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Earls, Averill Erin

History

MA

In the 1980s and 1990s, waves of Catholic sexual abuse scandals erupted in Ireland, Canada, United States, and elsewhere in the world. For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church seemed untouchable, above the reproach of the media and the state, infallible. The end of the twentieth-century revealed a Church in decline, embodied in the stigmatization of the 'pedophile priest.' This thesis explores the development of the 'pedophile priest, ' what it means to the understanding of priests, and the role that it plays inthe construction of fear around 'pedophilia' as a sexological classification. Additionally, this thesis examines the decline of the Church through the secularization of Western nations in the twentieth-century, ultimately identifying the clerical sexual abuse scandals as a product of, rather than the cause of, the decline of the Catholic Church. Both of these issues are discussed through case studies of Ireland and Newfoundland, two areas similar in geography, isolation, and reliance on Catholicism for much of their respective histories.