A note this morning to bring to your attention a valuable new resource Ruth Krall has just uploaded to her Enduring Space blog. Some of you may have seen a conversation in the comments thread here last week, in which Ruth and I and others talked about the need to gather together a list of work by Father Thomas Doyle, who has been a prophetic leader in urging the Catholic hierarchy to deal honestly and openly with the abuse situation in the Catholic church.
With her usual energy, Ruth went to work immediately and created such a cyber-anthology of Tom Doyle's online work. The link to her pdf file is here, at her blog site. Here's a direct link to the pdf file itself, which is entitled "A Thomas Doyle Cyber-Anthology: Studies in Religious Community Sexual Violence."
Ruth writes,
Eventually, someone will need to create an anthology, or more likely a series of anthologies, of Father Doyle’s work in much the same manner that the executors of Father Thomas Merton’s literary estate have done with Merton’s journals. This work is needed so that the Catholic Church, as the people of God, will not need to reinvent the wheels represented by Thomas Doyle’s years of work in the twentieth-century and twenty-first-century. Instead, future scholars and activists will be able to build upon a significant body of intellectual and advocacy work in the field of clergy sexual abuse inside the Roman Catholic Church by an ordained priest who, as a whistle- blower for more than thirty years, has straddled the border between insider and outsider.
But meanwhile, Ruth herself has created a very thorough and helpful cyber-anthology of her own, with links to Tom Doyle's work that will be immensely useful to so many people — survivors and survivor advocates, journalists studying the abuse crisis, lay Catholics and others joining Tom Doyle in calling the Catholic hierarchy to accountability, etc. We are all deeply in Ruth Krall's debt for this outstanding contribution.
(As I noted last week, I'm not sure of the original source of the photo of Tom Doyle, but it has appeared online at a number of blog sites over the past several years.)