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 hen
news broke in 1992 that former Catholic priest James Porter, known
for years to Church officials as a predatory child rapist, had sexually
abused dozens of children during his clerical career, making his
the worst clerical pedophilia case in U.S. history, it was hard
to imagine how anything could get worse for the Church. But as American
Catholics have learned since the wave of clergy molestation lawsuits
began in 1985, new lows are always just around the corner.
Porter assaulted
many of the children while serving in the Diocese of Fall River,
Mass., which prompted the Boston Globe to report aggressively
on the assaults and the Church cover-up. Under fire, an angry Bernard
Cardinal Law, the archbishop of Boston, denounced the media for
what he believed was sensational reporting of the scandal. Later
that year, Law said in a Globe interview that his staff had
gone through past molestation cases the archdiocese had investigated
and found no cases that merited further attention or concern.
It wasn't true.
While Law was fulminating against the press and assuring the public
that all was well with his clergy, a Boston priest, Father John
Geoghan, was in the final years of a 36-year career, during which
he molested scores of children in at least three Boston-area parishes,
including a four-year-old boy and seven boys in one extended family.
Documents show that the archdiocese had long been aware at its topmost
levels of Geoghan's abuse of children. Law's predecessors knew about
this priest, and they made sure Law knew about him when he took
over in 1984.
Law nevertheless
approved Geoghan as pastor of St. Julia's parish, where he would
go on to molest more children. In 1989, following molestation complaints,
Geoghan, by then a veteran of institutions that treat sexually abusive
priests, went back into treatment. The archdiocese then returned
him to the parish, where he continued to molest kids. After leaving
parish work in 1993, Geoghan was assigned to the chaplaincy at a
nursing home, but continued to seek out and abuse children.
By the time
Geoghan was convicted in the first of three criminal trials in early
January, more than 130 people had come forward, claiming to have
been sexually assaulted by Geoghan when they were children. Though
the criminal statute of limitations has expired in nearly all of
the cases, the Church has paid millions to settle civil suits in
the Geoghan matter, and faces 90 more suits — none of which
are being contested by the accused priest, who was defrocked by
Pope John Paul II in 1998.
Following new
revelations in the Globe, Law gave an extraordinary January
9 press conference in which he apologized for his "tragically
incorrect" 1984 decision to continue Geoghan's ministry. The
cardinal claimed that assignment came after psychiatric and medical
evaluators cleared the known pedophile for parish work. He announced
a new "get tough" policy that would require all archdiocesan
employees to report suspected incidents of clergy sex abuse to civil
authorities.
Yet subsequent
reporting by the Boston Globe, based on documents made public
as a result of civil trials against the archdiocese, revealed that
Geoghan had been in his new parish for a month before the archdiocese
ordered his evaluation. And, reported the Globe, one of the
two doctors who gave Geoghan a pass had no psychotherapy credentials.
The other, a psychiatrist, had no experience treating sexual offenders,
and had himself settled a 1977 lawsuit in which a female patient
accused him of sexual molestation.
It gets worse.
Last year, pedophile Christopher Reardon pleaded guilty to 75 counts
of criminal molestation of young boys, some of whom he abused at
the office of the Boston-area parish in which he worked. Workers
in the parish testified before a grand jury that lawyers for the
archdiocese counseled them not to aid authorities looking into the
matter, out of concern that the sexual activities of Reardon's supervisor,
Father Jon C. Martin, would open the archdiocese to negligence claims.
The workers testified that they found condoms in Fr. Martin's bed,
and that he often had male overnight guests in his rectory bedroom.
If it can be proved that Fr. Martin was homosexually active, and
that that in some way caused him to be negligent in his supervision
of Reardon, the archdiocese could be in for another devastating
round of lawsuits.
Molesters and
sexual deviants among the Catholic clergy, episcopal negligence
and cover-up, stonewalling chanceries and empty claims that at long
last the Church is going to get serious about cleaning house: This
is, of course, not a new story. And that, say critics, among them
conservative Catholics loyal to Church teaching, is the real scandal.
An
Ecclesiastical Enron
"For God's sake, this is the umpteenth time something like
this has happened!" says one angry priest. "The Louisiana
case [that initiated the wave of lawsuits against the Church] was
1985! This is 2002! How does Law have the hubris to stand in front
of cameras and say that now, now he's come up with a policy?"
Accurate estimates
of the amount of money the Catholic Church has paid in damages and
settlements to victims of clergy abuse are impossible to come by,
but informed sources within legal and abuse-survivors' circles put
the number at between $600 million and $1.3 billion since 1984.
The Church is hemorrhaging both money and the trust of its members.
Morale among priests, the vast majority of whom serve with integrity,
has suffered. And many place the blame squarely at the foot of the
American bishops, whom they accuse of placing the "good"
of the institutional Church over the welfare of the flock.
"The bishops
have the mindset of company men," observes one priest. "Being
company men is fine when the company is on a growth curve. But not
when your company is Enron."
The analogy
to the disgraced energy corporation collapsing under the weight
of its leaders' own malfeasance may sound extreme, but consider
what happened in Dallas in 1997, when a jury returned a staggering
$120 million judgment against the diocese in a molestation case
egregious even by the abysmal standards of such matters. Church
officials, pleading that the Dallas diocese would be bankrupted,
convinced the plaintiffs to settle for $31 million instead. Had
the victims not agreed, the 400,000 Catholics in Dallas could have
witnessed the selling off of many of their schools and parishes.
"It is
disgusting. It is revolting. It tries your faith," says a veteran
clergyman, a Dallas native. "But priests who try to speak out
just get crushed."
The scandals
involving Porter and Geoghan are arguably the worst in modern times,
but they are by no means the only ones to receive national attention.
Consider these high-profile cases, all from the last decade:
The landmark civil suit in Dallas primarily involved Rudy Kos, a
former priest, who was convicted in criminal court of serial molestation
of altar boys, and sent to prison. During the trial, it was revealed
that Church officials were repeatedly warned that Kos was a danger
to children, and did nothing. After the verdict, Msgr. Robert Rehkemper,
former vicar general of the diocese, said in an interview, "No
one ever says anything about what the role of the parents was in
all this"; also that Kos's child victims "knew what was
right and what was wrong. Anybody who reaches the age of reason
shares responsibility for what they do." Michael Sheehan, the
seminary rector who was advised time and time again about Kos's
attraction to children, but allowed him to remain, continued to
rise in the hierarchy, and is now archbishop of Santa Fe.
In 1999, the Diocese of Santa Rosa, Calif., already paying out $5.4
million in child sex-abuse settlements from the early 1990s, shuddered
when DNA and taped evidence proved that Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann
had been having sex with one of his priests — a relationship
the priest claimed Ziemann forced on him with blackmail. It emerged
that Ziemann, who resigned, had lost millions of the diocese's funds
in shady investment schemes — fraud for which he was never
prosecuted because, said local law-enforcement officials, Church
authorities refused to cooperate with investigators.
wJohn Bollard, a former Jesuit seminarian in San Francisco, filed
a sexual-harassment lawsuit four years ago against the Society of
Jesus, claiming his superiors in the order pressed him constantly
for gay sex. When their claim to be immune for religious reasons
from sexual-harassment law failed, the Jesuits settled the suit.
The ongoing
crisis began, as a public matter, in 1985, when a Louisiana priest
named Gilbert Gauthe was convicted of molesting a number of boys
in the Diocese of Lafayette. On the heels of the Gauthe conviction,
the American bishops and heads of religious orders received a confidential
report co-authored by the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer working
in the Vatican embassy in Washington. The lengthy document warned
the bishops that the Gauthe case was likely to be only one of many,
and that if they didn't act swiftly and decisively to clean out
their stables, the Church could lose an estimated $1 billion over
the next ten years. It also cautioned that conventional methods
for treating pederasty are not effective.
The bishops
shelved the report and, by and large, took no action, Doyle says
today. Radicalized by the extent of the problem, the damage to victims,
and the hierarchy's inaction, Doyle sabotaged his ecclesiastical
career by speaking out on behalf of victims. He now serves as a
consultant to plaintiffs in civil suits. "Average people feel
totally powerless when it comes to the hierarchy," Doyle says.
"Every time I speak with a victim — and I've counseled
hundreds of them — I'm shocked by how deep the pain is. And
in every single case I've been involved with, I'm the first person
from the Church who has come to them with comfort."
It is true
that the hierarchy, nationally, hasn't been entirely unresponsive.
Some bishops have indeed mandated the reporting of suspected child
abuse by clergy to civil authorities. The national bishops' conference
recommended stricter guidelines in the wake of the Porter disaster,
and issued a committee report in 1994 offering further advice to
its members.
Some observers
believe that bishops have gotten better in recent years because
they've become more sensitive to the problem. A more cynical view
holds that they tightened up because they were scared of being financially
ruined by all the lawsuits.
Last June,
Edward Cardinal Egan and a representative of the Archdiocese of
New York's insurer met with priests to issue stringent new guidelines
for reporting suspected instances of sexual abuse by archdiocesan
employees. Yet the supposed new level of vigilance in the chancery
did not prevent a New York diocesan priest who had been named in
an ongoing sex-abuse lawsuit involving a minor in a Bronx church
from remaining in his Staten Island parish. Egan suspended the priest
pending the outcome of the lawsuit only after the New York Post
reported the allegations against him.
Three other
priests named in the lawsuit — all Carmelites — had been
taken out of the Bronx parish by the religious order responsible
for them. As of last summer, at least one was doing parish work
in his native Puerto Rico, and, when reached by phone by a Post
reporter, admitted that sexual molestation had taken place in the
Bronx rectory with the teenage plaintiff, but claimed that he had
not taken part.
Trouble
at the Top
Why does this continue to happen? For several reasons, priests and
others say. For one thing, Church law restricts the right of bishops
to move quickly against suspected pedophile priests. Says one canon
lawyer, "In all fairness to the American bishops, they tried
to get the Holy See to approve an expedited process for laicization,
but Rome didn't go for it." That's not necessarily a bad thing,
says Doyle, himself a canonist. Accused priests are entitled to
a fair hearing, a right that may in fact be more important than
ever, given the risk that false accusations in the current environment
pose to an innocent cleric's vocation. In fact, Doyle complains
that the guidelines newly promulgated by the Vatican ordering bishops
and religious superiors to refer sex-abuse cases directly to Rome
are a step backward. "It's an attempt to quickly solve the
problem to reduce liability. It actually further erodes credibility.
The accused priest will be tried in a secret tribunal in Rome. It
enshrouds the issue in more secrecy, and calls into serious doubt
whether these priests will receive due process."
Another reason
for the inaction, say priests, is that the kind of men who rise
to the episcopacy are generally not the sort who rock boats. "Most
bishops are very choice-averse," says Father G., a southern
priest. "They were chosen because they would do the things
that were not unusual." Says Father R., who serves in the Southwest,
"Priests and bishops see so much evil, it can deaden one's
sensibilities, so one doesn't have a normal kind of reaction."
Some argue
that the age of the American hierarchy has a lot to do with its
demonstrably poor ability to handle these problems. Most bishops
today were formed in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, before the widespread
loss of faith and the turmoil of the sexual revolution. They have
been temperamentally and psychologically unable to adapt to changing
social realities, particularly the post-conciliar idea that the
life and governance of the Church must be more open and accountable
to the laity.
Others attribute
the failure of bishops to act firmly in these matters to a bureaucratic
reliance on experts and committees as a way of diffusing responsibility
for difficult or unpopular decisions. In Boston, this dovetailed
tragically with the culture of therapy, which medicalizes the problem
of radical evil and disables the common sense of men, like Cardinal
Law, who know better. Washington lawyer Charles Molineaux, a Knight
of Malta who called for Law's resignation in a recent Wall Street
Journal column, observed that "after 2,000 years of experience
with sin and recidivism," it is surprising that the Church
allows itself to be guided in these grave matters by trendy psychotherapy.
Then there
is old-fashioned clericalism, in which bishops, particularly older
ones, reflexively defend priests as if they were their sons. And
finally, the concepts of mercy, redemption, and humility come into
play. "What I have seen — and I have experienced this
myself — is, you don't like to judge other priests," says
a priest who is a top administrator in an East Coast diocese. "We
all have some kind of failing. The first thing an accused priest
says to a bishop is, 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.'
They know from history that almost every priest has a weakness of
some kind, not that they've acted on it. So when a priest says something
like that, the bishop thinks, 'Well, I'm not perfect either.'"
Take the case
of Bishop J. Keith Symons, 68, who resigned in 1998 as the head
of the Palm Beach, Fla., diocese after five men came forward to
accuse him of having molested them decades earlier, when they were
altar boys in his parish. Symons admitted the charges and left his
post. Two years later, to the dismay of victims'-rights groups,
Symons resurfaced in Michigan, living in a convent and conducting
spiritual retreats for adult Catholics.
When the activist
group Roman Catholic Faithful discovered that an admitted child
molester was quietly allowed by the bishop of Lansing to resume
ministry, it alerted the media, which reported the story. Not only
did the Lansing bishop defend his action, but the bishop emeritus,
Kenneth J. Povish, denounced RCF in a newspaper column as a "self-appointed
vigilante group" and praised the pederast bishop as a "wounded
healer" who is "likely to do an excellent job."
A
Protection Racket
One disturbing facet of this willingness to overlook serious sexual
sin, say a number of priests and seminarians, is the existence of
a discreet but powerful homosexual network within seminaries and
chanceries. A. W. Richard Sipe, a psychiatrist and former Benedictine
monk who has treated scores of sexually abusive priests and has
written extensively about the phenomenon, says that the reality
of the gay network is well known to clerics and others closely familiar
with the workings of the Catholic Church, though difficult to prove
from public sources.
"I've
reviewed over 100 cases of sexual abuse by priests. In there you
get the documentation, which unfortunately often gets sealed by
the Church after they settle the cases," says Sipe, who is
an expert witness in abuse cases. "It's very clear that you
can trace [the network], one person to another, through a sequence
of appointments, the sequence of who follows whom in what position,
and how they got there. It is a fact, and nobody can sincerely deny
it." A typical pattern involves a priest becoming sexually
involved with a seminarian or younger cleric, and then the junior
man following his elder up the diocesan hierarchy. Sipe and others
interviewed say this "bond of secrecy" introduces the
possibility of blackmail: Those in positions of authority are prevented
from acting against others because they themselves are compromised.
It's a form of mutually assured destruction.
For the last
decade, Church officials around the country have been moving quietly,
with some success, to reform the worst of the so-called "pink
palace" seminaries. "It's not official policy, but it
would be very hard for a man with a homosexual orientation to get
into the seminary here," says a top administrator in a major
archdiocese. "Everybody knows it has been a problem, and bishops
are trying to clean it up. But you can't say that officially, because
it will blow up in your face."
A quiet policy
of excluding homosexuals may not please liberal Catholics, whose
names and phone numbers tend to be in reporters' Rolodexes. Some
dissenting Catholics capitalize on sex-abuse scandals to agitate
for their pet causes, including an end to priestly celibacy. (There
is no evidence to suggest that celibacy turns normal people into
pedophiles — and there's plenty of evidence that married men
can be pedophiles as well.)
If orthodox
Catholics want to force positive change on the hierarchy, they can
speak out-loudly. The Rev. Charles Fiore, an outspoken conservative
priest in Wisconsin, says, "Change is going to come only when
the laity stands up and says, Enough." Tom Doyle believes the
most significant development since 1985 has been an increased skepticism
of the hierarchy on the part of lay Catholics, many of whom no longer
trust the bishops to do the right thing by their children, and will
hold the bishops' feet to the fire on these matters. And this often
means being uncowed by the bishops' stature, and unafraid to appeal
to law-enforcement authorities and the secular media for remedy.
When Roman
Catholic Faithful uncovered a secret pornographic website for gay
priests and clergy, it documented the names, photographs, and writings
of the participants and sent the information to members of the Church
hierarchy. "Nothing was done about it, so we made all the information
public on our website," RCF president Steve Brady says. "The
press coverage got the site taken down, and some of the priests
in trouble."
Lay Catholics
should demand more openness from the institutional Church. Dioceses
should open their books to laymen as a matter of accountability
and oversight. Doyle, who as counselor to many victims is privy
to settlement details, says the people in the pews "would be
absolutely shocked to discover how much of their money was being
paid out on these settlements."
Similarly,
given how poorly the institutional Church has policed itself, there
should be lay boards to review diocesan personnel files to make
sure sex abusers aren't being concealed. "I don't want to hear
about another new policy until someone says to me that someone other
than the fox guarding the henhouse has examined the files,"
says lawyer Steve Rubino, a leading victims' attorney.
Restoring the
Church's credibility also depends on the bishops' being less lawyerly
and more Christian. Johnnie Cochrane didn't come to save the world,
Jesus Christ did. This means seeing those who have been raped or
molested by priests as suffering souls in need of pastoral care,
not moneygrubbing plaintiffs who deserve the brass-knuckles routine.
One parish
priest says he will never forget the day he realized his former
boss, an East Coast bishop (now retired), was a true man of God.
"We had to meet with a family whose child had been abused by
one of our priests. When we sat down face to face with them and
the lawyers, we told them that the bishop had said his first priority
was to do the right thing. We told them our investigation had found
that the priest was guilty, but that he had never been in this kind
of situation before. We had removed him from any further parish
involvement. We told them that we didn't believe we had been neglectful,
but we wanted to help the family in any way we could, because we
recognized lives had been damaged, and we were profoundly sorry.
And that was the bishop's position.
"I looked
across the table, and the family was crying," the priest recalled.
"The father said, 'Thank you. We never wanted to persecute
anybody. That was all we wanted to hear.'"
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