Child Sexual Abuse by Members of the Catholic Church in Italy and France: A Literature Review of the Last Two Decades

ABSTRACT

This article aims to provide an overview of the most recent research on child sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church that occurred in Italy and France. The studies reported here have been selected as representative of major trends in the field. In particular, they illustrate the paths taken by current scholarship addressing child sexual abuse that has occurred in mono-confessional Catholic culture areas not yet affected by large-scale scandals. The assessment of the last two decades of literature shows that existing research attests the presence of regional patterns regarding the incidence of confirmed cases of abuse, the cover–up procedures, and the reactions of both ecclesiastical and civil institutions and society. However, this review also indicates that scholars have thus far neglected to problematize the local peculiarities of the phenomenon, and to relate them to the broader debate on regional variability in the articulation of modernization processes and religious vitality and power.

KEYWORDS:

• Catholicism
• clergy
• religion
• cultural issues
• methodological issues
• state of the art
• child sexual abuse
• institutional child abuse

Disclosure statement

The author has no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Ethical standards and informed consent

This research does not require IRB approval as it does not involve human participants. Data on living individuals used for this research were not collected through intervention or interaction with the individual, nor through identifiable private information.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster.

Notes on contributors

Giulia Marotta

Giulia Marotta, Ph.D., is a graduate from the University of Palermo, Giulia Marotta, Ph.D., has worked as post-doc at the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (École pratique des hautes études) and has been Visiting Scholar the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (Columbia University). She also held the position of Research Coordinator at the National Institute for Newman Studies (Duquesne University), specializing in European Catholicim and its intellectual, cultural, and social history during the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 2018, she is post-doc at the University of Münster and conducts a project on the conceptual history of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church in the 19th and 20th centuries.