Kevin O’Neill | The Sin of Sanctuary

This talk engages the Roman Catholic Church’s longstanding practice of granting sanctuary to sexually violent priests, assessing not only the monasteries that protect these men from criminal prosecution but also the lines of flight that these safehouses produce. Sanctuary became a common maneuver by the mid-twentieth century. In that era of standardization, as unified legal systems smoothed over jurisdictional patchworks, Church leaders recognized that they needed spaces of exception to enjoy the kinds of discretion that their ecclesiastical territories once afforded them. Monasteries worked well.

About the Speaker

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Kevin O’Neill is the Director of the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. A cultural anthropologist, his work focuses on the moral dimensions of contemporary political practice in Latin America. Previous monographs, exploring how new strains of Christian piety have become recognizable modes of governance in Central America, include City of God (University of California Press, 2010); Secure the Soul (University of California Press, 2015); Hunted (University of Chicago Press, 2019); and Unforgivable, which is forthcoming from University of California Press this February. Dr. O’Neill is currently at work an ethnography of traffic in Guatemala City that realigns conversations about security, mobility, and infrastructure in Latin America. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Stanford Department of Anthropology.