Holscher, associate professor of American Studies and Endowed Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at the University of New Mexico, poses a related question about clergy abuse as it happened on and near reservations, against a backdrop of Native-serving missions. Indigenous scholars and activists have named the political dimension of this sexual violence, locating it amid settler colonialism and its dispossessions. Here she lays out an approach to thinking about clerical abuse that works from this knowledge, paying attention to how Catholic institutions and actors reproduced US colonial logics and processes, but also “takes Catholicism seriously,” by attending to Catholic institutions as coherently religious bodies that communicated truths about God, and about priests as God’s earthly emissaries. In this talk she discusses clerical abuse in the Diocese of Gallup, in the decades after its founding as the only US “Indian diocese.” By moving between the settler colonial framing of Navajo country as a wasteland or “dumping ground” and its Catholic framing as a destination for special priests, she presents a methodological argument for approaching the internal logics of Catholicism and Catholic institutions—mixed up though they’ve always been with co-constitutive logics of race, economy, and state—as machinery that shaped not only the phenomenon of priests abusing young people, but also the frequency of their abuse across Indian Country. Dr. Steven Battin, assistant professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame will offer a response.

About the Speaker

Dr. Kathleen Holscher is associate professor of American Studies, and also holds the Endowed Chair of Roman Catholic Studies in the Religious Studies program at UNM. Her research is located at the intersection of religious studies with US cultural and legal / political history, and focuses on the relationship of religion, especially Catholicism, and formations of race and empire, particularly US settler colonialism. She is interested in how religious and colonial things have co-constituted one another, historically, and also in moments when religion is an opportunity for resistance. Religion and law (or church-state relations) is one place she goes to ask these questions

Holscher’s first book, Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters, Public Education and the Law in Mid-Century New Mexico, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Religious Lessons tells the story of Zellers v. Huff, a court case that challenged the employment of nearly 150 Catholic sisters in public schools across New Mexico in 1948. The “Dixon case,” as it was known nationally, was the most famous in a series of midcentury lawsuits, targeting what opponents provocatively dubbed “captive schools.” For many Americans, the scenario of nuns in veils teaching Spanish-speaking New Mexican children embodied the high stakes of the era’s church-state conflicts, and became occasion to assess the implications of the political principle of separation in their own lives.

Holscher’s recent work deals especially with Catholic clerical sexual abuse in the context of US missions to Native peoples; she has published pieces online on the subject for journals like the National Catholic Reporter and The Revealer. She also has a longer essay on the subject in the upcoming volume Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories, edited by Tisa Wenger and Sylvester Johnson (forthcoming with New York University Press in summer 2022). Additionally, she is part of the project “Gender, Sex, and Power: Towards a History of Clergy Sex Abuse in the US Catholic Church,” funded by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. Finally, Holscher is collaborating with her colleague Dr. Jack Downey of University of Rochester to build an interactive digital map that visualizes the movements of Jesuits accused of sexual abuse to and through Native serving missions in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. That project is funded by a grant from the Luce Foundation, through the Religion and Sexual Abuse Project.

Biography of Respondent

Dr. Steven Battin, assistant professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, specializes in contemporary systematic and constructive theology. He is particularly committed to the exploration of ecclesiology, christology, and soteriology from non-dominant perspectives. His present research contributes to the ongoing development of liberation theologies by way of placing Catholic theology in conversation with decolonial, indigenous, and African-American-based post-capitalist movements.

*A Note on Public Health Safety

Gonzaga faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend this event in person. Masks will be required for in-person attendance. Off-campus guests are not able to attend in person but are welcome to participate via a live-streamed Zoom Webinar. A link to the webinar will be sent to all registrants shortly before the event.