Author: Massimo Faggioli, School of Religion, Theology, and Peace Studies, Trinity College Dublin - Wikipedia

Abstract: » This essay reviews four important recent books in the field of the history of the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church: Vincenzo Lavenia e Franco Benigno, "Peccato o crimine. La chiesa di fronte alla pedofilia" (2021); Lorenzo Benadusi and Vincenzo Lagioia (eds.), "In segreto. Crimini sessuali e clero tra età moderna e contemporanea" (2022); Thomas Großbölting, "Die schuldigen Hirten. Geschichte des sexuellen Missbrauchs in der katholischen Kirche" (2022); Agnès Desmazières, "Sans loi ni foi. Prêtres et violences sexuelles au coeur du système catholique" (2024). These books signal the opening of the historiographical research on abuse in the Catholic Church in a long period perspective, with a more attentive focus on the international dimensions of the scandal and inter-disciplinary methodology. Historians now see in the abuse crisis a major turning point in Church history. This requires a new phase of research on the abuse crisis through collaborative endeavors aimed at interdisciplinary, historically contextualized accounts of the global history of the abuse of children and vulnerable adults in the Catholic Church in a comparative perspective with other institutions and organizations: from the focus on the «Catholic system», to an analysis of that «Catholic system» but in the context of a larger ecosystem that enabled abuse.« (Source: Contemporanea)

Wikipedia: Catholic Church: Catholic Church sexual abuse cases | Sex and the law: Child sexual abuse