Complicity without Collective Guilt: Aquinas and the Abuse Crisis

Abstract

When people speak of the Church’s complicity in the abuse crisis, they usually mean particular things that particular officeholders did or failed to do. I. Th. Eschmann’s study of Aquinas’s Scriptum is widely read as ruling out any Thomist account of collective ecclesial responsibility. What Eschmann denies, I argue, is narrower than has been supposed. He denies that the same sin can be imputed uniformly to every member of a community. He does not deny that individuals can be implicated in others’ sins, in differing degrees, by acts of their own. Aquinas sets this out at ST II–II, q. 62, a. 7, where nine ways of sharing in another’s wrong distribute liability across acts and omissions. Modern moral philosophers arrive at something close to this independently, and where they rely on a standard of culpable ignorance without explaining it, Aquinas does. I also point to a limitation: because the taxonomy is centred on acts, it does not reach the complicity Jaspers and May describe, which runs through membership and shared identity.