Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

The modern history of the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church begins in the middle of the 1980s, and back then it was known as a crisis of “pedophile clergy” or of “pedophilia in the Church.” In the last 20 years, the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has taken different turns and shapes, and now the focus is no longer exclusively on children (it now includes adult women and vulnerable adults). But there is no understanding of the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church without starting from the topic of the abuse of children and what it says to the Church, theology, and the Christian community and culture more generally.

Jesus of Nazareth (for the believers: the Christ, the Incarnate Word of God) was born a child, but in the Christian tradition theology of childhood is still underdeveloped. Within the Christian faith, much of the theology of the child has been indirect or unspoken, not articulated in a discursive way but in other forms of transmission of the tradition (in the arts, for example). One of the greatest Catholic theologians in the twentieth century, German Jesuit Karl Rahner, S.J., (1904-1984), pointed this out in the very important essay “Ideas for a Theology of Childhood” in Theological Investigations, Volume 8: Further Theology of the Spiritual Life (1971, pp. 33-50). Rahner remarked that in theology, “it is almost always presupposed that we already know what a child is.” The same is with scripture and the Catholic tradition, which do not tell us much about the child. But Rahner reminded us that there is a centrality of the child and of childhood in Christianity: “We only become the children whom we were because we gather up time – and in this our childhood too – into our eternity […] We do not move away from childhood in any definitive sense, but rather move towards the eternity of this childhood, to its definitive and enduring validity in God’s sight.” Childhood has value in itself and does not have to be justified on the fruits that come afterwards: “The grace of childhood is not merely the pledge of the grace of adulthood.”

Childhood as a theological source of understanding the divine has also implications for our life here on earth, for all those who want to understand the importance of family, education, and formation of children. Rahner emphasized the decisive influence “the experience of a secure childhood can have in the majority of cases for that attitude of committing oneself to trust in the radical and metaphysical sense, which has a vital and basic function to perform in religion.” In children there is “an attitude of radical trust in the very basis of existence, that submissive and trustful self-commitment to the mystery which permeates and presides over the whole of existence, the mystery of God’s protective and forgiving love and absolute nearness to him.”

In more recent years, Australian Catholic theologian James McEvoy has rediscovered Rahner’s original insights in light of the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church but also across our societies in religious and non-religious institutions. McEvoy analyzed the importance of a theology of children in the fundamentally relational nature of humanity, in ways that challenge our post-modern sensibilities: “The relational nature of children’s spirituality strongly contrasts with the individualizing tendency of late-modern Western culture, with its disengaged approach to human agency.” At the same time, McEvoy reminds us of the fundamentally distorted shape of Catholic theology without its center on children: “The almost sole focus on adult understanding and experience in contemporary theological reflection about the human condition cannot be justified. A theology of childhood must be an essential element of theological anthropology.”

The shortcomings in elaborating a theology of childhood must be seen in light of the fact that the concept of childhood remains largely implicit not only in scripture, but also in the theological and magisterial tradition from the early centuries. But we are understanding better the need to develop a new focus on the theology of childhood in the context and in parallel with the history of both religious and non-religious/non-Christian cultures and mentalities on childhood and children.

Massimo Faggioli is professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. His most recent books are The Liminal Papacy of Pope Francis. Moving Toward Global Catholicity (2020) and The Oxford Handbook of Vatican II (2023, edited with Catherine Clifford).