“You Better Tell the Truth”: Problem Priests, Archival Denials, and Black Catholic History

Scholars and journalists have deepened our sense of the Catholic clerical sexual abuse crisis in recent years by illuminating how Native and Black communities have been particularly vulnerable to abuse. This paper builds on this emergent scholarship by examining “problem priests” and sexual abuse in Black Catholic parishes in Chicago in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it asks scholars to consider the politics of archival access, the relationships between scholars and their communities of accountability, and the art of crafting historical narrative, and how all of these factors can conspire to prevent us from telling the truth regarding the ways anti-Black racism and clerical abuse have been constitutive of twentieth-century U.S. Catholicism. In this, the paper is an act of critical self-reflection, wherein the author considers how choices early in their career governed the narratives they constructed of Black Catholic history.