What makes listening ecclesial? Listening to those directly affected by the clerical child abuse crisis
What makes listening ecclesial? For the past three years I have been part of a research team in the Centre for Catholic Studies (CCS) at Durham University, engaged in a project called Boundary Breaking. Boundary Breaking - Durham University We were using listening practices to explore the aspects of Catholic culture and systems which are implicated in the clerical child abuse crisis in the Church. Our focus was on the experience of the Catholic community in England and Wales, a specific local context.
We practised what we termed a ‘whole church’ approach. Whilst victims and survivors voices were primary and crucial, we also listened to many others who were directly affected: parish members where a priest had been imprisoned; priests who had known or worked with abusing colleagues; bishops and leaders of religious communities charged with handling cases and wider response; office-holders responsible for safeguarding. In total, there were 82 interviews and four focus groups. A major report from the research was published in April 2024, titled The Cross of the Moment. It can be downloaded from the project website linked above.
In many ways, our listening was governed by academic research principles and ethics. Durham University and the CCS expect the highest possible standards. This meant taking great care in our approach to participants, respecting their agency and consent, and checking on their well-being, especially given the sensitive areas we were investigating. We consulted survivor advocacy groups and other expertise to inform our work. In particular we were influenced by the Charter for Survivor Engagement and the Survivor Involvement Ladder produced by Survivors’ Voices.[1]
But that was not the whole story. We were also ourselves members of the Catholic community, each bringing a lifetime experience of faith and of different contexts and commitments within the faith community. We each had a standpoint; we were not neutral. Academic literature about practical theology recognises this reality as an important aspect of research. Claire E. Wolfteich sets out some basic principles which include that it deals with ‘two areas of meaning: one inherent to the practice or expression being examined, and one invoked by the researcher’, and the methodology is ‘determined by the way these two are made to interact’.[2] John Swinton and Harriet Mowat argue that ‘the researcher becomes the primary tool that is used to access the meanings of the situation being explored’ and so must be aware of the impact of her own history.[3]
This awareness meant it was crucial to take a reflexive approach; in other words, to constantly check ourselves and each other to see what bias and which interests were operating in how we listened and interpreted what we heard. The collaborative nature of our project, with three of us doing the primary listening work, was immensely helpful. So too was another level of our listening, in which we met regularly for theological reflection with other colleagues. We took texts from our interviews as well as other writings and brought these into conversation and scrutiny.
Within this careful structure of principles and practices, there are other dimensions which are not captured in the formal structure of research but which are relevant in relation to the question this blog ponders. I can only speak for myself here, suggesting that our work is an ecclesial listening practice as well as a disciplined piece of academic work in theology.
When I reflect on the experience of listening within the research, I notice the following.
First, that such listening is ‘holy ground’. It is a privilege. The interview space, when carefully prepared, allows people to speak with soul-searching honesty. The protection of anonymity creates safety and enables people to express what some would otherwise find it hard to say in public. Christian Scharen and Eileen Campbell-Reid describe interview practice as ‘a work of sacred attention’, in which the process of listening is ‘part of God’s creative process in which we participate’.[4] We understood throughout that there was theology in all we heard, an embodied and relational theology. With most of our participants there was a shared language of faith and a shared landscape of ecclesial belonging, even if some had rejected or moved away from the Church as a result of their experience of abuse. Some participants did not express any Christian faith but their instincts also sought and expressed goodness and a sense of what love and justice ask of us.
Secondly, the academic method enables other levels of listening. All our interviews and focus groups were transcribed. We then developed a list of some 200 themes and analysed each transcript using these, tagging each line to the codes illuminated. Next we clustered and analysed the coded excerpts and did theological reflection on key themes emerging. This is standard academic practice; and it meant that the listening continued as we worked on the texts. The voices remain alive even when we are reading and re-reading extracts on specific themes from all the interviews and searching for their meaning.
This was the third time I had done this kind of listening and analysis followed by theological writing within research projects. Each time, the voices and faces remain in me, imprinted in my memory and consciousness, all the more deeply because I have worked intensively on the texts as well as experiencing the interviews. Each time I speak about the research, and in many other aspects of my involvement in the Church (and indeed in my life and relationships), those voices are part of my horizon. I carry now the awareness of their stories, their experience. I am changed by it. And I receive all this as a gift. It is part of what it means to be a member of the ecclesial body.
It is not just the voices however. There is another dimension in which the experience of research overflows the academic concept. Participation in research initiates a dialogue which for some becomes a relationship. Some survivors have remained in contact with us; and we have remained in contact with them, inviting them to the report launch, for example, or asking for feedback on what we have written. But there is also a genuine interest in and care for their concerns and experience. This leads to a significant dilemma; in formal terms, the research is finished. But the work and relationships it inaugurates has barely begun.
Listening leads to this dilemma when it is also ecclesial in motivation and standpoint. We cannot just listen and then return to the rest of our lives as if nothing has happened. This applies even more when the focus is as significant as ours was in this project. I find myself left with a restlessness and a sense of something that matters a great deal.
Two other perspectives also shaped my own sense of this research as ecclesial listening. The first was a conviction that the Church needed to listen to many of the voices which spoke in our research. Most of all, the whole Church – not just its ordained members but including them - needs to listen to the victims and survivors of clerical abuse and understand both the impact of the abuse and the impact of being treated unjustly and without compassion when they have sought acknowledgement and redress. This ‘secondary abuse’ still continues and still harms people.
For some the impact is worse than the original abuse, because, as one survivor explained, it is ‘in your face all the time’. In this case, listening is not just an opportunity for pastoral growth and personal conversion; it is a moral and theological necessity, an imperative. We must listen to these voices because the health and well-being of the whole ecclesial body depends on it. It may be helpful that the listening was done independently of the structures of the Church, albeit in collaboration with many of its institutions. It may also help that it was done with academic structures and standards.
The second is closely related. Sometimes listening is an act of justice. One of the survivors said
The Church, it needs to stand kind of face to face with survivors, as Church…to put the survivors first, not the Church. And not their own feelings because they can’t cope with it. As a survivor, you never had your permission asked when you were abused…We’re told how we’re going to do this, or we’re told we won’t be capable of doing it and we’d just like to be asked for once. And then we can say no, if we want to. So just please ask …Give the voice back that was taken.
Listening can be part of giving a voice back to those from whom it was taken away.
This aspect of justice is linked to what we term restorative work. It relates to aspects of Catholic social teaching (commutative justice) and is sometimes also termed ‘transitional justice’. We cannot undo the harm of abuse. But we can explore ways to acknowledge and take responsibility for ecclesial failings. In relation to abuse, listening practices in carefully planned safe spaces are potentially restorative; they do not deal with the abuser; but they may help repair other parts of the damage done. They do not replace the need for practical support and legally arranged redress. But they can reach for a properly ecclesial truthfulness and growth.
I found helpful here the concept of testimonial injustice, which Mary Carlson explores in an article titled ‘Can the Church be a virtuous hearer of women?’. She argues that the Church is disabled by its inability to listen to women, that as a body we have gaps in our collective knowledge and a reduced ability to understand some ideas, because we do not have spaces at every level in which women’s insights are heard.[5] If this is true for women (and it may be changing through the practice of synodality and because women are gradually – but not yet sufficiently – breaking the ecclesial glass ceiling), it is even more true for the voices of victims and survivors of abuse. It is also true for parish communities that have borne the grief and sadness and perplexity of discovering that a priest who served them has been imprisoned for abuse.
For me personally, the ecclesial dimensions of our listening grew in significance as the research progressed. The challenge as the research concluded was to find a way to offer something truthful and constructive to the Catholic community which we had studied. There is a vast amount of academic literature about the abuse crisis and multiple factual reports detailing all that has gone wrong. There is not very much that is readable by a parish group (admittedly, slowly) or by pastoral leaders including priests and bishops, that helps them to explore both the meaning of what has happened and the paths we can take to heal and, as far as possible, repair or restore what has been lost. So the research report sets out to enable conversations about the meaning and imagine how we can together find that path.
Listening as an ecclesial practice has this deep orientation, I suggest, towards truthfulness and grace, toward the search for greater faithfulness so that we are as healthy and flourishing as we can be. It asks of us that we don’t turn away from failure and harm but rather listen and acknowledge and learn.
The report from the Boundary Breaking project, titled The Cross of the Moment, is available here, together with a reading guide proposing the use of conversation in the Spirit to engage with the voices it follows. Boundary Breaking - Durham University
Dr Pat Jones is a research associate in the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University.
[1] Turning Pain into Power: A Charter for Organisations Engaging Abuse Survivors in Projects, Research & Service Development Survivors Voices
[2] Wolfteich, Claire E. ed. Invitation to Practical Theology: Catholic Voices and Vision (New York: Paulist Press, 2014) (p. 324).
[3] John Swinton and Harriet Mowat Practical Theology and Qualitative Research (London: SCM Press, 2006) (p. 60).
[4] Christian Scharen and Eileen Campbell-Reid: ‘Ethnography on Holy Ground: How Qualitative Interviewing Is Practical Theological Work’, International Journal of Practical Theology, 17 (2013), 232–59
[5] ‘Can the Church be a Virtuous Hearer of Women?’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 32 no.1 (2016) 21-36.