“I Will Surely Have You Deported:” Undocumenting Clergy Sexual Abuse in an Immigrant Community

Abstract

ABSTRACT Clergy sexual violence in immigrant communities is an understudied dimension of the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic church. Yet records suggest that bishops regularly treated immigrant-serving parishes as dumping grounds for serially abusive clergy. There, evidence suggests, abusers targeted minors from poor, vulnerable, and undocumented families, silencing victims with threats of deportation and further violence. How did legal status intersect with structures of state and ecclesial power and with social hierarchies of visibility in situations of clergy abuse? Centering the case of Msgr. Peter E. Garcia, a priest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles who abused at least twenty boys between 1966 and 1987, this article examines archival evidence from unsealed clergy personnel files to interrogate the complex politics of documentation in the case. It attends to the relationship between three interwoven forms of (un)documentation: first, the precarious legal and social status of victims; second, the silences, redactions, and euphemisms that characterize church records containing these accounts; and third, the spatial undocumentation at work in the use of migrant parishes as clergy dumping grounds. It demonstrates how a post–Vatican II theological and pastoral imagination of intimacy with the poor, refracted through prisms of state, ecclesial, and clerical dominance, helped to create conditions for the production of invisible victims. The erasure accomplished through the overlapping forms of undocumentation in the Garcia case, it argues, can help to account for the absence of such stories from the broader narrative of Catholic clergy sexual abuse in the United States.