Obviously I haven't read the book and now have no intention of doing so, but going on comments here and your description, with the explicit specific intention of preserving "the survivor gets blamed for everything that happened to him on a huge societal scale, in the worst ways for him possible, except this also becomes a plausible result of specific reasons, that are actually framed by the narrative":
---> space and alien contact are unavoidably political; involve the fucking Catholic Church and the Jesuits in that and you're not only squaring the inter-community Political, you're squaring the intra-community Political. There will be factions that actively want to interpret this expedition overall in the worst possible light both maliciously and simply out of "everything the Church does is bad"; there will be factions that want to find a scapegoat for the utter catastrophe of the mission that doesn't reflect either on the entire Jesuit Order or which does but doesn't reflect on the Church; there are going to be all kinds of factions that actively want to manipulate the information about this mission either via outright fabrication or through being morally sure that This (whatever This they come up with) Must Have Happened because that narrative is emotionally convenient for them.
It is indeed totally implausible that without external motive there would be a universal assumption of perverse decision rather than victimization, but look at one single major news-grabbing crisis/harm done to others that has Different Agendas to make use of it, and active interpretation of narratives and events to suit one's own either manipulative or emotional needs come fast and furious.
Fun wrinkles to this: - it is assumed/put about he actually murdered the rest of the expedition on purpose out of sheer twisted fucked-up-ery and that is also why he did everything else to himself (particularly attractive to those who need to rehabilitate the rest of the expedition but don't want to start an inflammatory rage-fest against the aliens in question for whatever reason - and there are many potential ones! - because it all becomes His Fault)
- same assumption, but allows that maybe the things that happened to him subsequently were not his fault, but kinda don't care because He Obviously Deserved It
- same assumption but based on the idea that He Lost His Mind, and is still crazy and dangerous
- narrative that Actually The Expedition Did Something Horrible To The Aliens And So Deserved It
- narrative that the Expedition Deserved It Because Colonialism AND initially the survivor was into all of what happened to him and has only changed his tune b/c humans found him and now he's ashamed and trying to cover that up.
Etc etc. All of these can be going around at the same time; especially if there's active motivation in one quarter or another against letting Anger At Atrocity build up either at the aliens or on this expedition's behalf. This is even easier to achieve because it seems almost easily assumed that this KIND of information would be linked very heavily to someone's idea of national/terrestrial security and thus highly unlikely for the message to be passed on to the press BEFORE it was peered over by whatever political powers are controlling money and permissions for space expeditions.
These motivations don't necessarily have to be plot related: I can think of three in-Church feuds the Jesuits are quietly in that have been going for decades (possibly centuries) that could apply, and so many easy causes of just People In Conflict With The Church/with Missionaries in Space/etc. Just a lot of collateral damage. Which is almost worse (or at least can be framed as worse) because at least if there's a plot reason for things it's like, related - but when you're being ground up just because you're COLLATERAL to someone's agenda it's insult to injury.
***extra points if you DO still want to set it up that nobody but the Vatican (or even just a small contingent that happened to get a budget while nobody was looking) thought the initial expedition was worth it but in the subsequent decades things have changed and frankly a significant chunk of the earth is now belatedly horrified at the idea that the Catholic Christian Church is potentially the First Representative of Humanity to Aliens, worse that it's not even! qualified people! and in the latter case the Vatican is scrambling to frame that in a way that makes it malice/manipulation on the part of the backers and not incompetence on the part of the actual established power base.
----> Easily support this by having the survivor's trauma severely impair his ability to communicate, either by outright traumatic mutism (always a good option for this), or by making his verbal communication confusing and incoherent. Severe acute psychological trauma can, after all, seriously confuse a patient's ability to construct coherent narrative ways to describe what happens to theme. This means that you can make it either so that the initial contacts have no information on him other than he's In This State plus he's violent, but for whatever reason they also have some obligation to transport him back.
You don't have them explicitly frame this as murder or even have any INTERPRETATION of the information they send back to Earth, just: "we found him, we think he's this guy based on our information, we found him here and in this state, and this is what happened when we found him". It sounds like it's not EASY to communicate back and forth in real time, so.
For me this would be extra horrible on actual arrival because presumably he then LIVES on the ship with these people for twelve years, and even if initially they are very wary/basically hostile/untrained it's pretty difficult not to end up communicating and understanding SOMEWHAT, so if they're awake for the journey, by the end you end up with them ARRIVING to discover the horror of what their brief earlier message turned into in those 12 years.
Or if they do cryo you can skip this, but then you're delivering the survivor in his still incapacitated state, so again, doesn't help.
---> this is where you swing back to "other people will actually have agendas about how this expedition and its outcomes are framed, and some of them will be powerful, and will be moving to make sure that things stay the way they want them": obviously it SHOULD be possible for the survivor to be delivered to competent, ethical medical and psychiatric (and legal) practitioners who know about these things and will adequately treat him - but INSTEAD you have someone in politics, or someone in the Church (or both) essentially making sure he ends up with practitioners who will make sure the narrative the person in power wants gets supported, or at least something as close to the narrative they want as can be supported by now available evidence.
So maybe it's no longer to totally hold up the idea of him as Evil Plotting Pervert but you can frame him as Unstable, Scary Weakling whose experience of trauma in the regrettable cultural misunderstanding of First Contact then turned him into a violent, dangerous unstable threat who needs to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric institution/In Pastoral Care of the Vatican/whatever you choose the motivation to be.
Maybe the expedition can no longer be themselves Actively Vilified but they CAN still be the authors of their own misfortunes due to culpable stupidity. Etc.
Bonus points that hitting this welcome will probably retraumatize the FUCK out of the survivor so that he decompensates rather badly. Assuming that he wasn't just stuck in some kind of long-term sleep for the space voyage, in which case he's just further acutely traumatized.
Extra fun effect on the survivor if on some level he KNOWS that there are actually good trauma medical and psychiatric practitioners, that such things exist, that honestly there COULD have been some expectation of Getting Home and finding Good Help and instead either being turned over to incompetents or subject to malicious use of the system to harm and hem him in, because then you can invoke the push-pull crazy-making tension of "but the People with Learning are telling me that X is true so maybe I AM wrong and X is true/what is real truth anymore?"
You can also do this on the religious level! You can do it SO WELL on the religious level, if it's Vatican politics that's aimed at him. For that matter you can do it pretty well if it's anti-Vatican forces that are driving the hateful narratives, because being a Catholic in crisis of faith and having the people around you be hostile to that is not actually necessarily better for sanity.
--->Now depending on how bleak you want the story to be, you either continue this indefinitely (leaving the survivor to stare bleakly at a wall somewhere) or you have it happen for a While and then something changes/someone intervenes/some amount of refuge is found and you pursue that as much as you care to, as the author.
NB: again, this is me specifically aiming to PRESERVE the "everyone blames the survivor for his own suffering" etc thing - I'm not saying this is how I would tell a first-contact-with-Jesuits story, I'm just saying that even if the extreme whump is what you want, or if you are in a position where These Are The Things You Know About This Story And They Won't Change (something I do get stuck with sometimes, with stories!), okay, this is how you actually use plausible pressures and events to get there without being so jarring. And it wouldn't require a LOT of changes or a lot of extra scenes - a lot of these pressures/etc could be sketched in with fairly brief interactions or narrative bits.
BUT it sounds like some of the big things that all of this requires that the author doesn't have is a genuine understanding of how the Catholic Church and the Vatican operate in the political pressures of the world, and how both those external and the internal pressures of Vatican politics THEMSELVES play, as well as WHY this kind of victim-blame narrative gets going (it's not just . . . out of the blue, it's because of the ways that it serves the needs of those telling the story, either explicitly or subconsciously, either politically, culturally or emotionally or all of the above) - as well as the ways that space-exploration and first-contact are never NOT going to be subject to global political and cultural dynamics and pressures and power-plays?
It's not that you CAN'T get "weird little underprepared and inappropriate group goes out to make First Contact and it goes to hell and then for various reasons things are Horrific for the survivor even after he gets back to Earth" if that's what you want to write/what the story insists it is? You just have to know what you have to alter about the way the world works, what dynamics and structures have to somehow be accounted for/be bypassed in order to allow that to happen and to have that outcome. Which isn't that HARD to do in this case, but . . . yeah.
Really the most absurd and totally-unable-to-be-fixed element here is the idea that a Jesuit would not be having COMPLEX and intense and extremely densely literate theological conversations to himself about all of this shit throughout, including, even if he DOESN'T ask the aliens about faith-issues, WHY he's not and what he's attempting to figure out, and also the entire complex history of the Order of Jesus in terms of exploration, missionary work, contact with other cultures, and both its legacy and its current perspectives on that complex and blood-filled legacy. Especially since as I glance at the Wiki plot summary, there are THREE OTHER JESUITS AND A JEWISH LINGUIST ABOARD.
It also seems like the author has no idea what it would look like when someone with his background (all the way thru seminary, years of missionary work, etc) has a crisis of faith - not that they CAN'T, but that this is going to be a super high-level theologian's crisis. This is a crisis of faith that will have citations, footnotes, and will already know the literature on what his intensely intellectual-academic order has to say about the exact kind of crisis of faith he is having, including the Problem of Evil and so on.
(That's not to say it's not well possible for someone with that background and knowledge to just hit the wall of "fuck this, none of this is satisfactory anymore, what the fuck" from horrific experiences - they can! they do! but it doesn't look like what seems to be there from the description of the plot above, which is very "moderately educated lay-person has First Confrontation with the Suffering of Humankind and finds faith Shaken.")
. . . he would also not be under the delusion that the team they have is adequate to the purpose they're being sent on, and I would frame that as part of what puts STRESS on his faith both in the church and in God beyond it, as this would be an example of the Church pushing underqualified/underprepared people off to do something very dangerous, which let's be real, is not at all out of character for them!
Those bits are unfixable - you just have to change them. But I could frame up the traumatic horror and whump without a lot of plot change, I think.
ETA: tho tbh coming back to this having been reminded that it was written in 1996, a fewwww of the things that are quite egregious about the implausibility become less so.
They still aren't GOOD, but they take her from "what planet are you FROM" to "you are uncritically replicating a superficial gestalt of the culture around you." Bc tbh from a 1996 perspective (as I was literally first becoming AWARE of the issues at that time), it's honestly a lot less implausible to imagine that someone would assume that public reaction to Emilio would totally side-line the issue of rape and assume that his existence in the brothel made him a perverted slut; that's . . . more or less how we superficially framed prison-rape via jokes and comedy and even revenge fantasy, to a large extent. Even if the very initial experience was an attack, there was a lot of subtext that having gone through that experience, you now were that perverted slut, and kind of a lot of underlying sense that you wouldn't've had that first thing happen to you if you were sufficiently pure and manly anyway.
Likewise, the idea that people would understand how trauma works and that people in these situations would be traumatized and so on, even at baseline, is less solid in a 1996 frame - like it's not that there WEREN'T people who did, and who weren't doing absolutely critical work on the topic, there were. But if you're just Some Writer extrapolating 2019 (oh so many years from now!) and then 2031 or whatever, and YOU don't really know shit about trauma except what you intuit from human experience, I can see how it would not be obvious to you that we would have to be better at identifying it and handling it as a global species, and with it as part of our policies and so on, by that point in time.
It still implies "someone did not do any EXTRA research beyond what she superficially knew about these topics", but it's just that, rather than "are you from Mars, do you not understand how the world works".
Like I said, this doesn't take these issues into the realm of it being actually good, or even a fully plausible extrapolation from a place of grounded research, which I would want to do before launching into this kind of story, but I can see why a normal surface-level understanding would lead to an author extrapolating in these ways if they didn't. Add some lovely prose, and yeah, I could also see audience reactions being what they were.
no subject
---> space and alien contact are unavoidably political; involve the fucking Catholic Church and the Jesuits in that and you're not only squaring the inter-community Political, you're squaring the intra-community Political. There will be factions that actively want to interpret this expedition overall in the worst possible light both maliciously and simply out of "everything the Church does is bad"; there will be factions that want to find a scapegoat for the utter catastrophe of the mission that doesn't reflect either on the entire Jesuit Order or which does but doesn't reflect on the Church; there are going to be all kinds of factions that actively want to manipulate the information about this mission either via outright fabrication or through being morally sure that This (whatever This they come up with) Must Have Happened because that narrative is emotionally convenient for them.
It is indeed totally implausible that without external motive there would be a universal assumption of perverse decision rather than victimization, but look at one single major news-grabbing crisis/harm done to others that has Different Agendas to make use of it, and active interpretation of narratives and events to suit one's own either manipulative or emotional needs come fast and furious.
Fun wrinkles to this:
- it is assumed/put about he actually murdered the rest of the expedition on purpose out of sheer twisted fucked-up-ery and that is also why he did everything else to himself (particularly attractive to those who need to rehabilitate the rest of the expedition but don't want to start an inflammatory rage-fest against the aliens in question for whatever reason - and there are many potential ones! - because it all becomes His Fault)
- same assumption, but allows that maybe the things that happened to him subsequently were not his fault, but kinda don't care because He Obviously Deserved It
- same assumption but based on the idea that He Lost His Mind, and is still crazy and dangerous
- narrative that Actually The Expedition Did Something Horrible To The Aliens And So Deserved It
- narrative that the Expedition Deserved It Because Colonialism AND initially the survivor was into all of what happened to him and has only changed his tune b/c humans found him and now he's ashamed and trying to cover that up.
Etc etc. All of these can be going around at the same time; especially if there's active motivation in one quarter or another against letting Anger At Atrocity build up either at the aliens or on this expedition's behalf. This is even easier to achieve because it seems almost easily assumed that this KIND of information would be linked very heavily to someone's idea of national/terrestrial security and thus highly unlikely for the message to be passed on to the press BEFORE it was peered over by whatever political powers are controlling money and permissions for space expeditions.
These motivations don't necessarily have to be plot related: I can think of three in-Church feuds the Jesuits are quietly in that have been going for decades (possibly centuries) that could apply, and so many easy causes of just People In Conflict With The Church/with Missionaries in Space/etc. Just a lot of collateral damage. Which is almost worse (or at least can be framed as worse) because at least if there's a plot reason for things it's like, related - but when you're being ground up just because you're COLLATERAL to someone's agenda it's insult to injury.
***extra points if you DO still want to set it up that nobody but the Vatican (or even just a small contingent that happened to get a budget while nobody was looking) thought the initial expedition was worth it but in the subsequent decades things have changed and frankly a significant chunk of the earth is now belatedly horrified at the idea that the Catholic Christian Church is potentially the First Representative of Humanity to Aliens, worse that it's not even! qualified people! and in the latter case the Vatican is scrambling to frame that in a way that makes it malice/manipulation on the part of the backers and not incompetence on the part of the actual established power base.
----> Easily support this by having the survivor's trauma severely impair his ability to communicate, either by outright traumatic mutism (always a good option for this), or by making his verbal communication confusing and incoherent. Severe acute psychological trauma can, after all, seriously confuse a patient's ability to construct coherent narrative ways to describe what happens to theme. This means that you can make it either so that the initial contacts have no information on him other than he's In This State plus he's violent, but for whatever reason they also have some obligation to transport him back.
You don't have them explicitly frame this as murder or even have any INTERPRETATION of the information they send back to Earth, just: "we found him, we think he's this guy based on our information, we found him here and in this state, and this is what happened when we found him". It sounds like it's not EASY to communicate back and forth in real time, so.
For me this would be extra horrible on actual arrival because presumably he then LIVES on the ship with these people for twelve years, and even if initially they are very wary/basically hostile/untrained it's pretty difficult not to end up communicating and understanding SOMEWHAT, so if they're awake for the journey, by the end you end up with them ARRIVING to discover the horror of what their brief earlier message turned into in those 12 years.
Or if they do cryo you can skip this, but then you're delivering the survivor in his still incapacitated state, so again, doesn't help.
---> this is where you swing back to "other people will actually have agendas about how this expedition and its outcomes are framed, and some of them will be powerful, and will be moving to make sure that things stay the way they want them": obviously it SHOULD be possible for the survivor to be delivered to competent, ethical medical and psychiatric (and legal) practitioners who know about these things and will adequately treat him - but INSTEAD you have someone in politics, or someone in the Church (or both) essentially making sure he ends up with practitioners who will make sure the narrative the person in power wants gets supported, or at least something as close to the narrative they want as can be supported by now available evidence.
So maybe it's no longer to totally hold up the idea of him as Evil Plotting Pervert but you can frame him as Unstable, Scary Weakling whose experience of trauma in the regrettable cultural misunderstanding of First Contact then turned him into a violent, dangerous unstable threat who needs to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric institution/In Pastoral Care of the Vatican/whatever you choose the motivation to be.
Maybe the expedition can no longer be themselves Actively Vilified but they CAN still be the authors of their own misfortunes due to culpable stupidity. Etc.
Bonus points that hitting this welcome will probably retraumatize the FUCK out of the survivor so that he decompensates rather badly. Assuming that he wasn't just stuck in some kind of long-term sleep for the space voyage, in which case he's just further acutely traumatized.
Extra fun effect on the survivor if on some level he KNOWS that there are actually good trauma medical and psychiatric practitioners, that such things exist, that honestly there COULD have been some expectation of Getting Home and finding Good Help and instead either being turned over to incompetents or subject to malicious use of the system to harm and hem him in, because then you can invoke the push-pull crazy-making tension of "but the People with Learning are telling me that X is true so maybe I AM wrong and X is true/what is real truth anymore?"
You can also do this on the religious level! You can do it SO WELL on the religious level, if it's Vatican politics that's aimed at him. For that matter you can do it pretty well if it's anti-Vatican forces that are driving the hateful narratives, because being a Catholic in crisis of faith and having the people around you be hostile to that is not actually necessarily better for sanity.
--->Now depending on how bleak you want the story to be, you either continue this indefinitely (leaving the survivor to stare bleakly at a wall somewhere) or you have it happen for a While and then something changes/someone intervenes/some amount of refuge is found and you pursue that as much as you care to, as the author.
NB: again, this is me specifically aiming to PRESERVE the "everyone blames the survivor for his own suffering" etc thing - I'm not saying this is how I would tell a first-contact-with-Jesuits story, I'm just saying that even if the extreme whump is what you want, or if you are in a position where These Are The Things You Know About This Story And They Won't Change (something I do get stuck with sometimes, with stories!), okay, this is how you actually use plausible pressures and events to get there without being so jarring. And it wouldn't require a LOT of changes or a lot of extra scenes - a lot of these pressures/etc could be sketched in with fairly brief interactions or narrative bits.
BUT it sounds like some of the big things that all of this requires that the author doesn't have is a genuine understanding of how the Catholic Church and the Vatican operate in the political pressures of the world, and how both those external and the internal pressures of Vatican politics THEMSELVES play, as well as WHY this kind of victim-blame narrative gets going (it's not just . . . out of the blue, it's because of the ways that it serves the needs of those telling the story, either explicitly or subconsciously, either politically, culturally or emotionally or all of the above) - as well as the ways that space-exploration and first-contact are never NOT going to be subject to global political and cultural dynamics and pressures and power-plays?
It's not that you CAN'T get "weird little underprepared and inappropriate group goes out to make First Contact and it goes to hell and then for various reasons things are Horrific for the survivor even after he gets back to Earth" if that's what you want to write/what the story insists it is? You just have to know what you have to alter about the way the world works, what dynamics and structures have to somehow be accounted for/be bypassed in order to allow that to happen and to have that outcome. Which isn't that HARD to do in this case, but . . . yeah.
Really the most absurd and totally-unable-to-be-fixed element here is the idea that a Jesuit would not be having COMPLEX and intense and extremely densely literate theological conversations to himself about all of this shit throughout, including, even if he DOESN'T ask the aliens about faith-issues, WHY he's not and what he's attempting to figure out, and also the entire complex history of the Order of Jesus in terms of exploration, missionary work, contact with other cultures, and both its legacy and its current perspectives on that complex and blood-filled legacy. Especially since as I glance at the Wiki plot summary, there are THREE OTHER JESUITS AND A JEWISH LINGUIST ABOARD.
It also seems like the author has no idea what it would look like when someone with his background (all the way thru seminary, years of missionary work, etc) has a crisis of faith - not that they CAN'T, but that this is going to be a super high-level theologian's crisis. This is a crisis of faith that will have citations, footnotes, and will already know the literature on what his intensely intellectual-academic order has to say about the exact kind of crisis of faith he is having, including the Problem of Evil and so on.
(That's not to say it's not well possible for someone with that background and knowledge to just hit the wall of "fuck this, none of this is satisfactory anymore, what the fuck" from horrific experiences - they can! they do! but it doesn't look like what seems to be there from the description of the plot above, which is very "moderately educated lay-person has First Confrontation with the Suffering of Humankind and finds faith Shaken.")
. . . he would also not be under the delusion that the team they have is adequate to the purpose they're being sent on, and I would frame that as part of what puts STRESS on his faith both in the church and in God beyond it, as this would be an example of the Church pushing underqualified/underprepared people off to do something very dangerous, which let's be real, is not at all out of character for them!
Those bits are unfixable - you just have to change them. But I could frame up the traumatic horror and whump without a lot of plot change, I think.
ETA: tho tbh coming back to this having been reminded that it was written in 1996, a fewwww of the things that are quite egregious about the implausibility become less so.
They still aren't GOOD, but they take her from "what planet are you FROM" to "you are uncritically replicating a superficial gestalt of the culture around you." Bc tbh from a 1996 perspective (as I was literally first becoming AWARE of the issues at that time), it's honestly a lot less implausible to imagine that someone would assume that public reaction to Emilio would totally side-line the issue of rape and assume that his existence in the brothel made him a perverted slut; that's . . . more or less how we superficially framed prison-rape via jokes and comedy and even revenge fantasy, to a large extent. Even if the very initial experience was an attack, there was a lot of subtext that having gone through that experience, you now were that perverted slut, and kind of a lot of underlying sense that you wouldn't've had that first thing happen to you if you were sufficiently pure and manly anyway.
Likewise, the idea that people would understand how trauma works and that people in these situations would be traumatized and so on, even at baseline, is less solid in a 1996 frame - like it's not that there WEREN'T people who did, and who weren't doing absolutely critical work on the topic, there were. But if you're just Some Writer extrapolating 2019 (oh so many years from now!) and then 2031 or whatever, and YOU don't really know shit about trauma except what you intuit from human experience, I can see how it would not be obvious to you that we would have to be better at identifying it and handling it as a global species, and with it as part of our policies and so on, by that point in time.
It still implies "someone did not do any EXTRA research beyond what she superficially knew about these topics", but it's just that, rather than "are you from Mars, do you not understand how the world works".
Like I said, this doesn't take these issues into the realm of it being actually good, or even a fully plausible extrapolation from a place of grounded research, which I would want to do before launching into this kind of story, but I can see why a normal surface-level understanding would lead to an author extrapolating in these ways if they didn't. Add some lovely prose, and yeah, I could also see audience reactions being what they were.