What Is the Church? Defining Communal Commonplaces in the Pennsylvania State Statute of Limitations Debate

ABSTRACT

What exactly is the Church? Is it primarily an institution? Or is it the people in its pews? And depending on the answer, what obligations do the people who constitute it in the present have toward the past? This essay utilizes the Pennsylvania State Legislative debate over clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as a way to explore how communal commonplaces are activated in public argument and used to shift the dominant meanings of a community. Communal commonplaces act as a shorthand to bring audiences to a place of shared understanding while managing opposing lines of argument, images, and tropes. Understanding the Church as a communal commonplace illuminates how divergent meanings can be activated for wildly different and materially consequential purposes. Analyzing the Church helps us to understand how other communal commonplaces— the nation, for instance—manage opposing images of a community.

KEYWORDS:

• Catholic Church
• community
• metaphor
• tropes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ There is considerable debate over the terms used to refer to individuals who have experienced sexual violence. The term victim is often used in legal contexts, whereas survivor is common in antisexual violence advocacy circles (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network [RAINN]). Some individuals who have experienced sexual violence prefer one term over another (or neither), and that preference may change over time and in different contexts (Williamson and Serna). Throughout the essay, in an attempt to honor the terms individuals have chosen for themselves, I use whatever term appears in the text I am most recently quoting or analyzing. Otherwise, I follow RAINN’s practice of referring to individuals as victims when referring to their relationship to the criminal or civil legal system.

² While a partial Statute of Limitations reform bill was signed into Pennsylvania law in 2019, Rozzi’s look-back window was taken out of the bill and put forth as a constitutional amendment. Due to several significant setbacks, the question of the look-back window remains unresolved.

³ Both within legal and academic circles, the idea of institutions expressing corporate agency is a contested one. This idea is a part of an ongoing debate over whether groups can exhibit the capacities and actions associated with theories of individual agency, such as the capacity for thought, intention, and moral blameworthiness (Smiley). In both its legal and public use, it is oftentimes used to capture both the tendency for institutions to be the subject of moral reproach, and the idea that individuals both share and enable each other’s actions within specific group structures (Williams). My use of corporate agency within this essay is meant to capture the sentiment of the Rozzi coalition, and their insistence that the structures of the Church enabled the concerted actions of multiple individuals, and thus that the institution could be held legally and morally responsible.