In 2004, the Archdiocese of Boston sold the archbishop’s mansion and surrounding 43 acres to Boston College for $99.4 million. In 2006, Boston College paid an additional $8 million for the archdiocese’s adjoining tribunal buildings, and completed the purchase of the final 18 acres of the property for $65 million in 2008. Bringing the grand total transferred from Boston College, a Jesuit Catholic university, to its local archdiocese to $168 million.
During the same period, the archdiocese paid over $95 million in settlements to 627 victims of Clergy-Perpetrated Sexual Abuse (CPSA), not including its own legal fees and other costs related to these crimes.
On the purchased property, the McMullen Art Museum now occupies the palatial estate last inhabited by the infamous Cardinal Law, and the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry is housed in a building to its rear.(1) Grounded in the work of sociologist Avery Gordon and using the method of autoethnography, I trace my own theological work in these physical spaces as an experience of paradoxical haunting – at once called to memory by knowledge of the victims, and simultaneously tempted into forgetting by the good work now done within these walls.
This explicit case of religious haunting is intertwined with its physical constructs, now used for the arts and theological leadership, that create an intentional sense of amnesia. Such re-use of space is an explicit strategy of encouraged forgetting that negates processes for justice and facilitates the intergenerational impacts of abuse.(2) Or, more insidiously, the past of these spaces simply “never comes up,” creating a normalization of spaces once explicitly inhabited by and used for evil.
I recognize, with Miroslav Volf, that for a victim, a type of forgetting can be palpably desired and even healthy, especially within an eschatological vision of Christian redemption.(3) For perpetrators and all associated witnesses, however, a memory for justice is the only ethical, and in this case Christian, response.(4) Through my own embeddedness, I take on a distinctly material reflection on the ephemeral nature of haunting. I conclude that memory is essential as an act of resistance to injustice, specifically one that should be materially reflected in now repurposed physical structures. I conclude with how such material memory resists a theology of forgetting of CPSA that is pervasive in the US Catholic hierarchy steeped in clericalism.(5,6)
- The CSTM relocated to the now-called Simboli Hall when it was created as a merger of two pre-existing Jesuit theological programs in 2008. Cardinal Bernard Law was forced to resign in 2002 after it became clear he consistently relocated serial rapist John Geoghan around the archdiocese, despite Law’s knowledge of Geoghan’s abuse of over 130 young boys. The Vatican moved Law to Italy, where he died in 2017 at the age of 86, never having faced legal accountability for his role in facilitating abuse. Geoghan was strangled and stomped to death in prison by his cellmate, who was also a child sexual abuse survivor, in 2003.
- Stephanie Edwards and Kimberly Humphrey, “A Haunted Church: Ecclesial Sex Abuse and Intergenerational Trauma,” Journal of Moral Theology 9, no.1, Special Thematic Issue (January 2020): 52-74.
- Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006).
- Judith Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (New York: Basic Books, 2024) and Flora Keshgegian, Redeeming Memories: A Theology of Healing and Transformation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000).
- John Sheveland, editor, Theology in a Post-Traumatic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2023).
- Julie Hanlon Rubio and Paul Schutz, “Beyond ‘bad apples’: Understanding Clergy Perpetrated Sexual Abuse as a Structural Problem & Cultivating Strategies for Change,” Santa Clara University (2022): https://www.scu.edu/ic/programs/bannan-forum/media--publications/beyond-bad-apples-/.
In the early 2000s, Boston College, a Jesuit Catholic university, paid $168 million to the Boston Archdiocese in land purchases. During the same period, the archdiocese paid over $95 million in settlements to 627 victims of Clergy-Perpetrated Sexual Abuse. On the purchased property, the McMullen Art Museum now occupies the estate last inhabited by the infamous Cardinal Law, and the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry is housed in a building to its rear. Grounded in the work of Avery Gordon and using the method of autoethnography, I trace my own theological work in these spaces as an experience of paradoxical haunting – at once called to memory by knowledge of the victims, and tempted into forgetting by the good work now done within these walls. Such re-use of space is an explicit strategy of encouraged forgetting that negates processes for justice and facilitates the intergenerational impacts of abuse.