Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  Anderson’s friendship with SNAP leaders Blaine in Chicago, David Clohessy and Barbara Dorris in St. Louis, and Peter Isely in Milwaukee, among others, formed an emotional rudder in his life. Their cause was his cause, their outrage his outrage. He had represented Clohessy, one of three brothers abused by the family priest, in a Missouri case that was thrown out for statute of limitations. One of Clohessy’s brothers became a priest who later abused youngsters; he left the ministry. Across the gulf of suffering, the two brothers had not spoken in years. The family was deeply splintered.

  “I wouldn’t know how much I’ve given SNAP,” Anderson told me, “or how much I have made or lost. I don’t focus on my own money … I’m committed to the same goals and purposes as SNAP. I help them do their advocacy because they help support our survivors in recovery and deliver a message in the court of public opinion. In these parallel universes our goals intersect. If they were another nonprofit, I’d do the same thing. It’s evolved into a loose collaboration.”

  Anderson had several times pushed his bank credit limit to the brink for the heavy costs in investigations and travel, and to lobby legislatures to open state laws on the time frame allowing victims to sue. Bishops attacked such legislation, arguing it would bankrupt their dioceses; defense lawyers accused Anderson of self-enrichment strategies. He had a gladiatorial approach. “From the New Deal to civil rights, the bishops were allied with social justice,” he continued. “Now they’re allied with the Republican Party, the insurance industry and U.S. Chamber of Commerce in trying to shut down legislative reform”—meaning laws to extend the statutes of limitations. Insurance companies paid heavily in many church settlements, though dioceses since the 1990s had resorted to self-insurance risk pools. Closing parishes to fund settlements, in his view, was a dodge: the church could raise funds to resolve these cases.

  “When a bishop testifies at a committee hearing, the politicians imagine 235,000 Catholic voters. Then the insurance representatives come in and they worry about rates going up. The Chamber of Commerce says these cases will kill business. Martin Luther King said the moral arc of time bends toward truth and justice. I see us trending toward greater awareness with attention on the Vatican.”

  His wife had a point: it was never really about the money. Battling the church was more about Jeff. He enjoyed what wealth brought—the vacation home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado; the elegantly appointed Rivertown Inn with the wraparound porch and Victorian porticoes he and Julie had renovated just up the street in Stillwater; the collection of religious art he had acquired in a spiritual awakening. But money was more of a means, a weapon to batter corrupted power. “You have to be kind of nuts, or willing to take an enormous amount of risk,” he opined on the phone between meetings in Chicago. “From a business standpoint, no one would have thought you could do it this way. I’ve taken a tremendous number of cases knowing the odds were against us. Of the cases I’ve filed, 40 percent have been knocked out for statute of limitations.”

  Born in 1947, he was raised outside St. Paul in a comfortably middle-class home with older and younger sisters. The family attended a Lutheran and later a Congregationalist church. “It made me feel constricted,” he recalled. His father, a furniture buyer, was deeply humanitarian, but quietly so; he recalls his mother as emotionally distant. “I don’t remember my childhood. I remember being cared for, but there was a lack of bonding I somehow internalized. Maybe some missing element in childhood explains my compulsive behavior.”

  After high school he entered Simpson College in Iowa. He was nineteen and deeply in love when his girlfriend, Patty, who came from a sprawling Catholic family, got pregnant. They married and had a son. Anderson left school, worked, then transferred to the University of Minnesota just in time for the revolution. His hair grew long, he smoked weed, he marched against the Vietnam War, hungering for a larger part in the 1960s social rebellion. After graduation and several low-wage jobs, he began night classes at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. By then they had an infant daughter, too. He flunked a course, scrambled for readmission, and found his stride in a criminal law class taught by Rosalie Wahl, a future justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. He thrilled to the idea of fighting the establishment by defending people on the margins. In a faculty-supervised poverty law clinic, he took the case of a black man accused of exposing himself in a church basement. Anderson argued that his homeless client was only looking for a place to pee. The judge agreed. “And I got something that day I’d never felt before,” he told me in his elegant office, flanked by pictures of Clarence Darrow and Dr. King. “A feeling of power, that I could make a difference in how society treats people.”

  Starting out as a criminal defense attorney, he established a practice with a former law professor that included personal injury work. In 1983 a blue-collar Catholic couple asked his help. Their twenty-five-year-old son, in prison for molesting a youngster, had revealed to them that he was abused as a boy by Father Tom Adamson. They had met with Auxiliary Bishop Robert Carlson, the chancellor of the Twin Cities archdiocese. Carlson offered mild compassion, and then sent a check for $1,500. “Cash it,” said Anderson. “And let me visit your son.”

  Gazing at the young inmate through the glass partition, he was touched by his sad naïveté, a quality he detected in many criminal clients. Anderson called the cops; they were powerless, the statute of limitations on Adamson’s crimes had lapsed. He knew of no lawyer who had sued the Catholic Church.

  Minnesota law allows a plaintiff to serve a complaint on a defendant before filing court papers. Discovery proceeds as an inducement to settle a case without notoriety or court costs. He sent his complaint to the archdiocese. Church counsel called immediately: what did he want? He wanted the priest removed from his parish. He soon got assurance that Adamson was yanked. The church wanted to settle. Anderson wanted to take the deposition testimony of Archbishop John Roach. His opposing counsel said no. Anderson threatened to file suit and call the media. He got the deposition, along with church files containing letters that documented how Adamson had crisscrossed dioceses and parishes trailed by sex abuse complaints. He took the deposition of a second bishop, Loras Watters of Winona. Convinced that both bishops had lied to him under oath about their knowledge of Adamson’s history, he probed deeper.8 The archdiocesan lawyer offered a settlement “in the usual way,” a signal to him that Adamson was not unique. The offer was $1 million to be paid in a structured annuity, a steady paycheck over many years.

  “Sick, scared, upset, and unable to sleep,” he says now of the offer as if it had been made yesterday, “I saw it as a huge amount of money.” His client had gotten out of prison when Anderson went to see him. He recalls crying as he explained the settlement offer, which carried a nondisclosure clause: hush money. Anderson asked him not to agree to that condition. “Jeff,” said the man, “turn it down—but turn it down quickly, before I change my mind.”

  He returned to his office, drafted a complaint, went to the courthouse.

  Filing the case made major news in St. Paul. The fall 1984 criminal indictment of Father Gilbert Gauthe in Lafayette, Louisiana, made bigger news. Gauthe accepted a twenty-year plea bargain in 1985; the diocese settled a dozen cases with the families of boys he had abused. Gauthe and Adamson were opposite faces of the same coin. Adamson was never prosecuted. The early Gauthe cases (many more would follow) settled, on average, for about $400,000 per victim. Anderson settled his case for $1.2 million as a structured annuity. Other Adamson victims called him. He settled those cases in the late 1980s for an average of $550,000, some $10 million in all, of which insurance companies paid about a third of the costs. Eventually he persuaded the Minnesota legislature to extend the statute of limitations for child abuse. Along the way, his marriage died because of his drinking and infidelity. Later, he met and married Julie Aronson, who was fourteen years younger than he. In 1992 Jeff Anderson had a year-old son, a lovely wife, a beautiful house, and a surging practice when his eighteen-year
-old daughter from his first marriage revealed that she had been abused at age eight by her therapist, an ex-priest. The man had since gone to prison. Throttled with guilt, Jeff Anderson resolved to be a better father. But he was rolling down a jagged hill, drinking so voraciously that on his fiftieth birthday he crashed: blacked out after a dinner with friends. When he awoke his second marriage was on the rocks.

  Anderson entered outpatient treatment and began attending AA meetings. As the rescuer peered into the wreckage of his drinking, he felt fear at the specter of something he could not control. The spirituality that kept all those Catholics glued to their church had a million forms, he realized; he wanted a spiritual base to overcome the lovelessness that drove his compulsive drinking. How does an agnostic find a higher power? His wife and AA allies helped, but it was a Catholic priest who really got him grounded.

  BROTHERS IN BATTLE

  Father Tom Doyle, the canon lawyer at the Vatican embassy, had lost his job, and a sure bet to become a bishop, because of the 1985 report he coauthored that warned the hierarchy of the abuse crisis. Doyle was a Dominican, and Dominicans are known for preaching; when reporters called, Doyle spoke his mind about the bishops’ inaction, his candor quotient rising like a critical mass. The cleric who had worn French cuffs at embassy functions and gone to White House lunches joined the air force as a Catholic chaplain. In 1988 he had unpacked his books in a cottage on an Indiana air base when a lawyer named Jeff Anderson telephoned. Doyle let him talk. A few days later he sent Anderson the ninety-three-page report he had written with lawyer F. Ray Mouton and psychiatrist Father Michael Peterson, which had gone to every bishop in America. The document was a smoking gun at that juncture for Anderson’s lawsuits.

  A disillusioned soldier of orthodoxy, Tom Doyle was on his own crash landing from alcohol. After hitting bottom, Doyle never blamed the Vatican or bishops; he accepted his powerlessness over drinking and refocused his spiritual life on the daily path of recovery. He accepted himself as a wounded healer. With a pilot’s license and membership in the National Rifle Association, Doyle was as conservative as Anderson was liberal. Tom Doyle became the brother Jeff Anderson never had, bonded in the struggle to live clean and take the battle forward. Doyle had become a priest to achieve closeness with God. Appalled by the hierarchy he had once served, Father Doyle counseled abuse survivors via phone calls and e-mail. Doyle’s reflections on spiritual integrity had a huge impact on the attorney, who had never had a confessor. Anderson, in turn, gave the rebel priest a new kind of power: as an expert witness in lawsuits he could use his knowledge to throttle the hierarchy for its transgressions of canon law—and moral values. Doyle considered the power structure toxic: prelates addicted to power, sheltering the guilty. Doyle was radical, from the Greek redux, meaning roots, first things. Sober as a judge, protected by his air force status from sanctions that diocesan bishops might take, he gave testimony in cases for Anderson and other lawyers as time allowed. In 2002 he received the Priest of Integrity Award from Voice of the Faithful, an upstart reform group. In 2003 the chief military archbishop, Edwin O’Brien, engineered his dismissal as a chaplain for an obscure technicality in canon law over which the air force had no control.9 In reality, it was payback. Doyle was forced out of the military chaplaincy, after nineteen years—one year short of qualifying for a pension.

  What the retribution against Tom Doyle signified in pettiness it made up for in shortsightedness: Doyle was a sure bet to fight back. He settled in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and began full-time work as an expert witness in clergy abuse cases. For that he was much in demand. Doyle was on a leave of absence from priestly ministry in 2010.

  Anderson’s turning point came when two brothers, James and Joh Howard, asked him to take their case against the diocese of Stockton, California. In the early 1980s, an Irish-born priest named Oliver O’Grady had ingratiated himself with the Howard family and molested four of the seven siblings. O’Grady also befriended a woman whose nine-month-old daughter suffered vaginal scarring from his abuse. In 1984 another family reported O’Grady to police. A church attorney told police O’Grady would have no more contact with children. Stockton bishop Roger Mahony sent him to a psychiatrist. O’Grady discussed his sexual attraction to boys. O’Grady had a “severe defect in maturation,” the psychiatrist wrote. “Perhaps Oliver is not truly called to the priesthood.”

  At Christmas 1985 Bishop Mahony sent O’Grady to a rural church, with parishioners unaware that the priest was a child molester. In 1993 O’Grady was convicted of lewd conduct with the younger Howard, Joh, who was then fifteen. O’Grady was in prison when the brothers contacted Anderson. The Minnesota lawyer needed a California cocounsel in order to function in the state court. He found his ally in Larry Drivon of Stockton, a highly regarded trial attorney from a prominent legal family. Drivon accepted the expensive, time-intensive preparation for a trial of this sort. Knowing that Jeff Anderson was in recovery, Drivon’s wife and sympatico friends helped him find noontime AA meetings during the trial.

  Roger Mahony was by then the cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles. He traveled the 9,058-square-mile expanse of his archdiocese in a $400,000 helicopter donated by Richard Riordan, a wealthy businessman and future mayor. Los Angeles was the most populous U.S. archdiocese and the wealthiest.10 John Paul II teased Mahony gently by calling him “Hollywood,” but the needling carried a message: the pope made him give up the helicopter.

  In the 1960s, as a priest in Stockton, Mahony befriended César Chávez of the United Farm Workers. He had served as the first chairman of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, a pro-labor state agency launched under Governor Jerry Brown in 1975. But Mahony’s political liberalism regarding Latinos and immigration issues never translated into theological liberalism, and his social awareness was tempered by a fealty to the church’s bottom line. As archbishop in the 1990s he scuttled an effort by the predominantly Latino gravediggers in Catholic cemeteries to organize themselves as a union. “Western Sequoia Corp., the commercial firm responsible for cemetery-plot sales that were once handled in-house by employees of the archdiocese, employs people on an ‘at will’ basis, meaning they may be terminated for any reason,” Ron Russell reported.11

  Speaking out against the death penalty and abortion, Mahony championed the rights of immigrants, while raising funds from some of California’s richest Republicans. In 1996 Mahony purchased a five-acre parking lot off the Hollywood Freeway for $10.85 million, the site for a new cathedral.12

  His ability to bounce back from criticism or bad press bestirred Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez to call him “the Teflon Cardinal.”13 Mahony, at six and a half feet, towered over Anderson at the 1998 trial in Stockton. Six months into recovery, the attorney felt raw, working late in preparing for each day in court. On the phone at night he drew comfort from Doyle’s words: You can do it. You’re not alone. A day at a time. Keep it simple.

  A 1976 letter in which O’Grady admitted to molesting a girl was in his personnel file. “I was not aware of that letter,” Cardinal Mahony told the jury.

  “Cardinal, if you had known that he admitted [to an earlier therapist] to touching a 9-year-old boy, would you have committed to him the full care of souls at the church at St. Andrew’s parish?” asked Anderson.

  “It’s a bit speculative,” answered Mahony. “In any and all cases we—if there’s a suspicion or problem—we refer to competent professionals to assist in making the recommendations. And if the competent professionals do not raise any flag or cautions or concerns, then we act according to their judgment.”14

  When the judge called a recess, the cardinal spoke with reporters in the hall. The proceedings resumed. “Cardinal,” began Anderson, “you were just out there speaking to the media. And you told the media, did you not, the following: ‘I thought when we placed O’Grady in the parish we did everything we humanly could have done to make sure there was no problem there.’ ”

  “Well I’m not sure that’s the e
xact words, but something similar … yes.”

  “At the time, Cardinal, did you talk to the police?”

  “No.”

  “You could have.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I could have. But—”

  “What was restraining you from calling the police and asking them about your priest?”

  “When I was told that an allegation had been made, thoroughly investigated, found to be wanting and dismissed, I had no reason to call the police.”

  “You could have sent Father O’Grady to a specialist, that is a doctor who specializes in the treatment and assessment of suspected offenders, correct?”

  “At that time I was really unaware that there were such specialists.”

  “You have an education in social work, correct?”

  “Yes,” said Mahony, who had a master’s from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

  “When you sent him to that parish you could have gone to the priest file and looked at what was in there about Father O’Grady, could you not?”

  “Yes.”15

  The jury returned a verdict of $30 million, $24 million of which was punitive damages against the church. A judge later reduced the award to $7.65 million, the largest on record for clergy abuse in a California trial.

  HOW THE LOS ANGELES ARCHDIOCESE GREW

  Born in 1936, Roger M. Mahony grew up in North Hollywood when it still had open fields. His father was an electrician with a poultry farm; the boy mingled with Mexican workers, picking up bits of Spanish, becoming bilingual as a young man. He entered the seminary at fourteen, advancing to the college level at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, set on a gorgeous estate sixty miles northwest of the city in Ventura County. “In seminary Roger was focused on Mexicans and wanted to work with them,” recalls a former classmate, Jerry Fallon, an ex-priest. “But he also had pretty thin skin when it came to criticism.”