Jim Christie (“When theology trumps psychology”, 15 February) is correct to draw attention to the way in which the historic use of exclusively theological categories to understand psychosexual pathologies contributed to the occlusion of the clerical sexual-abuse crisis, and to argue for the need for further integration of psychology and psychoanalysis in diagnosis and cure. But this is still only part of the story. As Marie Keenan has indicated in her Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: gender, power, and organizational culture (2011), the ills exposed by the sexual-abuse crisis are not only individual and psychosexual but also cultural, organisational, and even ecclesiological. Here, properly critical theological analysis still has a crucial and, as yet, lar
20 February 2014, The Tablet
Partners in understanding
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