Here you can find an explanation of how I researched and wrote the contents of this website. You can also read an overview on the interdisciplinary research into the clerical sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
All content for Chronicling Entanglement was written by Sebastian Wuepper, Ph.D.
This project is an outgrow of a nationwide network project run by Fordham University (Taking Responsibility ) in which scholars associated with Jesuit universities look into the role their institutions and their respective members played in the child sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
The purpose of this project is twofold. Firstly, the project traces the history of three Jesuit priests who abused minors and students at Loyola University Chicago. The three individuals in question each had a long history of sexual abuse and predation on minors, in some instances these histories had been established and known to Jesuit leadership and Loyola University Chicago administration before they arrived to serve here.
The second purpose, and the reason why more than three individuals appear in this project, is to showcase how wide-spread sexual abuse of minors and students by members of the Jesuit order has been, and how due to this pervasiveness, how many sexual abusers were over time sent to serve at Loyola University Chicago.
The initiators of this project do not wish to rouse general suspicions towards each and every individual serving for the Society of Jesus today. We do not wish to establish any sense of collective, automatic guilt or suspicion. We do however wish to show that these problems are very widespread and that they have gone without much if any redress for a very long time. By doing so, we hope that the victims of sexual abuse receive a degree of justice, and we further hope that by making public the pervasiveness of this problem, that other survivors who might so far not have come forward will find the strength necessary to do so.
Finally, this project is also us doing our part as members of the larger Loyola University Chicago community to reckon with the past of our institution, so that we can proudly say that Loyola has done its part in seeking reconciliation with the survivors of sexual abuse that happened within the confines of the university over the years. It is our belief, that through a documentary project like this, suspicion and collective guilt of the Society of Jesus and the Catholic Church in general will be diminished, rather than increased, since we have received substantial help from those institutions for whom the release of a project like this is generally unpleasant. By doing so, the institutions demonstrate that they have a vested interest in bringing the truth about these incidents to light, they demonstrate that they do not wish to further obscure what some individuals among their ranks have allowed to happen on their watch.
This project’s goal is not to shame and damage the reputation of any religious order, the church or the community of the faithful. Rather the project’s intended goal is for it to become an effort to allow for healing and reconciliation.
