Moral Injury, Spiritual Damage, and Abuse in Catholic Ecclesial Contexts - Carolina Orphanopoulos

Summary:

To re-conceptualize, from an interdisciplinary theopsych perspective, the spiritual damage/ moral injury caused by catholic clergy abuse, distinguishing it from damages caused by other types of abuse perpetrators. Based on the premise that catholic clergy abuse involves traumatic life ruptures that have specific features given the symbolic nature and religious representation that invests the perpetrators and their institution, this research is engaged with acknowledging victims’ autobiographical narratives as valid epistemological sources that contribute to comprehending the character of the specific spiritual/moral harms inflicted on them and thus advance in comprehending its adequate reparation.

• The specific research questions:

1.           What are the contributions of the scientific, interdisciplinary, and autobiographical human experience on clergy abuse, for the understanding of the specific damage it causes?

2.           What is distinctive about the damage that catholic clergy abuse inflicts on victims/survivors (in comparison to other types of relations in abuse perpetrators/victims)?

3.           How can we understand the psychological and spiritual manifestations of this damage?

Why the project is needed, and how it relates to the wider theme of the fellowship programme:

As the fellowship theme states, exploring “questions about the representation of God, emotional and intellectual understanding of the divine, and the relationship between God representations and outcomes such as” abuse and trauma is urgent in theological research on clergy abuse. A psychological understanding seems vital to truly develop how this trauma can change representations of the divine and relationships with God. This would also mean a better comprehension of how reparation must take place to become an integral healing experience. The valuable yet dispersed interdisciplinary efforts that exist on this subject have not yet been systematized. Undertaking research on a structured proposal from this perspective also provides a conceptual framework that opens new lines of research and interdisciplinary dialogue for future research.

The project activities:

1.           Critical and comparative analysis of the bibliography on clergy abuse to understand the use of categories such as spiritual damage and moral injury in them, reformulating the initial (when existent) psychological and theological definition of these, through an ad hoc adaptation of the method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR).

2.           Identify and understand the distinctive variables of abuse that appear in ten chosen case studies (autobiographies).

3.           Comparatively analyze the autobiographies for an understanding of the explicit or implicit (or lack of) presence of the categories of moral injury and spiritual damage in abuse. The analysis of these case studies will include a review of the bibliographic corpus that constitutes the necessary tools for the understanding of each narrative. Thus, the approach will be the autobiographical psychology literature; the lens, Betrayal Trauma Theory; and the subject, the autobiographies.