Harvard Divinity Bulletin - Robert Orsi - A Crisis About the Theology of Children

Whatever else the dreadful crisis still unfolding in the American Catholic church is about—and the news media, the courts, the church hierarchy in Rome and in the United States, and an increasingly infuriated laity have offered different interpretations—it is fundamentally about children. It is about children's vulnerability to adult power and to adult fantasy in religious contexts and it is about the absence of real children in these settings—real children as opposed to "children" as the projections of adult needs and desires or "children" as extensions of adult religious interiority. The necessary response to the crisis must be about children too.

The most common interpretations of clerical pedophilia have been biological. The issue is celibacy—if priests were allowed to marry and have families none of this would have happened. (A letter writer to the New York Daily News suggested that Boston's Cardinal Law would have acted differently if he had grandchildren of his own.) The Vatican and some American conservatives maintain that homosexuality is the problem, the uncontrollable impulses of gay men, and the political environment that permits and sanctions such impulses. "We are now bearing the consequences of the collapse of discipline," Father Richard John Neuhaus told The New York Times. The pedophilia crisis according to Neuhaus and others on the right is the product of Sixties moral license.

Such bio-political interpretations effectively accomplish several things. They make this a completely Catholic problem, first of all, because only Catholic clergy are celibate, which means, in turn, that there is nothing to learn from this crisis about children's risk and fate in other Christian contexts. They also naturalize the problem: pedophilia is about sexual urges. This implies either that nothing can be done about it (because who can stem the forces of nature?) or else that the only way of dealing with the crisis is repression. Naturalization also takes the crisis out of culture, making it a matter of bodies and not of history or theology. Most important, bio-political interpretations completely deflect attention away from children and from the nature of children's lives in the church.

Maybe this crisis is not only about bodies and sex but about theology as well, however, about the kinds of stories that have been told about children in Christian cultures over time—about their "innocence" or "depravity"—and the serious consequences of these stories for real-life children in particular times and places. Not about celibate men (there is no evidence really that celibacy inclines anyone to depravity and Catholic priests are statistically no more likely to abuse children than other adults who work with youngsters) but about the kinds of relationships that form between adults and children in Christian contexts and about the needs Christian adults bring to their children. Not about sex but about the power and authority adults in religious contexts claim over children, which is not only a Catholic problem. If any of these alternative possibilities are relevant, it means that other responses are called for than repression or an angry, uninformed (and in some cases anti-Catholic) attack on celibacy.

I agreed to write this article after reading the account in The New York Times on Wednesday, April 10, about the way the Boston hierarchy dealt with Father Paul R. Shanley, an incorrigible child molester. Cardinal Law and his bishops lied about Father Shanley's history when they recommended him for positions in other dioceses, knowingly granting him access to children in his new posts. Again: Boston's bishops placed among children a man they knew would rape them. But they liked Paul Shanley, in a clerical clubhouse way. On the occasion of Father Shanley's retirement from what Cardinal Law knew well was a long career of molesting children, the Cardinal commended the priest: "For thirty years in assigned ministry you brought God's word and His Love to His people [God's gender seems to have mattered to Cardinal Law at this precise moment] and I know that that continues to be your goal despite some difficult limitations." But it was the lighthearted chancery banter about Father Shanley that most profoundly shocked me. "Dealing with Paul Shanley is never dull" the Times reports an internal diocesan memo chortling, and in another an administrator writes fondly "[Paul Shanley] is an interesting character." The meaning of this tonality is clear: these are men who cared absolutely nothing for children. Children did not exist for them. (Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk explained his procedure for dealing with clerical child abuse: reassign the offender and "tell the child to forget about it." So much for children's experience.) Or to put this another way: the children who were so present to Father Shanley's desires and imagination were at the same time completely absent to the moral imaginations of church officials. How can children be simultaneously so absent and so present in the same religious environment?

This interplay of children's absence and presence also characterizes the Vatican's response to the crisis. Roman officials say clerical pedophilia is an American problem; as a Cardinal spokesman slyly pointed out at a Vatican press conference, questions about child abuse are invariably addressed in English. Then, shamefully—is there any end to the shame of all this?—Rome asserted that this distinctly American crisis was about gay priests. Taken together what these statements mean is that in Rome's understanding the rape of children is the product of liberal democracy, certainly of movements for gay rights, but more generally of a rights-based and democratically open political culture. Then Vatican officials called for a purge of gay priests. So the violated bodies of children are to be mobilized for the reactionary ends of the curia and for the demonizing of liberalism. Children are present in these imaginations only long enough so that the pain in their bodies can be appropriated for Rome's political ends, a variant of the logic of torture, and then they disappear. The agenda of a high-level meeting planned for Rome in late April did not mention "children" as a topic for consideration.

What accounts for the strange doubleness of children in Catholic culture, for their simultaneous presence and absence?

There has always been a deep ambivalence in Christianity about the spiritual and moral status of children. St. Augustine thought that children were naturally depraved; other theologians suggested that children were good only because they lacked capacity and opportunity for sin; others found children angelic and innocent. Christian conceptions of children throughout the Middle Ages "oscillate between extremes," writes church historian Janet L. Nelson, "because children's behavior was taken to indicate good or bad supernatural power: on the one hand, lack of control suggested diabolical influence, on the other, weakness and unprotectedness suggested access to the divine." Nelson concludes that the child was a protean figure to be "exploited in legal or political as well as moralizing contexts." In the Christian imagination, the child-as-holy-innocent and the child-as-demonic-other have spun around each other in an unsteady dance.

It was the child as holy innocent, however, that came to dominate European and American Christian understanding in the modern era. Children were brutalized in industrial workplaces; in European colonies they suffered the same fates as their parents (modern times have not been kind to children). And in these same years the European and American middle classes elaborated an extensive fantasy of childhood innocence in the idioms of romanticism, religion, and consumerism.

Among Catholics, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the age of the child. Catholics thrilled to the sight of children in ecstatic communication with the Virgin and to the sound of their voices speaking her messages of consolation and warning: that Mary chose to reveal herself to children at Lourdes and Fatima and elsewhere was taken by the church as proof of the validity of the events—because how could innocent children deceive anyone—and by critics as proof of the church's intolerable and decadent corruption of the minds and hearts of simple people. The age of the child had its pope, Giuseppe Sarto, Pius X, who was determined to bring children into full participation in the life of the church. Pius radically lowered the age at which children might make their first communion (in a widely reported story the pope himself gave the host to a 4-year-old boy), encouraged youngsters to receive often, and promoted the cult of the baby Jesus (to whom the Pope was devoted).

Catholics prided themselves on offering their children direct access to the sacred, not what they imagined as the scaled-down, make-believe Sunday-school version of Christianity given Protestant children. Childhood became the model of adult faith in the age of children. In an allocution in 1929 on St. Theresa of the Little Flower, whose autobiography was a major inspiration for the age of the child, Pope Benedict XV summed up the ethos of the period: "In spiritual childhood is the secret of sanctity for all the faithful of the Catholic world." This was how the challenges of modernity would be met, by the politics of innocence.

Pope Pius told an audience of French children in April 1912 that their guardian angels every day beheld the face of God "in the souls of these little ones where God is reflected as in the mirror of their innocence, their splendor, their purity." The comment reveals the dilemma of real children in the age of the child: Innocence is a mirror—but there is nothing in a mirror other than what is reflected in it. Innocence is empty. "Childhood can be made a wonderfully hollow category," literary historian James Kincaid writes of Victorian fantasies of the innocent child, "able to be filled with anyone's overflowing emotions, not least overflowing passion."

Kincaid refers to the discourse of innocence as the "hollowing out of children." What is hollowed out? The child hollowed out by adult religious fantasies is denied agency and will. The discourse of innocence precludes children having their own wants, needs, and desires, and their own understandings of things different from what adults propose for them. Innocence ironically functions more effectively as discipline than religious tropes of childhood depravity because while the latter acknowledge (even if only hyperbolically) the existence of childhood needs and behaviors that enrage or frighten adults, the discourse of innocence simply and authoritatively denies children any existence at all. The emptiness of innocence deprives children of the authority and integrity of their own experience ("tell the child to forget about it"). Ironically, the discourse of innocence put children at the greatest risk because the emptiness of innocence creates a space into which adult desire can be projected. The innocent child is bound to adult desire; he or she does not exist apart from this.

This is not to say that there were not countervailing modern accounts of the child in Catholic and Protestant cultures. When Christians aligned with progressive political initiatives in defense of young people's rights, for example, they developed richer accounts of children's real lives that challenged normative religious views. Nor am I saying that the hollowing out of the child in modern Christian culture is the only source of children's distress and oppression. Many of the children abused by the priests assigned them by Boston's bishops were poor and dark-skinned; in these cases, race and class deepened children's invisibility. The demon child endured into modernity, moreover, the necessary shadow of the holy innocent. The innocent child is uncanny (what else could he or she be, without life or experience of his or her own?), and adults are made anxious by the emptiness they themselves have imposed on children. When this happens, innocence is transposed into evil. But the major trope of the modern Christian conception of the child is innocence, with all that this brings with it.

Let me give an example of children as the objects of adult desire in modern Catholic culture. The decision of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore virtually to mandate that American parents send their children to parochial schools under penalty of sin ensured that Catholic youngsters and the adult religious assigned the task of forming them in the faith spent a great deal of time together, much more so than religious figures and children in any other American religious culture. Children and adults watched one another very closely in this world, the inevitable result of their daily proximity, and one of the things that adults searched children for were signs of religious vocation. (Children looked back too, but this is another matter.) It was common before the Second Vatican Council for youngsters to enter religious life at a very early age, directly out of elementary school; these special children—"priests-in-the-making," in a popular phrase for altar boys, or little nuns—were identified as such by adult religious, sometimes taking hold of children's own religious fervor, sometimes imposing their vision on children.

The children singled out for this special kind of religious attention were marked off from the rest of their peers and usually found themselves relentlessly pursued, the objects of a long and complex seduction process that involved special privileges in school, little gifts of religious objects, special field trips, and the delight of adult attention. Some children found this intense religious scrutiny flattering, but many others were terrified by it. Little priests and nuns in the making experienced the attention as a constraint on their behavior—they could no longer be themselves among their peers. It was very hard to dissuade the adults involved, moreover, to convince them they were mistaken about a child's destiny. The boundary between these specially designated children and the adult religious around them had been dissolved by adult fantasy and projection.

None of this is distinctive to Catholicism, however. The hollowing dynamics of innocence and the absent/present "child" generated by them are evident across American Christianity. There are two dominant discourses about children among contemporary American Christians and post-Christian practitioners (in New Age and Pagan groups, for instance). The view that children are innately spiritual, which develops out of the nineteenth-century discourse of the holy innocent, holds liberal imaginations; the view of children as weak and in need of adult religious authority and protection holds conservative imaginations. In popular understanding and practice there is considerable fluidity between the two (apparently dissimilar) accounts of childhood because they are shadows of each other, the holy child and the demon child chasing each other across the American Christian landscape.

It is a widely held assumption among Christian educators and writers on children's religion today that children are naturally religious, as Protestant and Catholic educators insisted to me again and again at a conference recently. Children are endowed with an innate spirituality that is more authentic, more open and more gracious than adult religiosity. There is a real gnosticism of childhood in the contemporary United States. Prominent religious theorists claim that children have greater spiritual insight than adults and that children speak with prophetic voices. In such fantasies of childhood spirituality, maturation can only be seen as a fall from grace; holy children cannot really grow up (because then they cease to be holy).

Adult fantasies of innately holy children deny youngsters the full range of human experience and emotion. The fantasy is predicated on children not having normal lives (normal lives are the privilege and prerogative of the adults who nostalgically situate children in a pre-social space of holiness). The fear that children may indeed have more complicated lives, emotions, experiences than is allowed them by fantasies of their natural holiness—that in fact they might be just like adults in this regard—produces the damned children that populate the American gothic as well as the moral hysteria that periodically grips American Christians, liberal and conservative. The discourse of the holy child generates as its necessary counterpart the fantasy of the dark teen-ager that so haunts contemporary imaginations; the dark teen is the holy child come to adolescence. (Sometimes, as in the Christian retelling of Columbine, sacred children and damned teen-agers are arrayed against each other in cosmic combat.) The trope of innocence, the hollowing out of children's own interiorities, desires, and autonomy, the blurring of boundaries between adult religious fantasies and the lives of children—this is children's fate in Christian modernity. Children may have been safer in premodern Christian contexts where they were not burdened by adult fantasies of their sacredness or by the peculiar attentions that follow the imposition of holiness.

Adults tell themselves (with great urgency and often enough fearfully) that they must pass on their religious beliefs and values to their children; to this end, they organize catechism classes, Sunday school programs, after-school religious instruction, special children's rituals, and so on. The fear is that without such instruction children will be bereft and alienated on the deepest levels. But this is disingenuous. Children represent the vulnerability and contingency of a particular religious world and of religion itself; in exchanges between adults and children about sacred matters, the religious world is in play. On no other occasion except perhaps in times of physical pain is the fictive quality of religion—the fact that religious meanings are made and sustained by humans—so intimately and unavoidably apprehended as when adults attempt to realize the meaningfulness of their religious worlds in their children. This is why discussions of what children lack religiously—and most often children's religious development is framed precisely as a narrative of lack—are fraught with such fear, sometimes sorrow, and sometimes ferocity, among adults, especially in times of social dislocation. Fear for children is invariably accompanied by fear of children. The apparently commonsensical and straightforward nature of the enterprise of religious training—we want to pass our religious beliefs onto our children—naturalizes a far more complex relationship. Children's bodies, rationalities, imaginations, and desires, rendered accessible to adult imposition by the fantasy of innocence, have all been privileged media for giving substance to religious meaning, for making the sacred present not only for children but through them too for the adults in relation to them.

The problem is not celibacy, homosexuality, or liberalism but the unstable presence/absence of children in a religious and political culture that denies them the full complexity of their experience and renders them porous to adult need and desire. The necessary response to the crisis in the church is to find ways of making children more authentically and autonomously present in contemporary Christian contexts and of genuinely protecting them. Genuine protection here means protecting their autonomy rather than putting in place safeguards that only serve to locate children ever more completely under absolute adult authority and protection. The issue at stake, in other words, is children's rights in religious environments. (I have not read a single commentator on the Catholic crisis say that what is needed are mechanisms for giving children greater voice in the church.) Making children truly present—as opposed to present to Father Shanley's desires or to conservatives' repressive agenda—means recognizing first of all their separateness from adults (at the same time honoring the bonds of love, responsibility, and dependence that form between the generations). Clearly defined boundaries between children and adults are essential especially in religious contexts where not only the boundaries tend to be weak but also the absence of such boundaries between generations is often seen as morally and spiritually appropriate and good. Children are not extensions of their parents' religious worlds. Churches might begin a season of reflection on their own theological traditions and moral practices (the resources for this are finally becoming available in the emerging area of the study of children's religious history) to examine how theology and denominational practices deny children's lives and experience and what they have affirmed of children's lives. Christians might also reflect on the relationship between their theological and ecclesiastical traditions, on the one hand, and discourses and practices relating to children in the culture around them, on the other.

It may be possible to stop the endlessly spinning modern Christian dialectic of children's absence/presence by opening a space in Christian contexts for real children with lives not constrained by adult fantasies (of children's innate spirituality and holiness), grief (for a lost golden age of innocence), fear (of children), or desire (for children). This calls for a new season of honoring children in the fullness and complexity of their real lives in the circumstances of the present and in their autonomy.

Harvard Divinity School