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Abstract
This dissertation is a history of the lay Catholic clergy sexual abuse survivor movement, analyzed through the lens of three survivor advocacy groups: Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup (LINKUP), the Survivor’s Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), and the Coalition of Concerned Catholics (CCC). More than any other population, the community of survivors comprised by the overlapping membership of these three lay organizations has shaped the discursive framework through which the U.S. news media have understood, articulated, and debated the pain of clergy sexual abuse.
Drawing on four years of archival and ethnographic research, I argue that the Chicago survivor movement descended from the moral and ecclesiological visions of two preceding generations of Chicago Catholic activists, particularly in survivors’ commitment to women’s liturgical participation and the theology of personalism (as descended through the Catholic Worker movement). This research thus demonstrates that American survivors were not, as prior studies have suggested, coopted into a liberal reform agenda by the so-called “Catholic Left.” Rather, in both substance and form the ecclesiological and legal changes sought by LINKUP, SNAP, and CCC stem from the personal connections between the three women who founded the Chicago survivor movement, Jeanne Miller, Barbara Blaine, and Marilyn Steffel, and their mentors, particularly Nina Polcyn and Patricia Crowley.
By harnessing the pain and suffering of betrayal, the Chicago survivor movement embodies an alternative vision of Catholic social justice. I introduce the term “politics of survivorhood” to describe this vision of the disenfranchised. The key politics of survivorhood explored herein are: (i) the recovery of voice as a means to survive abuse; (ii) the privileging of local communal conscience and democratic processes; (iii) the suspicion of patriarchal communities, prayers, and texts; (iv) a lived anthropology of communal suffering; (v) an approach to the “whole person” that integrates medical and religious approaches to heal body and soul; (vi) a set of judicial and legislative reforms that imagines global child abuse activism through a distinctly American Catholic framework; and (vii) a critique of clerical culture in favor of the post-Vatican II ecclesiological definition of church as “the People of God.”





