Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  The Camarillo seminary’s huge Spanish colonial library sat on a hilltop with a roof-level loggia. This was a gift of Estelle Doheny, the widow of Edward L. Doheny who had made a fortune in Mexico’s oil fields in the early 1900s.16 In 1921 Doheny gave $100,000 to Interior Secretary Albert Fall, who was imprisoned for bribery in the Teapot Dome scandal. Doheny avoided prison after a ten-year court battle. Irish-born archbishop John Cantwell cultivated Doheny. Doheny, who was second-generation Irish, became Cantwell’s largest donor. The American church was like a trunk of Ireland with branches spreading west.

  But racial and cultural blending—and geopolitical maneuvering—shaped the great western city from its beginnings. The first official settlement, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles—City of Our Lady of Angels—was founded in 1781 by the Spanish crown to counteract the presumed territorial claims of Russia, which had trading posts and forts down the California coast with names such as Sebastapol. The Spanish governor recruited colonists to a pueblo along the Los Angeles River north of Mission San Gabriel—eleven families, who were headed by two Spaniards, four Indians, two blacks, and three men of mixed race. None of the wives was white; most of the twenty-two children were a mixture of Spanish, Indian, and African blood. In 1821, when Mexico won its independence from Spain, California and much of today’s Southwest fell under Mexico City’s nominal control. After the U.S. defeated Mexico in 1848, America claimed all the land north of the Rio Grande, extending out to the Pacific Ocean.17

  Flush with the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills, California became the thirty-first state in the Union, admitted as a nonslave state in 1850. California’s motto was Eureka—“I have found it.” People with gilded dreams came from every corner of America and Europe; after the Civil War, jobs building the railroads drew laborers from Canton Province in China to County Cork in Ireland. A century after the founding of the pueblo at Los Angeles, in the city to the north, San Francisco, some 27 percent of the voting-age populace was Irish-born. Long after the gold fields played out, the ethnic pilgrims kept arriving in Los Angeles. As the population grew, farms became subdivisions. L.A.’s population between 1910 and 1930 grew from 319,000 to 1.24 million, of whom 100,000 were Mexicans who had fled the Revolution of 1910, followed by refugees from the late 1920s Cristero Rebellion.18 Cantwell took in three dozen exiled bishops from Mexico and established fifty Hispanic parishes. The Cristero war so central to Maciel’s identity colored Los Angeles, too. In 1934, writes historian Mike Davis, “Cantwell organized the largest demonstration in Los Angeles history: a giant procession of 40,000 people, many of them Cristero refugees, chanting ‘Viva Cristo Rey’ and marching behind banners that denounced the ‘atheistic regimes in Mexico City and Moscow.’ ”19

  In 1947, when Cantwell died, Cardinal Spellman of New York recommended his chancellor, James F. McIntyre, to the Vatican. “Lean and taciturn, with the neat gray hair and rimless glasses of a corporate chieftain, McIntyre was a gifted administrator and rock-hard conservative, who fit perfectly with the Los Angeles Protestant establishment,” writes Charles R. Morris. A brokerage executive before his call to ministry, Archbishop McIntyre faced frenetic postwar growth as white Catholics moved into greater Los Angeles at a rate of one thousand per week. Stopping plans for a new cathedral, McIntyre went on to open more than one hundred new parishes and nearly twice as many schools, a seminary, and half a dozen hospitals. This construction agenda stemmed from adroit decisions in real estate, scouting land before housing subdivisions were built, buying tracts and selling the excess to fund new parishes or schools.20

  In a 1954 report to the Holy See, the cardinal explained that his parishes’ indebtedness was $15 million, but only $5.5 million of that was owed to banks. As a corporation sole, the cardinal outlined his strategy for Pius XII:

  1. In the name of the parish, the money is borrowed from a local bank, the parish giving a promissory note as security. The Corporation Sole then signs this note as a guarantor. This is the only security the bank has.

  There is no mortgage placed upon the parish property. The parish then pays the loan by payments at specified times and obtains this money from the general income of the parish.

  2. It is the custom of the archdiocese for parishes to deposit in the Chancery Office surplus moneys which they may possess. This would happen, for example, if a parish were accumulating moneys which they may possess with the intention of erecting a new building a few years hence … The Chancery Office, in turn, lends this money to other parishes.

  This constitutes a substitute for borrowing from the bank. It also places the Chancery Office in somewhat the position of a bank, at least to some of the parishes.21

  Unlike Eastern and Midwestern dioceses where ethnic churches anchored urban villages a few blocks apart, the Los Angeles archdiocese was a huge landmass spread over four southern California counties. McIntyre foresaw the patterns of freeways tied to real estate development; he spaced out churches at some distance from one another to create large flocks. The city’s 1948 population of 3,961,800 nearly doubled to 7,110,796 in just twelve years; besides the Anglos, Mexicans and Central Americans came to work the fruit and vegetable fields that provided 40 percent of the domestic market.22 McIntyre’s careful grid approach stood the test of time well. In 2004 the preeminent California historian Kevin Starr wrote:

  In Pacoima, Father Tom Rush of Mary Immaculate parish, whose congregation had grown to the point where 8,500 parishioners were attending one of ten masses every Sunday (seven in Spanish, three in English), was completing a $3.2 million renovation and expansion of the parish church and school.23

  McIntyre in the 1960s had bitter clashes with Latino activists, black protesters, and nuns inspired by Vatican II. His successor, Timothy Manning, was a more flexible prelate. Manning gave the vicar general, Monsignor Robert Hawkes, a major hand in financial control. “Hawkes was feared by many priests,” a church insider told me, “for his power and absolute control of money.”

  “As Manning’s vicar general, Hawkes handled dozens of accusations against clergy predators, mostly by covering them up,” explains John Manly, a prominent Orange County attorney in clergy abuse litigation.

  Hawkes was also a pederast. “He paid boys he abused to work at rectories and secured scholarships at a Catholic high school to keep them silent,” says Beverly Hills attorney Anthony Demarco, who represents one of the victims.

  In 1985, when Mahony became archbishop, he fired Hawkes, although no reason was publicly given. Hawkes died soon thereafter. His probate shows that he left $30,000 cash and about $100,000 in property, most of which went to relatives.24 He also left behind at least three youths he sexually abused.25

  The first native Angeleno archbishop, Mahony came from Irish stock. “I didn’t see Fresno as his career move,” says Jerry Fallon. “Most priests were against César Chávez. Farmers donated heavily to churches in the San Joaquin Valley.” Mahony publicly supported the highly religious Chávez, while privately recycling the pedophile O’Grady, which was an internal matter.

  In 1991 John Paul made Mahony a cardinal. With his imposing height, dark eyes, and handsome face, Mahony had the social ease to charm the wealthy who gave and gave again. Among them were the hotelier Baron Hilton; Bob Hope’s wife, Dolores; Richard Riordan, the future mayor; and Daniel Donohue, president of the Dan Murphy Foundation (based on his father-in-law’s fortune). Donohue held a knighthood bestowed by Pius XII for donations to the Holy See; he liked being called Sir Daniel. In the 1940s his wife, Bernardine, gave $250,000 to St. Vibiana Cathedral.26 When a 1994 earthquake jolted St. Vibiana, Mahony wanted to demolish and rebuild; preservationists blocked him. He pitched a world-class cathedral to civic leaders on the site off Hollywood Freeway. The Rupert Murdoch Family Foundations gave $10 million. The Wall Street Journal called it “one of the five most significant building projects in the country.”27

  Mahony was an avatar of the building bishops of yesteryear, raising the $190 million for the
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, immersing himself in the aesthetic and construction details. Los Angeles was growing into its past as a vast Mexican city outside Mexico, now encompassing a mosaic of Asians, Filipinos, and Latinos from Central America. The city was also a case study of national problems that seemed insoluble: a choked infrastructure, dysfunctional public schools, the yawning maw between wealth and poverty, gang killings in drug-infested barrios, and the recurrent plague of national disasters—fires, droughts, mud slides, earthquakes—so severe they at times seemed biblical.

  But like the city it served, the church under Cardinal Mahony was a study in resilience. When he gave his shocking 1998 testimony in Stockton, the archdiocese had 287 parish programs for 4 million Catholics. The previous eight years had seen parishes generate a $299 million surplus to fund renovation or new buildings.28 Each parish paid for its schools. The cardinal was immersed in the final stages of the new cathedral when the Boston scandal broke in January 2002.

  MAHONY IN CRISIS

  As the media coverage intensified, Jeff Anderson got a call from a southern California police officer named Manny Vega. A decorated marine veteran, Vega said that he and guys he had grown up with in his hometown, Oxnard, were abused as kids by Father Fidencio Silva. Oxnard lies about halfway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. On Easter Sunday in 2002, Anderson and Drivon made the 345-mile trek from Stockton to meet with the survivors’ group—eight Latinos, including a probation officer, a social worker, cops, and a lawyer. Anderson explained the statute of limitations hurdle; he wanted to help them seek redress. On the long drive home, Anderson fumed, “We need a window in the law.”

  “Hell yes!” said Larry Drivon, who had political contacts. “Let’s go do it.”

  Manny Vega’s family had come from Yucatán; his father was a bracero, a field-worker who had come legally to postwar California and eventually gained citizenship. Father Silva began abusing the boy sexually in sixth grade, and took nude photos of him. As Manny heard kids play outside, he felt dirty inside Our Lady of Guadalupe rectory. To keep the boy from telling anyone of his ordeal, Silva drummed into him the story of Judas, betrayer of Jesus. For years Manny Vega kept silent, shame growing like a tumor.29 Sorrow lanced his memories of praying with his parents as a boy. As a man he couldn’t take his own two kids to church, he couldn’t step inside a church. At the state capitol in Sacramento, Manny Vega, an Oxnard police officer of the year, sat down with State Senator Martha Escutia, the head of the powerful Latino caucus. She was appalled to learn what the priest had done, that Vega had no legal recourse. Escutia arranged for a group of survivors to give committee testimony. Drivon knew they needed more help to move a bill of this scope through the legislature; he introduced Anderson to Ray Boucher, one of the state’s leading trial attorneys. Boucher had good political contacts and superb experience as a class action litigator. Boucher’s law firm in Beverly Hills was in a two-story building with about forty employees. All three men knew that if the bill passed, their small firms faced a daunting commitment of time and money. The legislation sailed through, giving victims—regardless of when they had been abused—one year starting on January 1, 2003, to sue the responsible party.

  In response to the bishops’ youth protection charter of June 2002, Mahony cast himself as a reformer. “If priests are indicted and some end up in prison or whatever, that’s going to be very sad for them, for the church,” Mahony asserted. “But if that is required to move beyond, that’s what we’re going to have go through.”30 The cardinal hired J. Michael Hennigan, one of L.A.’s priciest white-collar criminal defense attorneys, to blunt the criminal subpoenas seeking personnel files of priests. Reading the Boston Globe, and Ron Russell’s investigative reports in New Times (L.A.), Head Deputy District Attorney William Hodgman viewed Mahony as a possible case of obstruction of justice. “There is an inevitability to this investigation,” Hodgman told L.A. Weekly. “It’s like Watergate unfolding. We’ll work from the ground up. We will get documents and we will put priests in jail.”31

  In response to the budding criminal probe, Mahony formed a Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board with thirteen members, mostly laypeople, and three former FBI agents on call to investigate any charges that might arise. He instituted a Safeguard the Children Program for eighteen thousand church and school employees. But if his reforms and rhetoric suggested an outstretched healing hand to people hungry for justice, his other fist gripped a shield. Mahony and his lawyers knew that the decision of one judge in Boston had released clergy files to the Globe, and that as a result Cardinal Law’s reputation lay in wreckage.

  Sizing up the media dynamics, Roger Mahony launched the most expensive legal battle in American church history to thwart subpoenas for files of accused priests. He would not sit still as prosecutor Bill Hodgman’s staff investigated his own complicity in shielding crimes. The assertion that clergy files were privileged under freedom of religion, which the Boston court rejected, became the ramrod issue in Los Angeles, stalling the criminal and civil cases in a legal saga that would run for many years.

  A Los Angeles Times investigation in late summer 2002 mapped out a chronology of priests who had been reassigned after going to treatment facilities, while the church evaded or ignored police—a pattern of hierarchical behavior well documented in Louisiana, Minnesota, Illinois, New England, New York, Texas, and elsewhere. The priests’ photographs resembled mug shots. “I’m just horrified by this whole thing,” Mahony said. “You get the cross that comes your way, and this obviously for me is a very heavy cross.”

  The Times identified 32 parish priests and one deacon who, since Mahony’s arrival in 1985, have been accused of molesting minors. Seven of the clerics were dismissed by the cardinal in February, six fled, three have been convicted of sex crimes and 17 are under criminal investigation by law enforcement. The Times examination also included more than 100 interviews with church officials, law enforcement authorities, alleged victims and their attorneys.32

  The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels opened on September 2, 2002, to a choir singing “Ode to Joy” as Nigerian and Scottish drummers, a family carrying the relics of saints, a train of bishops wearing robes of watered silk, then priests, deacons, nuns—some seven hundred religious figures—moved in stately procession past the three-story bronze doors into a space of soaring beauty. “The fulcrum where the secular and sacred are joined for the glory of God and the good of the city,” wrote Larry B. Stammer in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Mahony called it “a symbol evocative of the deepest aspiration and hopes of the whole polis, the whole people of Los Angeles, the earthly city yearning for consummation, the completion yet to come in the new Jerusalem.”33

  The legal front focused on a subterranean city, as suggested in the 1998 Stockton trial. Jeff Anderson and the gathering army of lawyers knew that clergy records would excavate another California, a Catholic terrain of memory, laden with a hidden history of sexual crimes perpetrated on hundreds of youngsters like Manny Vega. Ray Boucher, who had been an altar boy in New England, became the lead plaintiff attorney to negotiate with the archdiocesan counsel, Mike Hennigan, in Los Angeles. The culmination of the 2003 Boston cases—$85 million for 542 clients—averaged out at $156,000 per plaintiff. California dioceses were well financed, with solid real estate holdings and insurers’ deep pockets. As the lawyers signed up clients, the cathedral stood for the presence of Christ in time, a structure of breathtaking beauty—Mahony’s symbolic legacy.

  The archdiocesan annual budget of $116 million was nearly half that of the Vatican. Less than a month after the glowing coverage of the cathedral opening, Mahony cut the budgets of seven church programs “to close a $4.3 million deficit … [with] layoffs of roughly 60 employees,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Five of Mahony’s top assistants resigned in frustration.

  Mahony and other archdiocesan officials have said that the cuts in the budget were needed to close a deficit caused by losses in the stock market. Others have pointed to the c
hurch’s need to set aside money against the future costs of sexual-abuse settlements.34

  While Jeff Anderson was on a journey toward spirituality, John Manly’s faith was crumbling. His law firm was in a high-rise office near John Wayne Airport in Orange County. A Republican who had built a practice on real estate law, Manly had gone through Catholic schools and attended retreats as a University of Southern California undergraduate. After serving as a naval intelligence officer, he went to law school. He and his wife had four children. “There is an evil in all this,” Manly brooded in a December twilight of 2004, with a panoramic view of gleaming malls and manicured streets. “We have clients in Alaska who went through stuff that is mind-boggling to someone like me.”

  In 1996 Manly and Irvine attorney Katherine Freberg had taken the case of Ryan DiMaria, age twenty-one, who was battling alcoholism in the aftershocks of being molested by Father Michael Harris, a popular high school principal from whom he had sought counseling as a teenager, after a friend’s suicide. DiMaria told a priest how Harris had abused him: Father G. Patrick Ziemann, the scion of a prominent area family, and a seminary friend of Mahony’s. Mahony, in the meantime, arranged for Ziemann to become bishop of Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco. Ziemann squandered the diocesan treasury, left a $16 million debt, and resigned in 1998 when a priest sued him, alleging he coerced him to provide sex. To prevent Mahony from testifying in the DiMaria case, the Orange diocese settled for a whopping $5.2 million, and agreed to eleven demands made by DiMaria and his attorney, notably, a zero-tolerance policy on abusers. In time, Ryan DiMaria became an attorney representing victims. Harris, the perpetrator, left the priesthood but was never prosecuted.

  John Manly’s firm had one hundred abuse clients. His chief researcher, Patrick Wall, was a brilliant canonist who had quit the Benedictine priesthood in Collegeville, Minnesota, after five parish assignments, each one replacing a pastor who had stolen money or abused children. Wall had recently moved to California when he saw Manly quoted in the press. He called in hopes of sharing a few things he knew. Manly hired him on the spot. Now married, with a child, Wall was a sleuth when it came to church documents—and had become an Episcopalian by 2003. Another expert witness, Richard Sipe of La Jolla, was a psychotherapist and former Benedictine priest who had written books on celibacy. In their overlapping research, Sipe, Wall, and Tom Doyle, with ten advanced degrees among them, formed a brain trust for Jeff Anderson and John Manly. The trio collaborated on Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes, a history of how church laws responded to systemic clergy sexual abuse and the hierarchy’s latter-day reliance on psychiatric treatment facilities.35