Beyond Betrayal: The Priest Sex Abuse Crisis, the Voice of the Faithful, and the Process of Collective Identity

In 2002, the national spotlight fell on Boston's archdiocese, where decades of rampant sexual misconduct from priests--and the church's systematic cover-ups--were exposed by reporters from the Boston Globe. The sordid and tragic stories of abuse and secrecy led many to leave the church outright and others to rekindle their faith and deny any suggestions of institutional wrongdoing. But a number of Catholics vowed to find a middle ground between these two extremes: keeping their faith while simultaneously working to change the church for the better.

Beyond Betrayal charts a nationwide identity shift through the story of one chapter of Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), an organization founded in the scandal's aftermath. VOTF had three goals: helping survivors of abuse; supporting priests who were either innocent or took risky public stands against the wrongdoers; and pursuing a broad set of structural changes in the church. Patricia Ewick and Marc W. Steinberg follow two years in the life of one of the longest-lived and most active chapters of VOTF, whose thwarted early efforts at ecclesiastical reform led them to realize that before they could change the Catholic Church, they had to change themselves. The shaping of their collective identity is at the heart of Beyond Betrayal, an ethnographic portrait of how one group reimagined their place within an institutional order and forged new ideas of faith in the wake of widespread distrust.

Author: Patricia Ewick, Marc W. Steinberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 08/21/2019
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
ISBN: 9780226644264


Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2020

About the Author
Patricia Ewick is professor of sociology at Clark University and coauthor of The Common Place of Law, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Marc W. Steinberg (1956-2019) was the Sydenham C. Parsons professor of sociology at Smith College and author of England's Great Transformation, also published by the University of Chicago Press.


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