Research by a University of New Mexico professor that traced Catholic priests who abused and molested Native American children and teenagers was recently cited in an article in the Washington Post. Investigative reporters at the Post used the research data to find additional abusers.
The research was conducted, and the map compiled, by Kathleen Holscher, associate 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 Rochester University. Holscher specializes in research in the field of U.S. Catholic history, focusing on church-state relations, settler colonialism, and clerical sexual abuse.
Holscher and Downey used a list compiled by the Jesuits of priests who had been accused of sexually assaulting children to make an interactive digital map that tracks their careers.
"They found 47 priests accused of abuse who had been assigned to Catholic missions in Native American communities," the Post article noted, adding that "The Post's investigation, which reviewed their data and other records, identified the boarding schools where those priests worked and found 75 additional abusers."
Much of Holscher's research over the last several years has been on Catholic clerical sexual abuse − Catholic priests who sexually abused children and teenagers − and how that abuse happened amid Catholic missions to Native peoples during the 20th century.
"Desolate Country is an interactive digital map that visualizes the movements of Catholic priests "credibly accused" of abuse over the course of their careers," Holscher explained. "It demonstrates how clergy accused of abuse moved between different types of assignments, in different places, and clustered at Native serving missions. The map does not show every priest accused of abuse at a Native mission in the U.S., rather it focuses on priests who were members of the Society of Jesus − or the Jesuits − a Catholic religious order that ran an especially large number of missions during the 20th century."
Holscher said she has long been interested in how the Catholic Church collaborated with the federal government when it came to running boarding schools for Native people, and the role of Catholicism in U.S. settler colonialism more generally.
"In 2018, in the wake of a Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, there was a great deal of new attention about Catholic clerical abuse nationally, both among scholars and in the media. My colleague Dr. Jack Downey and I were familiar with Catholic missions, and so we knew that clerical sexual abuse happened at missions at disproportionately higher rates than in places on the East Coast that were getting all the media attention. It was important to us to raise awareness of this, and correct the narrative, so to speak," Holscher said. The two continue to collaborate on the subject of clerical abuse and missions.
"This research reveals a complex story. In some cases, Church leaders transferred or 'dumped' priests they already knew were trouble into missions. In other cases, priests who were longtime workers at missions began to abuse young people there, under racially biased assumption that the abuse would never be reported."
– Professor Kathleen Holscher
Of priests whose accusations of abuse come from Native missions, many worked at boarding schools, especially in the Northwestern and Western U.S. Some of the worst institutions, in this regard, were on Native 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 U.S. Southwest 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 mission contexts beyond boarding schools, including small mission churches, schools, and hospitals in places like Alaska.
"The clusters of abuse that our map shows demonstrate correlation – that priests accused of sexual abuse correlate with Native missions − but they cannot on their own demonstrate causation – i.e. they cannot explain how and why that abuse occurred," Holscher said. "Dr. Downey and I have also been conducting qualitative, archivally-based research, to flush out the 'hows and whys' of mission abuse. This research reveals a complex story. In some cases, Church leaders transferred or 'dumped' priests they already knew were trouble into missions. In other cases, priests who were longtime workers at missions began to abuse young people there, under racially biased assumption that the abuse would never be reported."
Desolate Country is a map built for both public and scholarly audiences.
"Most importantly, we hope this research can raise public awareness of the history of Catholic boarding schools, and other Catholic missions, and of Catholic clerical sexual abuse as a problem that was endemic to those missions," Holscher said. "Within the field of Catholic history, the map makes an important intervention by shifting the way in which clerical sexual abuse is studied, away from a longstanding focus on individual 'bad actor' priests, and toward a focus on space and place as key categories for understanding abuse."
Holscher and Downey have had a lot of positive feedback on their research. Initially the map was 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 many groups across the country, both public and scholarly.
"We are really happy the Washington Post was able to use its resources to locate abusers beyond the scope of our own work. We were especially happy to see the reporters combine this approach, which they informed us was modeled directly on our work, with interviews and other forms of survivor-centered reporting," Holscher said.
She added that it is worth noting that the Washington Post team ended up using criteria for locating abusers that was different than their own: "While we focused only on Jesuits from 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 at Native missions, their numbers − as best we can tell − reflected all priests accused of abuse who spent time working at Native missions, whether or not 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 − while their reporting focused exclusively on boarding schools."
The majority of priests, as well as religious brothers and sisters, accused of abuse are now dead. For those who are still living, criminal statutes of limitations have expired. The best legal recourses for survivors have been civil lawsuits and bankruptcy settlements, and these have had varying levels of success, Holscher said.
"But aside from bringing individual priests 'to justice,' the Catholic Church and its different institutional components still have opportunity to reckon with this history and make amends. Just this month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops published a document that included an 'apology' for the Church's past failures in missionizing to Native people. But the document failed to mention clerical sexual abuse. There is still a lot of work to be done," she continued.
Holscher believes that mapping has potential to continue to teach us important things, both about clerical sexual abuse and about the Catholic Church's history on Native lands. She and Downey are currently working on a plan to expand Desolate Country and hope to release a new version in the next couple of years.
"We hope that both Catholic leaders and Catholic laity in this country will understand that Native missions, and the violence that happened within them, are central rather than peripheral parts of American Catholic history, and that the U.S. Church has a responsibility to commit to truth-telling about those missions," Holscher said.
The Post article also noted that Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, UNM graduate and the first Native American Cabinet secretary, whose own relatives were sent to boarding schools, has examined the history of the schools operated or supported by the U.S. Interior Department. A 2022 report blamed the U.S. government for the boarding school system.
