The volume "From Cases to Scandals: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church" contributes to the sociology of religion by examining how individual cases of clerical sexual abuse escalate (or not) into scandals that challenge religious authority and reshape institutional life. It explores how the strategies of public mobilisation and media responses encourage collective reflection and action to ensure accountability and societal change. Through case studies from Argentina, Canada, Croatia, Czechia, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and the U.S., this volume explores Church responses, believers' reactions, and the shifting dynamics of trust and legitimacy. It highlights how these developments affect religious affiliation, moral credibility, and the public role of the Church, offering new perspectives on the evolving relationship between religion, society, and scandal in contemporary contexts.
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Gewebe-Einband
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Höhe: 235 mm
Breite: 155 mm
ISBN-13
978-90-04-74668-8 (9789004746688)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Celine Beraud is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris) and a member of CeSor (Centre d'etudes en sciences sociales des religions). She has published Une religion parmi d'autres. Le catholicisme en prison et a l'hopital (PUF 2025), Le catholicisme francais a l'epreuve des scandales sexuels (Seuil 2021), and La bataille du genre. Du mariage pour tous a la PMA (Fayard 2021).
Giuseppe Giordan, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology at the University of Padova. He coordinates the International Joint PhD in Religion, Culture and Public Life. He has recently co-authored A Sociology of Religious Freedom (with O. Breskaya and J. T. Richardson, Oxford University Press 2024) and co-edited the volume Religious Freedom: Social-Scientific Approaches (with O. Breskaya and R. Finke, Brill 2021).
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
From Cases to Scandals: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church. An Introduction
Céline Béraud and Giuseppe Giordan
1 Sexual Violence in the Catholic Church in France: Contribution to the Sociology of a Scandal
Philippe Portier
2 From 'Clergy Sexual Abuse' to a More Comprehensive Concept of Abuse in the Catholic Church: Major Cultural and Social Shifts in the USA
Massimo Faggioli
3 Clerical Child Sexual Abuse Cases in Catholicism: Centering the Role of the Vatican
Brian Conway
4 Sexual Abuse in the Dutch Roman Catholic Church
Stefan Gärtner
5 The Sauvé Report: What's Next? Anatomy of the French Catholic Sexual Abuse Scandal
Céline Béraud
6 Missing Incidents and Masking Scandals: How Swiss Cheese Organization and Neutralization Techniques Help Religious Orders Blunt the Effects of Clergy Sexual Abuse
Rebecca K. Murray, Heather Fryer and Julia Feder
7 "It Is the Abuses That Made Me Click": Formal Disaffiliation as Mobilization against the Catholic Church
Julia Martínez-Ariño
8 From Cases to Scandals? Media Representations of Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church in Italy
Stefano Sbalchiero, Giuseppe Giordan and Piermarco Aroldi
9 An Aborted Scandal? Denunciatory Discourse and Media Marginalization of Sexually Abused Nuns in France
Clémence Douteau
10 A (Non)Disruptive Scandal? The Fragmented Societalization of the Problem of Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church in Italy
Marco Guglielmi
11 Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church in Croatia: Cases but Not (Yet?) Scandals
Nikolina Hazdovac Bajic, Sinisa Zrinscak and Dinka Marinovic Jerolimov
12 Sacred Eroticism within the Catholic Church: the Philippe Family, Jean Vanier, and Their Secret Society
Massimo Introvigne
13 The Catholic Church and the Scandal of Indigenous Unmarked Graves: a Catalyst of Social, Political and Historical Tensions towards Catholicism in Canada
E.-Martin Meunier and Sabrina Di Matteo
14 Clerical Offenders as Family Friends: a Pilot Study of Case-to-Scandal Dynamics in Czechia Using Open-Source Data
Michal Opatrný
15 Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church in Poland: the Role of Media and Cinema
Magdalena Ratajczak
Index
