Islands, Enclaves, and the Offshoring of Clerical Sexual Abuse

Abstract

The essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical.

—Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts (2004)

“It were better they had not been born,” wrote Father Gerald Fitzgerald to the Archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico (Fitzgerald 1957). Cantankerous on a good day, this hardnosed Roman Catholic priest was furious, and for good reason. A decade earlier, Fitzgerald had founded a religious order known as the Servants of the Paraclete to assist clerics struggling with alcohol abuse and crises of faith, but his renewal center, which he built atop two thousand rambling acres of New Mexico grassland, soon began receiving priests who had been accused of sexually abusing minors. As the latter began to outnumber the former and his center became “crowded beyond the doors” (Fitzgerald 1948), Fitzgerald worried about what he should do with the most incorrigible of these men: with those unable to stop “sin[ning] repeatedly with little children” (Fitzgerald 1948). He prayed for the impossible, for God to erase their very existence, but Fitzgerald also pursued what he considered to be the most logical solution to the problem of the so-called “problem priest” (Fitzgerald 1963). “It is for this class of rattlesnake,” Fitzgerald wrote to the archbishop, “[that] I have always wished an island retreat” (Fitzgerald 1957).

Between 1952 and 1968, the Servants of the Paraclete sought, bought, and finally sold a small island in the Caribbean for Roman Catholic priests incapable of managing, in Fitzgerald’s words, “abnormalities of sex” (Fitzgerald 1948). They considered one near Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands; another was a short boat ride away from Barbados, but the one that they ended up buying sat just off the coast of Carriacou. The intention of this island was unambiguous: to set these sinners out to sea. “These men are devils,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and the wrath of God is upon them” (Fitzgerald 1957). But the pursuit and eventual purchase of the island ultimately—and inadvertently—set the conditions for Fitzgerald’s successor, a broad-shouldered priest named Father Joseph McNamara, to develop a network of Church-run sex-therapy centers located throughout the United States as well as in England, Italy, Mexico, Scotland, the Philippines, France, Vietnam, and multiple sites in Africa and Latin America.

This article, in response, details the Servants of the Paraclete’s mid-twentieth-century efforts at offshoring sexually abusive priests in and eventually beyond the Caribbean, exploring how and to what effect the US Church sought to secure transnational lines of flight for some of its most prolific abusers. It is a critical account of arbitrage that upsets an increasingly familiar history of clerical sexual abuse. Across the humanities and the social sciences, from a range of theoretical and methodological commitments, a growing number of scholars document how US bishops transferred sexually abusive priests from one parish to another.¹ Although this focus on interparish clerical transfers has often proven effective at demonstrating, to both juries and the general public, some of the Church’s more pernicious maneuvers, this research has nonetheless been rather parochial in its scope—and not just in an ecclesiastical sense.² Nearly absent from the conversation is any account of how US priests moved (or were moved) across international borders to evade suspicion and (at times) prosecution. Fitzgerald’s island, for one, sought autonomy, secrecy, and anonymity, with the Servants of the Paraclete’s broader practice of offshoring sexually abusive priests evidencing that a mid-twentieth-century interest in operating beyond the reach of national regulators was not just an economic but also an ecclesiastical project: it was not confined to free-market, neoliberal corporations, as today’s literature assumes (Ogle 2017), but also involved such nonliberal, global corporate institutions as the Roman Catholic Church.³ This insight pushes scholars of clerical sexual abuse to engage the interstitial spaces that Church leaders have long sought for its perpetrators while at the same time flagging for students of capitalism that practices of offshoring not only align with the economic rationality of corporations but also with the moral imagination of the Church.

ISLANDS

Fitzgerald founded the Servants of the Paraclete in 1947 with the best of intentions, taking it upon himself to fill what he considered to be an ecclesiastical void. The Roman Catholic Church at the time made no provisions for priests who proved themselves unable to serve in their role. Instead, those who lost their way, be it from alcoholism or a lack of faith, ran the risk of not only falling out of favor with the Church but also failing to achieve eternal salvation. This affront to clerical dignity upset Fitzgerald so much that he petitioned bishops to support what he would later describe as “the M.A.S.H. unit of the Roman Catholic Church” (quoted in Burritt 1995). With the backing of the Archbishop of Santa Fe and some funds from Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, Fitzgerald purchased an expansive plot of land in New Mexico, upon which sat the ruins of a Franciscan monastery and an abandoned hotel. There, Fitzgerald ran guest-priests, as he called them, through a veritable gauntlet of spiritual exercises: morning prayers and meditations; the rosary and benedictions; spiritual readings and holy hours on top of regular church services. This pursuit of piety would quietly come to be known among clerics throughout the United States as “the program.”

The program enjoyed immediate and unanticipated levels of success. By 1950, priests from thirty-five dioceses and nine religious orders had filled Fitzgerald’s center well past capacity (Doyle 2020, 2). Within this rather motley crew of clerics, Fitzgerald quickly spotted what he considered to be two classes of priests. The first was clearly capable of redemption. Some of them even seemed to benefit from the existential struggles of sin: “Surely St Peter was [a] better confessor by reason of his fall,” Fitzgerald once wrote, “and St Augustine by reason of his former life” (Fitzgerald 1962). But Fitzgerald had far less hope in a second class of priests: a veritable rogues’ gallery whom he described with a wandering constellation of moral judgements: “aberrations,” “defections,” and “diseases” (Fitzgerald 1948). Given that the defining characteristic of these priests was a proclivity for “sins with the young” (Fitzgerald 1963), Fitzgerald knew that their presence at his center placed local children in danger, and this seemed to give him pause from time to time. “As there are many little children in this Canyon, where I am the shepherd of souls,” Fitzgerald once wrote to a colleague about a particularly aggressive priest, “I could not in conscience consider receiving him here” (Fitzgerald 1960a). Yet, Fitzgerald often seemed far more concerned for the well-being of the Roman Catholic Church than the members of his immediate community. As early as 1952, nearly a half-century before the Vatican would formally acknowledge the problem of clerical sexual abuse, Fitzgerald wrote to a bishop in Nevada to warn his colleague that allowing these men to “wander from diocese to diocese [would] contribute to scandal or at least to the approximate danger of scandal” (quoted in Doyle 2011, 1). Fitzgerald thus insisted that this second class of priests should be removed from society—since he feared that “this extreme type [would] never be converted” (Fitzgerald 1960a).

The practical logistics of this exile evolved over the years. His first proposal, which proved to be terribly naive, was that the remote location of his center in New Mexico would suffice.⁴ Part of the place’s charm, after all, was what Fitzgerald saw as its rugged isolation. Yet guest-priests, as part of the program, would often hear confessions and celebrate mass at area churches and on nearby Indian reservations (Holscher 2018). Even this limited amount of pastoral contact was enough for some to sow sexually abusive relationships. This prompted Fitzgerald to imagine a slightly more carceral setting, one in which these “unfortunate priests” would be secured “within the protection of monastery walls” (Fitzgerald 1962). But house arrest soon seemed too rickety of a response to such diabolically industrious men, which is why Fitzgerald’s imagination then landed on “a mountain refuge far apart from civilization” (Fitzgerald 1948).⁵ And though the mountain idea eventually fell away, the notion of a refuge stuck, with Fitzgerald settling on what he thought was a foolproof plan to protect children, punish priests, and avoid scandal: an island retreat in the Caribbean.

Fitzgerald, to be sure, was not the only mid-century executive with an interest in the Caribbean (Ogle 2020). There was at the time something of a rush on the region as the British Empire came to an end. The Caribbean’s many advantages included proximity to the United States, economies pegged to the pound sterling, and a recognized degree of political stability (Ogle 2017, 1441–42), but just as appealing was the fact that most Caribbean countries at the time were strapped for cash. Decolonization had prompted several businesses to liquidate and remove their assets from the region. To generate new lines of revenue, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Bermuda, and Antigua (to name only a few) created tax havens to lure capital back. They offered multinational corporations minimal rates of taxation, the near absence of capital control, and attenuated banking regulations (Ogle 2017, 1432). The plan worked in that these financial instruments attracted capital, but one of the unintended consequences was that the Caribbean soon became something of a laboratory for the development of a wide range of avoidance and offshoring practices. Some better-known examples include free trade zones, extraterritorial markets, and flexible labor laws, but there was also a raft of social experiments during the 1950s and 1960s that self-consciously took advantage of the Caribbean’s widely advertised lack of government oversight (Shaxson 2011).

Fitzgerald’s island for inveterate priests was one such experiment. Like other exploitations of the emerging offshore world, Fitzgerald’s island was shaped by a colonial imagination of the Caribbean archipelagos (Benítez-Rojo 1996) and oriented in large part toward juridical arbitrage (Neuman 1996). At the same time, this pursuit was also a way for Fitzgerald to make a theological argument about the practical governance of souls. The Roman Catholic Church of this era was engaged in its own process of liberalization.⁶ This tended to center on matters of church and state, with bishops throughout the Americas navigating a thicket of property disputes, but it also included an extended debate over Christian renewal.⁷ In this debate, Fitzgerald proved to be a pessimist. Some sinners, he insisted, could not change: thus, the island. But Fitzgerald’s eventual successor, the much younger McNamara, was an unrepentant optimist about psychology’s promise to heal (not save) priests from sickness (not sin). It was ultimately this optimism that would eventually force Fitzgerald to sell his island and set the conditions for a worldwide network of sex-therapy centers that would diagnose, treat, and redeploy clerics. None of this would have been possible, however, without the pursuit and eventual purchase of Fitzgerald’s island.

SOUGHT

“It is not lust but pride that is the fundamental root of your difficulty,” Fitzgerald wrote a priest (Fitzgerald 1948). Hobbled by “intimacies with the youth,” the cleric in question had asked Fitzgerald if he could take up residence with the Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico, but Fitzgerald would not have it. There was no more room, for one. In his letter, Fitzgerald paints a picture of guest-priests occupying nearly every square inch of the compound. They are crammed into bedrooms, sleeping on patios, and huddled in cabins. Some of these men had even hitchhiked across the country for a chance to spend a few weeks at the center. They were all in search of a transformation, a release from their worst impulses, but Fitzgerald would occasionally decide that his center was too flimsy a setting for priests with such extreme desires: “It would never do in view of your problem to have you here,” Fitzgerald explained to the man. The perimeter of the compound had no walls, the doors did not lock, and there were too many children nearby. “All I can suggest for you,” Fitzgerald added, “would be to go somewhere you will not be known.” But before the priest could follow this advice, by surreptitiously moving throughout his career from parish to parish, Fitzgerald set a clear intention: “I hope, in the not too distant future, to have an island, where [this] particular problem [can be] dealt with in a manner which is not possible here in a house of this nature” (Fitzgerald 1948).

Very little of Fitzgerald’s intention for the island appears to have been punitive. He never tried to hide his contempt for these men and what he describes as their “lack of priestly self-discipline” (Fitzgerald 1962), but Fitzgerald seems largely unfamiliar with the writings of Franz Kafka ([1919] 1995): nothing suggests a penal colony for priests. Fitzgerald also appears indifferent to the work of Daniel Defoe ([1719] 2021) and his fictional account of a self-mastery so complete that it would become a civilizing force.⁸ Instead, when Fitzgerald suggests that an island would allow these men to learn “the truth of [their] own nothingness” (Fitzgerald 1948) he uses the language of “refuge” and “retreat” in a manner that calls to mind what Roland Barthes has described as anachoresis: a “separation from the world that’s effected by going back up to some isolated, private, secret, distant place” (Barthes 2012, 24).⁹ Classic examples of anachoresis include hermits, ascetics, and monks, but consider Fitzgerald’s insistence that, given the right setting, even “the fallen priest is yet capable of resurrection” (Fitzgerald 1962). For Fitzgerald, the right setting would be a distant island that could—materially but also spiritually—wrench men from this world.

Fitzgerald also wanted out of this world (at least its bureaucracy), and an island seemed as good a plan as any.¹⁰ He was, without a doubt, a terribly disorganized administrator, a man challenged at a seemingly existential level by the rigors of recordkeeping. He certainly had the entrepreneurial pluck to spot the Church-wide demand that his Servants of the Paraclete readily met. He also had the necessary skillset to develop his religious order into a worldwide organization, with outposts eventually anchored on nearly every continent. Nevertheless, his books were a mess. By 1964, the Archbishop of Santa Fe emulated the increasing bureaucratization of the post-war economy by ordering Fitzgerald to document the intake of guest-priests, compile legible case files, and accurately record the outtake of each man, but none of this interested Fitzgerald (Davis 1964a). Instead, he daydreamed about an island absolutely bereft of paperwork, where priests only arrived and never left. All the while, Fitzgerald hoped that this island could stave off what he saw as the advance of modern psychology. The discipline’s growing popularity among Church leaders infuriated him, in large part because this relatively new science appeared to undermine the Church’s theology of sin by minimizing the role of personal salvation. Fitzgerald therefore ignored these experts, never once deigning to recognize their authority, and staffed his center accordingly. Not a single member of his team in New Mexico had a graduate degree in psychology, psychiatry, or social work: the program was administered entirely by clerics. “There is a training program for Paracletes,” Fitzgerald (quoted in Doyle 2011) once boasted. “It is a very fine and wide-spread kind of program: on-the-job training.” Often rejecting the disease concept altogether, Fitzgerald argued that the guest-priests in his care could not be cured of their problems because these “vicious evil habits” (Fitzgerald 1960b) were not sicknesses so much as “weaknesses” (Fitzgerald 1962). Redemption only arrived, he preached, with a bootstrapping kind of devotion.

The most perfidious of these priests compulsively shirked their obligations by choosing illicit pleasures over hard-earned piety. Deceived by the devil and thus ensnared by sin, these men did not need a diagnosis, at least in Fitzgerald’s view; nor did they need treatment. What would talk-therapy do for them that prayer could not? Instead, they would only benefit from a distant, effectively inescapable retreat where they could right themselves for the Lord. Thus, psychology for Fitzgerald was not just bad science but more urgently an affront to the Church’s teachings on sin and salvation: “If [a priest’s] compulsions are something he is not morally responsible for both in their initiation and continuance,” Fitzgerald wrote, “then Calvary becomes delusion and redemption worn-out farce” (Fitzgerald 1960b). It is no wonder then that Fitzgerald imagined this island not only as a refuge for delinquent priests but also as a beachhead for an unholy war. The stakes could not have been higher: “Fundamentally,” Fitzgerald reasoned, “the whole concept of the dignity of the human entity is at stake” (Fitzgerald 1960b).

Barthes would certainly have approved of Fitzgerald’s battlefield, or at least of how Fitzgerald imagined the island retreat: a verdant, unoccupied mass within eyesight of the mainland; simple, rustic cabins that would echo the ascetic qualities of a monk’s cell; and tracts of arable land that would allow priests to pursue a contemplative amount of manual labor. Church bells would mark canonical hours and the start of daily mass. Yet, the key devotional activity would be perpetual Eucharistic adoration. This is the practice of placing a consecrated host on an altar so that the faithful can prostrate themselves before what Fitzgerald understood to be the immediate presence of Jesus Christ: “There,” Fitzgerald writes, “alone with God, exposed as it were to God, the Sacred Heart of Jesus can work directly on the soul of the priest [with] the unique attraction of Divine law” (Fitzgerald 1962). Yet, although Fitzgerald painted a saintly vision of retreat as a merciful solution to a terrible problem, it was also and would forever remain a complete fantasy, because purchasing such a place proved to be just short of impossible.

BOUGHT

Fitzgerald wrote to the Archbishop of Santa Fe about a priest “whom we would like to ship out of here.” Unable “to handle his oddities and keep him in line,” Fitzgerald pined for “a place in the West islands” where the Servants of the Paraclete could “keep [this particular priest] out of circulation.” Having just planned a missionary trip to Puerto Rico, Fitzgerald suggested to the archbishop that he might purchase an island in the Caribbean “where we could utilize the priests who have a problem” (Fitzgerald 1957). The letter seems to suggest that Fitzgerald thought the task to be relatively straightforward, but acquiring an island, he would soon learn, was easier said than done, not least because islands are not made to order. They vary so dramatically in terms of size, shape, and location that the process of procuring just the right property took years. It also forced Fitzgerald to define more clearly the very priests that he so desperately wanted to isolate. Fitzgerald’s idea of an island had always been a vague solution to an imprecise problem—until he put boots on the ground.

Father Joseph Moylan and Brother Edward Fitzgerald, both Servants of the Paraclete reporting to the more senior Fitzgerald, landed in the British Virgin Islands in 1960. They spent more than a year serving a parish in Tortola, but they devoted most of their attention toward the search for a proper island. They even bought a boat and a horse to access remote areas, but the real problem was not accessibility so much as stock. Nearly every island in the area had its limitations, and nothing seemed sufficient. Pelican Island, for example, could have been an interesting option. An uninhabited islet located in the southwestern corner of the British Virgin Islands, it has sheer cliffs that plunge into the sea. However, the same crags that effectively turn this haven into a cage also make it exceedingly difficult for supply boats to dock safely with any kind of consistency. Norman Island, a low-lying landmass that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write Treasure Island ([1883] 1993), is also bucolic, but nonetheless incapable of providing enough crops to sustain a community. Then there was Culpepper Island. This is a lonely rock located in the Atlantic Ocean, and it too could have met their needs, but its proximity to Barbados was worrisome. During low tide, one needed only to wade thirty meters through chest-deep water to reach the mainland.

Joseph Moylan and Edward Fitzgerald were not finicky men. They could have lived on any one of those islands, piously keeping canonical hours, but their inability to imagine the priests in question doing the same says something about how they imagined the very problem that they set out to solve. While Gerald Fitzgerald would routinely lament the existence of these priests, calling them “vipers” and suggesting that they were “damned” (Fitzgerald 1957), he and his colleagues also imbued them with such superhuman appetites that sheer cliffs seemed like a good idea. So too did a self-sustaining homestead, in case the Servants of the Paraclete ever had to abandon the island (and the men on it). Most telling may have been the “red lights of warning” (Fitzgerald 1962) that flashed for Joseph Moylan and Edward Fitzgerald when they realized just how close Culpepper Island is to Barbados. Even after considering the turbulence of the Atlantic Ocean and the precariousness of the rocky footing between the island and the mainland, they could still imagine men so blinded by their lust for children that they would battle the coastline for a chance to stalk the streets of Barbados.

This vison of the insatiable, unrepentant cleric is also why the Servants of the Paraclete scoured the Caribbean rather than Indonesia or even the Arctic for an island. In practice, Gerald Fitzgerald could have sent these priests anywhere in the world. He would soon have renewal centers on most every continent, from Asia to Africa to Latin America. In a letter postmarked September 17, 1960, Fitzgerald appeals to his colleague for a report from British Honduras, wondering “whether or not you feel the ecclesiastical authorities would be friendly to our undertaking our particular work in that area of Central America” (Fitzgerald 1960c). There are several islands just off the coast of Honduras, and many of them would have provided these priests with a properly soft landing, but Fitzgerald wanted these men to disappear—and in the 1950s and 1960s, the Caribbean offered the opportunity to do just that: with tax havens and free trade zones, for sure. But the Caribbean also had an unsettled sense of jurisdiction. Joseph Moylan and Edward Fitzgerald were aware of Flanagan Island, for example, and it too piqued their interest. No more than a half-mile long and a quarter-mile wide, this rocky outcrop has jagged contours and patches of green grass, but its appeal had much more to do with the fact that the island fell between the claimed maritime boundaries of the British Virgin Islands and the US Virgin Islands. Although no one thought that the place existed in international waters, making it subject to a then-vague sense of the law of the sea, it was clear that this confusion over sovereignty would allow the Servants of the Paraclete to take advantage of discrepancies between legal jurisdictions, especially if a government ever wanted to extradite one of their guest-priests.¹¹

In the end, bureaucratic difficulties scuttled the Servants of the Paraclete’s attempts to purchase Flanagan Island. The price also quickly outpaced what this small religious order could afford. Their pursuit of several other islands also met a similar end, but Fitzgerald was undeterred. For years to come, he would write bishops throughout the Caribbean asking whether any of them had an island for sale. Many of his requests were openly bigoted, proposing a “place for homos” (Fitzgerald 1960c), whereas others proved to be far more tactical. In one, Fitzgerald laments “the extreme spiritual poverty of South and Central America” (Fitzgerald 1950). The Roman Catholic Church had begun to lose sway throughout the region, and Fitzgerald knew it: “The fields are brown to the harvest.” He thus proposed that his island could serve as “a stepping stone to Latin countries” (Fitzgerald 1950): a gateway through which abusive priests could move from the United States to Latin America to serve as missionaries. Over time, several bishops responded, and although Fitzgerald would go back and forth with the Archbishop of San Juan, Puerto Rico, about one opportunity, he eventually struck a claim on a small landmass located just off the island of Carriacou within the Diocese of Grenada.¹² Home to an abandoned hotel, albeit one damaged by fire, this island cost the Servants of the Paraclete US$50,000.

SOLD

Gerald Fitzgerald had always been slow to accept that islands are never as remote as they may first seem, and this is somewhat surprising.¹³ For a cleric so concerned with church scandal, whose direct correspondence with Pope Paul VI openly worried about the public relations threat of “habitual sin” (Fitzgerald 1963), it is curious that Fitzgerald never thought that an island for sexually abusive priests might itself become a liability for the Roman Catholic Church: that a journalist might one day stumble upon the island and publish the story under a salacious headline like “Club Ped.” Some of Fitzgerald’s confidence clearly came from a growing consensus about the Caribbean, both within and beyond the financial world. In 1950, the Miami Herald published the first of what would become several mentions of something called the “Bermuda Triangle”: a mysterious stretch of ocean where ships, aircraft, and people vanished without a trace (Jones 1950). But Fitzgerald should have been able to see past popular culture to appreciate the Caribbean’s quickly changing social ecology. While Joseph Moylan and Edward Fitzgerald searched for an island retreat, they encountered a growing number of “tourists and [members of] the pleasure seeking public” (Fitzgerald, date redacted). Conspicuously dressed in tunics and leather sandals, with faces perpetually pink from the sun, these two clerics constantly found themselves outbid for property by captains of industry. Little Thatch, for example, is a privately owned island in the British Virgin Islands, and it too would have made for an ideal setting, but its listing price had jumped to US$500,000 by the time Gerald Fitzgerald engaged its owner. “The up in price” (Fitzgerald 1960c) caught him completely off guard.

It is no wonder, then, that many within the Roman Catholic Church began to consider Fitzgerald to be out of touch, not simply with the Caribbean but also with the Church. The island that his religious order now owned rested atop several assumptions but none as curious as his belief that he could avert the influence of modern psychology. This soft science, according to Fitzgerald, ignored the soul and its immortal core. It also pointed to sickness rather than sin as the primary cause of deviant behavior. All this offended Fitzgerald. “Why save men?” he once huffed, “if what they need is medical treatment?” (Fitzgerald 1960b). Fitzgerald, by contrast, emphasized a weakness of will, and he organized his renewal center in New Mexico accordingly, with his plan for an island retreat doubling down on his commitment to piety by placing those “caught in this particular dilemma” (Fitzgerald 1964) under the direction of “a couple of saintly priests’” (Fitzgerald 1948). Eucharistic adoration would be the fix.

Church leadership grew increasingly concerned, and the Archbishop of Santa Fe eventually wrote Fitzgerald directly: “I agree with your idea of working ‘quietly’ and perseveringly with this problem,” the archbishop wrote (Davis 1964b). There was no question that Fitzgerald had pioneered the pastoral care of priests and that he had also identified clerical sexual abuse as one of the Church’s most pivotal problems. The archbishop also clearly appreciated “the holy compulsion under which you [Fitzgerald] have labored these many years” (Davis 1964b). There was real admiration between the two men, but the archbishop needed Fitzgerald to resolve any theological tensions that he might have felt between the care of the soul and a scientific approach to the mind. The archbishop pressed Fitzgerald to likewise embrace the virtues of science: “It is presumed that in your constant concern for these unhappy men you do not rule out the close cooperation of reputable psychiatrists and doctors with experience in these cases” (Davis 1964b). But Fitzgerald wanted none of it, insisting that his island would be a bastion of respect and repair for the soul.

This impasse between faith and reason ended up casting Fitzgerald as a literary trope: the shipwrecked man, surviving for years on a distant, remote island while the rest of the world moves apace without him. In all subsequent correspondence between them, the archbishop addresses Fitzgerald with a tone usually reserved for those who must be shocked to attention, as if he were indeed a bearded survivor who had been (even if only metaphorically) lost at sea for some time. When the Archbishop of Santa Fe writes Fitzgerald in 1965, he presents an exceedingly clear set of directives on how to proceed with the island and then with the Servants of the Paraclete. His eight orders are unqualified: the second demands that Fitzgerald “sell the island which you recently purchased,” numbers four through seven name his replacements, and number eight commands him to report to Rome immediately (Davis 1965). The archbishop then repeats himself: “to leave no doubt in our minds that we mean what we say and say what we mean.” Turned from castaway to castoff, Fitzgerald was heartbroken. The religious order he founded had just been taken from him because he insisted through Church teachings that sinners should find “salvation in the mercy of Christ” (Fitzgerald 1962).

The transition was swift. Once the Archbishop of Santa Fe removed Fitzgerald as superior, he installed Father Joseph McNamara, a rather vocal advocate for lay therapy programs. McNamara’s faith in psychology opens onto a vast history of biopolitics, one far too intricate to address here. Suffice it to say, though, that McNamara quickly began working with local psychologists, hired resident psychiatrists, and, by 1976, offered a holistic approach to spiritual rehabilitation that largely mirrored the work of sexual disorder clinics found in secular settings. Guest-priests in New Mexico still attended daily mass, pursued spiritual direction, and prostrated themselves to the Blessed Sacrament, with church bells punctuating the day. But in addition to these religious activities, many of the guest-priests also received prescriptions for the contraceptive injection Depo-Provera to quell their sexual desires, whereas others found themselves hooked up to a plethysmograph: a machine with an inflatable cuff that secures to the base of the penis, measuring changes in blood flow while the subject listens to or watches sexually explicit material. The intake of guest-priests also included a complete medical examination with a pulmonary function, exercise stress test, and an electrocardiogram. The Renewal Center’s medical staff then drew blood and tracked the testosterone levels of each cleric. Finally, they mapped the inner worlds of these men with psychological examinations propelled by Jungian assumptions about the unconscious.

From afar, this transition from sin to sickness must have read like progress, but it had profound consequences on the worldwide perpetration of clerical sexual abuse. Understood against the backdrop of a global Church and an equally global pattern of sexual abuse, McNamara’s commitment to psychology made possible diabolical levels of deceit to which the potential liability of Fitzgerald’s island now pales in comparison. Buried inside McNamara’s warm embrace of the clinic over the colony was something of a shrug: why would the Servants of the Paraclete need an island, it asked, when they had the world?

THE WORLD

Gerald Fitzgerald, truth be told, had as much access to the world, in an absolute sense, as Joseph McNamara. The two men just imagined this world very differently. Believing in the power of the blessed sacrament and its capacity to align the human will with the glory of God, Fitzgerald conjured a world populated by two classes of priests: one redeemable, and the other not; one capable of Christian renewal in the craggy mountains of New Mexico, and the other not.

“We believe,” Fitzgerald wrote in a report to the Vatican, “in a clear distinction.” It is “between the priest whose sin is like the sin of David or Peter, a reversal of his whole way of life, and the priest whose life is found upon investigation to be one of continual weakness and habitual failures” (Fitzgerald 1962). The world that Fitzgerald imagined also neatly divided into two classes of place. Rigidly governed by the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical territory, with dioceses and archdioceses obediently structuring a recognizable horizon of accountability, there were those places in Fitzgerald’s world that existed on the grid, so to speak, and those that did not. Given just how much modern psychology offended Fitzgerald, in an era of emerging offshore economies, it is not entirely surprising that he spent so much of his career trying to maroon this second class of priests atop this second class of place: to stash sexually abusive men off the grid. “If a priest is willing to accept protection in his weakness,” Fitzgerald wrote, “this aid to salvation in the mercy of Christ should be made available to him” (Fitzgerald 1962).

Joseph McNamara, in contrast, actively deconstructed Fitzgerald’s world of binary oppositions. Through the power and glory of Carl Jung rather than Jesus Christ, the Servants of the Paraclete under the direction of McNamara quickly concluded that there is only one class of priests rather than two. Even the most predatory of men can be redeployed, he reasoned, because sickness (not sin) prompts psychologists (not clerics) to heal (not save) these unfortunate men whom Fitzgerald once described as suffering from an “abnormal abuse of nature” (Fitzgerald 1962). One of McNamara’s defining acts as Servant General, in fact, was to hire the psychologist Dr. John A. Salazar as an alternative to the island (McNamara 1993). “These priests,” Salazar later noted, “were thinking about just shipping these men off to a Caribbean island.” Salazar clearly did not think much of this plan. “I believe that treatment is the answer,” Salazar insisted, “rather than have a prison for priests on some exotic island.” The entire proposition of an island seemed to offend Salazar. “There would be better hope for recovery,” Salazar added, “if [these priests] were not put on an island to rot for the rest of their life” (Salazar 1993). Implicit in all this posturing was the idea that there is really only one class of place in the world rather than two: nothing and no one is ever entirely off the grid, not even a priest stranded on some island.

Yet, for all of their differences—in theology, cosmology, and maybe even especially ontology—Fitzgerald’s island fantasy ultimately fueled what is probably best described as the transnationalization of clerical sexual abuse. The Servants of the Paraclete under the direction of McNamara simply could not have aided and abetted so many sexual predators for so many years and on such a global scale without the initial idea of the island serving as a testing ground for this worldwide network of renewal centers. Fitzgerald’s ambition to solve the crisis of the problem priest by effectively disappearing them proved attractive to McNamara, but the plan’s principal flaw, at least from the vantage of McNamara’s world, was that Fitzgerald understood the island as an endpoint: as a dead end, a full stop. Again, the island for Fitzgerald would be a place in the world where priests only arrived and never left. McNamara, on the other hand, thought the island should not be the end of anything but rather a place of new beginnings, of fresh starts, and this meant for McNamara ditching the idea of a single island altogether for what would become a worldwide archipelago of renewal centers. These would be places in the world where priests continually arrived and always left.

Since the moment McNamara scuttled the idea of Fitzgerald’s island, the Servants of the Paraclete began to build a patchwork of networked renewal centers, each one reaching toward the next. Together, these havens and the priests that they harbored spread across multiple jurisdictions with varying, sometimes contradictory laws. This kind of legal and political unevenness, what Lauren Benton has called “lumpiness” (Benton 2010, xiii), allowed the Servants of the Paraclete to operate not necessarily beyond the law, as an island might have allowed them to do, but rather within spaces of ambiguous authority. In addition to Fitzgerald’s original and rather remote compound located in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, the Servants of the Paraclete founded dozens of renewal centers around the world: they have included houses in Nevis, Minnesota; Gallup, New Mexico; San Diego, California; Burlington, Vermont; Youngstown, Ohio; the British Virgin Islands; Stroud, England; Rome, Italy; Santa Cruz, Mexico; Rapid City, South Dakota; Chicago, Illinois; a pair of houses in South America, one in Argentina and another in Brazil; others in Africa, including Ghana and Nigeria; another in Dumfriesshire, Scotland; and then more in Jallais, France; San Bernardino, California; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; St. Louis, Missouri; Dambri, Vietnam; Dittmer, Missouri; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Tagaytay City, Philippines. None of these places were islands. Instead, they became tactical switch points that facilitated the worldwide movement of sexually abusive priests by diagnosing, treating, and then redeploying these men under the pretense of a new clerical placement, as well as through such informal arrangements as mission trips, clerical exchanges, solidarity movements, sponsorship programs, volunteer opportunities, and semi-active retirements. Other times leadership simply sent these men from one renewal center to another to keep them at least one step ahead of local authorities.

This worldwide archipelago of renewal centers lays bare the fact that the phenomenon of clerical sexual abuse, when understood through the history of the Servants of the Paraclete, has always been as global as the Roman Catholic Church. Its study, however, has been far narrower in scope. Investigative journalism, landmark court cases, grand jury reports, and the occasional social-scientific study—all elevated by major motion pictures—document with forensic detail how bishops in the United States transferred sexually abusive priests from one parish to another. This research has been so successful that teams of lawyers and activists around the world now pursue similar lines of investigation in their own countries, diligently tracking the possibility that a given bishop from a given diocese might have moved predatory priests between parishes (Barrientos 2019). They routinely find this to be the case, but interparish clerical transfer is only a small part of a much larger story of criminal evasion: of endpoints becoming switch points; of an island becoming a worldwide archipelago of renewal centers. For nearly a century, the Servants of the Paraclete made it their pastoral mission to create enclaves of jurisdictional ambiguity—sites that are not off the grid so much as situated between contrasting grids of legibility— as a way of moving sexually abusive men to parts unknown. It is thus incumbent on the study of clerical sexual abuse to engage those interstitial spaces and the transnational itineraries that connect them so that switch points might one day turn back into endpoints: into dead ends, full stops.

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Footnotes