The central event of this book is Delta Airlines Flight 1604. The plane left Minnesota on May 17, 1994, bound for Guatemala. Among its passengers was a Father David Roney. Proceedings in the days and months leading up to the flight made the expatriation a matter of considerable urgency. Police recently picked the priest up for “lewd acts with a young child” and several other child abuse accusations hovered near Roney (p. 71). Complaints from parents in the 1980s had already inspired the priest’s superiors to send him to New Mexico for therapy. Only a dramatic action could address his persistent behavior. Roney left his rural diocese in America and made his way to the mission it ran in the highlands of Guatemala.

The flight is at the heart of Kevin O’Neill’s argument in this provocative and important book. When the airborne vessel shuttled him across international borders and deposited him in Latin America, O’Neill argues, Roney’s status as a pedophile evaporated. Guatemala, O’Neill contends, is “a place removed from North America’s medicalized notions of sexual deviancy” and, as such, its highlands are “a place where clerical sexual abuse, as a category of criminal behavior, could not be named or recognized” (p. 92). Near the end of the book O’Neill notes that Roney’s superior leveraged the unevenness of the world to “unmake” Roney as a pedophile and preserve his priesthood, albeit in a place far away from Minnesota. Roney embraced his new environment and went about befriending and abusing dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Guatemalan children. Early accusations from the late 1980s compelled authorities to mandate psychotherapy in New Mexico, but the accusations in 1994 necessitated an escalated strategic response.

Unforgivable is significant work, and for this reviewer, it generates two distinct streams of thought. We should mention here that the book breaks new ground. The phenomenon of clergy abuse is receiving more attention from scholars of religion, and while researchers have produced important stand-alone articles on individual priests, no such academic book that takes a focused biographical approach has existed until now.

The book is, in the first place, immensely productive. It teems with fresh scholarly insights, and rich analytical moments. O’Neill contemplates the genesis of Roney’s sexual drives. He suggests that the priest’s sexual appetites have some roots in the loneliness he experienced living in a rural diocese. Roney was a city boy forced by circumstances beyond his control to live in remote areas. Unforgivable broaches an important conversation on the nature of seminary formation in the biography of an abuser priest. The seminary schedule kept Roney on the move, distracting him from sins, but then, upon graduation, the system catapulted him into the banal realities of parish work. O’Neill provides an incisive starting point for scholars of clergy abuse to think about the theology of the priesthood. He is at his best when he uses the metaphor of “pipes” and “tubes” to describe priests as tools that pump God’s grace in the world by way of the sacraments (p. 28). The channeling of grace occurred, O’Neill notes, no matter how immoral a cleric’s behavior. The book’s fundamental pivot, the move from Minnesota to Guatemala that undoes Roney as a pedophile, opens up a much wider field of questions about the movement of abusive clergy across national borders. O’Neill rightly points us toward the global dimensions of this phenomenon. This book is an important contribution to what we are now calling Global Catholicism.

A second set of thoughts recurred as I worked my way across the book’s chapters. This line of cogitation first percolated upon reading four words that O’Neill uses to describe his approach. This book is an exercise in what he calls “the aesthetics of biography” (p. xvi). The reader would be right to take some time and sit with this phrase. I never quite shook it. (O’Neill also deploys other descriptors of his mixed methodology: “historical non-fiction,” “ethnographic inquiry,” “true crime,” and “philosophical criticism”). Unforgivable does offer the reader a tranche of details about its subject. We do get a sense of Roney as a character. But we rarely hear Roney in his own voice. When he was in Guatemala he wrote a monthly column for his diocesan newspaper. O’Neill does not plumb this body of writing for insights. Why not? Roney took thousands of photographs. O’Neill only describes a few of these many snaps. Why so few? None of the images are reproduced in the book. The reader does not get to spend enough time examining the documents produced by the therapists or the lawyers. The book comes off at times as more literary than empirical. In the end, the notion of “aesthetics” functions as a self-bestowed license to do more telling than showing.

The major thesis of the book is grounded in evidence (as well as O’Neill’s previous work on Guatemala), but it is to some extent derivative of theories produced by Michel Foucault and philosopher Ian Hacking. O’Neill filters the evidence and the thesis – Roney going from a man with a moral problem to a sexual deviant to a normal priest in Guatemala – through the prism of “making” and “unmaking” people. It is important to note that O’Neill also places survivors in this framework when he argues that, for it to exist, the identity of survivor requires a matrix of law, free press, psychological expertise, and an insurance industry. This move is productive, and it will influence future studies. Yet, I think the book could have had a more powerful intervention if O’Neill built from the sources up to the framework, rather than reading the sources from the perspective of this preconceived scholarly edifice. This consistent deployment of theory is part of the book’s theatrics.

A question must be asked: does such an aesthetic and theoretical approach really permit a scholar to listen to the documents? This is certainly up for debate. The position one takes on such a question will likely relate to one’s scholarly tools of choice. To lay my own cards on the table: I am writing a book on a diocesan priest, a prolific abuser, who never leaves his archdiocese. I prefer a more inductive method related to the approach we call “microhistory.” I think it necessary to do more showing, especially as it relates to sources and even broad paradigms, than telling. Yet, I recognize the balance is very difficult to strike. Authors have to tell readers what things mean. O’Neill’s choice to frame the book as “making” and “unmaking” is indeed generative. Yet, I am left desiring more thickness in each and every description. This would permit us to learn more about the history of clergy abuse from the Roney case.

As O’Neill notes in the conclusion, Unforgivable is the start of a much larger research project on the movement of abuser-priests across borders. This book is a prequel. Or perhaps it is better understood as a beachhead from which he will stage a much more sustained operation. He is now at work connecting America, Latin America and Rome into a much wider web. The work at hand here is analytically rich, provocative, and exquisitely written at the sentence level. It marks a genesis for a wider exploration of priesthood, abuse, the state, global transfers, and survivors. In the end, perhaps we can see its aesthetic and literary approach as grounds to raise important ethical questions. What is the most appropriate way to write about such a nefarious and abusive character like Roney? What is the responsibility of the researcher when writing about the superiors – the enablers – of such behaviors? If one writes a book on a single priest, how should survivors come into the narrative? Unforgivable defines its subject more than it allows its subject to self-define. Scholars, we should note, also “make” and “unmake” subjects.