Sarah Pearson is the Associate Director of Nate’s Mission, a Wisconsin-based project of End Clergy Abuse. She is also a former political spokesperson for Ending Clergy Abuse and Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests—Wisconsin, as well as a national organizer of an AIDS service organization, and co-founder of a nonprofit women’s advocacy organization.

“The MRPL program is the perfect place for exploration of the dynamics that have resulted in the clergy abuse crisis and the actions necessary to dismantle the structural mechanisms that enable, and even encourage, abuse.”

For Pearson's MRPL final project, "Manufacturing the Clerical Predator: How the Catholic Hierarchy Creates and Maintains a Culture of Abuse," she presented her documentary film featuring former and current priests who reveal how clerical pedophilia is not a phenomenon that occurs as the result of an external perversion of the Catholic hierarchy, but rather, a distinct form of sexual violence that is produced, manufactured, and reproduced within the clerical system. Following the screening panelists discussed the question, "The Catholic Church has overseen the world's longest lasting and most widespread campaign of institutional sexual abuse. Why is it that after sixteen centuries of documented evidence and decades of continuous international public exposure, new revelations of the scope and magnitude of the abuse crisis continue to shock the public?"

Panelists included Anne Barrett Doyle, Co-Director, Bishop Accountability; Shaun Dougherty, President, Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests; Denise Buchanan, Founding Board Member, Ending Clergy Abuse; and Peter Isely, Program Director, Nate’s Mission.

Watch the Manufacturing the Clerical Predator Documentary Film trailer.

Watch the Manufacturing the Clerical Predator Documentary Film.