UNM study cited in Washington Post article on clergy abuse

A University of New Mexico professor’s study tracking Catholic priests who abused and molested Native American children and teens was recently cited in a Washington Post article. Investigative reporters from the Post used the research data to find more abusers.

The research was conducted and the map was created by Kathleen Holscher, assistant professor of Religious Studies and American Studies and Endowed Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at UNM, and Jack Downey, professor of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. Holscher specializes in the history of Catholicism in the United States, focusing on church-state relations, settler colonialism, and clergy sexual abuse.

Holscher and Downey used a Jesuit list of priests accused of sexually abusing children to create an interactive digital map tracking their careers.

“They found 47 priests accused of abuse who were assigned to Catholic missions in American Indian communities,” the Post article notes, adding that “the Post investigation, which analyzed their records and other information, identified the boarding schools where those priests worked and found 75 additional abusers.”

Much of Holscher’s research over the past few years has focused on clerical sexual abuse—Catholic priests who sexually molested children and teenagers—and how that abuse occurred during Catholic missions to indigenous peoples in the 20th century.

“Desolate Country is an interactive digital map that visualizes the movements of Catholic priests ‘credibly accused’ of abuse throughout their careers,” Holscher explained. “It shows how clergy accused of abuse moved between different types of assignments, in different locations, and converged on missions serving Native people. The map does not show every priest accused of abuse in Native missions in the U.S., but rather focuses on priests who were members of the Society of Jesus — or the Jesuits — a Catholic religious order that operated a particularly large number of missions in the 20th century.”

Holscher said she has long been interested in the Catholic Church’s work with the federal government to run boarding schools for Indigenous people, as well as the role of Catholicism in U.S. settler colonialism more broadly.

“In 2018, after the grand jury report in Pennsylvania, there was a lot of new attention to Catholic clergy abuse in the country, both among scholars and in the media. My colleague Dr. Jack Downey and I were familiar with Catholic missions, so we knew that clergy sexual abuse was happening in missions at disproportionately higher rates than in places on the East Coast that were getting all the media attention. It was important for us to raise awareness of that and correct the narrative, so to speak,” Holscher said. The two continue to work together on the subject of clergy abuse and missions.

“These studies reveal a complex history. In some cases, Church leaders transferred or ‘kicked out’ priests they knew were troublesome to missions. In other cases, priests who had been long-time mission workers began abusing young men there, guided by the racist assumption that the abuse would never be reported.”

–Professor Kathleen Holscher

Of the priests whose abuse allegations came from Native American missions, many worked in boarding schools, particularly in the northwestern and western United States. Some of the worst institutions in this regard were on Native American lands in South Dakota, Montana, and Washington state, including places like the Colville Reservation, the Rosebud Reservation, and the Pine Ridge Reservation, Holscher noted. There were also boarding schools in the southwestern United States that were sites of abuse, including St. Michael’s on the Navajo Reservation and St. Catherine’s Indian School in Santa Fe. But priests also abused in missionary contexts outside of boarding schools, including small mission churches, schools, and hospitals in places like Alaska.

“The clusters of abuse that our map shows show a correlation—that priests accused of sexual abuse are associated with Native American missions—but they cannot by themselves demonstrate causality—that is, they cannot explain how or why the abuse occurred,” Holscher said. “Dr. Downey and I also conducted qualitative, archival-based research to explain the ‘how and why’ of abuse in missions. This research reveals a complex story. In some cases, Church leaders transferred or ‘kicked out’ priests they already knew were troublesome to missions. In other cases, priests who had been long-term mission workers began abusing young people there, guided by the racist assumption that the abuse would never be reported.”

Desolate Country is a map intended for both the general public and scientists.

“Most importantly, we hope that this research can increase public awareness of the history of Catholic boarding schools and other Catholic missions, and of clergy sexual abuse as a problem endemic to those missions,” Holscher said. “For the field of Catholic history, the map represents an important intervention by changing the way clergy sexual abuse is studied, moving away from the long-standing focus on individual ‘bad actor’ priests and toward space and place as key categories for understanding abuse.”

Holscher and Downey have received much positive feedback about their research. The map was initially covered by smaller media outlets, including Native News Online and Indian Country Today, before being picked up by the Washington Post. The two have also presented their research to numerous groups across the country, both public and academic.

“We were really happy that The Washington Post was able to use its resources to help find perpetrators of abuse outside the scope of our own work. We were especially happy to see that the reporters combined this approach, which they told us was modeled directly on our work, with interviews and other forms of survivor-centered reporting,” Holscher said.

She added that it was worth noting that the Washington Post team ultimately used criteria for locating abuse that were different from their own: “While we focused only on Jesuits in the Western Province of the Society of Jesus, they looked for priests accused of abuse both inside and outside the Jesuits. While our numbers reflected only priests accused of abuse in Native American missions, their numbers—as far as we could tell—reflected all priests accused of abuse who spent time working in Native American missions, regardless of whether the accusations against them came directly from the missions in question. Our map also included other types of missions beyond boarding schools—mission churches and day schools, for example—whereas their reports focused solely on boarding schools.”

Most of the priests, as well as the brothers and nuns accused of abuse, are now dead. For those still alive, the statute of limitations on criminal charges has expired. The best legal remedies for survivors have been civil lawsuits and bankruptcy settlements, which have had varying degrees of success, Holscher said.

“But beyond holding individual priests accountable, the Catholic Church and its various institutional components still have an opportunity to reckon with this history and repair the damage. Just this month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a document that included an ‘apology’ for the church’s past failures in mission to indigenous peoples. Yet the document made no mention of clergy sexual abuse. There is still much work to be done,” she continued.

Holscher believes that mapping has the potential to continue to teach us important things, both about clergy sexual abuse and the history of the Catholic Church on Indigenous lands. She and Downey are currently working on an expansion plan for Desolate Country and hope to release a new version in the next few years.

“We hope that both Catholic leaders and lay Catholics in this country will understand that the Native American missions and the violence that occurred during them are central, not peripheral, parts of the history of American Catholicism, and that the church in the United States has an obligation to commit to telling the truth about those missions,” Holscher said.

The Post article also noted that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a UNM graduate and the first Native American Cabinet secretary whose relatives were sent to boarding schools, has investigated the history of schools run or supported by the U.S. Department of the Interior. The 2022 report blamed the U.S. government for the boarding school system.