Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  “In some dioceses,” said Manly, “if you’re not part of the sexual culture, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get choice assignments. No one can talk about it because the consequences for that person are catastrophic.”

  The darkness John Manly felt cut a sharp contrast with Pat Wall’s wit. Both men had the heft of football players from their younger years. Wall was rewriting his idea of faith with intrigue over each new document. “Roger Mahony is crucial to the Vatican,” he told me in 2010, by which time he had become a Buddhist. “He was one of the cardinals called to the Consistory for the Study of the Special Economic Problems of the Holy See”—a 1980 convocation under John Paul II to deal with Vatican deficits. “James Stafford, the archbishop of Denver, was on it; he’s in the Curia now. Cormac Murphy O’Connor of London was drawn in, and later Ed Egan from New York. These cardinals are some of the best money producers for Rome. Los Angeles pays the largest annual fee to Rome of any U.S. diocese. Factor in Peter’s Pence, and the special checks a cardinal takes on trips to Rome, there’s Roger.

  “Mahony has a big contract with Stewart Enterprises for management of the Catholic cemeteries,” said Wall. “They give a cut to the archdiocese on every funeral they do. Stewart was a big supporter of the new cathedral.36 Burials are a business for the church. If you’re a pastor, as I was, you’re inundated in winter—that’s the burial season. Spring is big for baptisms, summer for weddings. It’s the flow of life, the rise and fall of the rivers and rains. You can bet Mahony is laying his groundwork in Rome to make these abuse cases go away.”

  Mahony was indeed doing business in Rome, as several lawyers deduced from informal conversations with certain judges overseeing the negotiations. Of the three geographic groupings for the settlements—Clergy 1, in northern California; Clergy 2, in Los Angeles; and Clergy 3, in Orange, San Diego, and dioceses to the south—Clergy 2, with 554 cases, dwarfed the others. Mahony made presentations to the Third Office of the Congregation for the Clergy for the alienation of church property. Unlike Seán O’Malley, who had come empty-handed from Boston to Rome, Mahony dealt from a position of strength. The Vatican gave him great latitude on his handling of assets, for besides building the great cathedral, he had otherwise proved his mettle.

  GIRDING FOR BATTLE

  By spring 2003, eleven clerics had been indicted on criminal charges in Los Angeles. More than nine hundred civil claims were filed that year against California dioceses. The judges were pushing the settlement groups for mediation to avoid a system clogged with endless trials. These were not class action suits; still, coordinated proceedings with many clients move slowly. Besides the forty or so plaintiff lawyers, Hennigan had a large firm billing long hours on the many issues; the insurance companies that held liability policies of the dioceses had their lawyers. Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Don Steier represented accused priests. Procedural delays were strategic. Mahony also retained a public relations firm (with Enron among its clients) to help with damage control.37

  “The usual process in cases like this is to saddle up, start discovery, and get a trial date,” explained Steve Rubino, a New Jersey lawyer who had two decades’ experience in suing dioceses and religious orders. “Instead, we fought about what the discovery would be. The church claimed the priests’ files were off-limits because of freedom of religion. Then they challenged the state law under which we had filed the cases. It became a tsunami of paper.”

  Raised in a blue-collar Catholic home and a law school graduate of Catholic University, Rubino had started out as a prosecutor. He began a civil practice; on taking his first case against the church, he was appalled at the unprosecuted criminal behavior. Through a friendship with Tom Doyle he “joined this strange force, out of the church, into the church,” he told me one afternoon on the Atlantic shore, a short walk from his home. Unlike Jeff Anderson, the conservative Rubino turned down many cases with time-statute problems. The only thing I can get for you is money, he told the clients he did take on. What you’ve got to do is recover and learn to live well.

  “Mahony and Hennigan led certain of my esteemed colleagues to believe this would be paid by [insurance] carriers; we’ll settle all claims in six months,” bristled Rubino. “That played well with the judiciary. The judges didn’t want discovery in all of these cases: they wanted order and structure to the proceedings. When Mahony claimed First Amendment privilege, that foxed everything. We spent three years circling over whether we had a mediated package.”

  Rubino was allied with Kathy Freberg, Manly’s former law partner, on 156 cases and 37 perpetrators. “We said this is it, we know our future’s on the line, let’s do it,” Rubino remembered. “The only way to get a job done is to deal from a position of strength. The defense had an advantage in sheer manpower. We had to borrow $2 million each, and when I say we were in, I mean, we were deep in, like with houses, pets, trailers. A lot of lawyers are not willing to take those risks. I don’t begrudge them. The only thing the bishops respect is when you keep hitting them, all the time. You have to just stay in their faces.”

  Manny Vega spent Holy Week of 2003 on a hunger strike outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels with a sleeping bag and picket sign that said “You Can’t Hide the Truth from God.” A lady entering church hissed, “You’re a shame and an embarrassment.” Father Silva had fled to Mexico. (When a TV reporter found him, Silva denied abusing any of the eight men.) Refusing to shave, shower, or eat, Vega occupied his slice of sidewalk. On Good Friday, he was asleep on the concrete when Mahony appeared. Light-headed from lack of food, Vega stood up and stumbled. The cardinal gave him a steadying hand. “You need to take some nutrients,” said Mahony helpfully.

  “Would you have said that to César Chávez?” Vega shot back.

  Mahony winced at the reference to the farm workers’ legendary hunger strikes, and withdrew.

  Later, the cardinal came back, several times, to talk with Vega and a clutch of survivor-protesters. He apologized (though Silva’s abuses predated his time as archbishop); he gave them access to the cathedral restrooms. He offered rosary beads blessed by the pope, which Vega accepted, and later regretted, saying it made him feel bought off. Vega asked to meet one-on-one. Mahony said he could not, regretfully, for legal reasons.

  In June 2003 the roof caved in on District Attorney Steve Cooley and the lead prosecutor, Bill Hodgman. The U.S. Supreme Court in Stogner v. California, on a 5–4 vote, reversed a California law that enabled prosecutors, in certain circumstances, to pursue people for sex crimes committed far back in time. “Stogner killed us,” said Hodgman. Among those set free, Michael Wempe had gone through the seminary with Mahony. Wempe’s indictment on forty-three counts of child molestation was thrown out. His backstory is instructive.

  In May 1987 Wempe was accused of having sex with a youth. Mahony sent him to a clergy treatment center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, for six months. In 1988 he appointed Wempe a chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, confiding not a word on his background to hospital officials. Later that year, two young men complained to the archdiocese that Wempe had abused them as boys. He stayed on his job, undergoing therapy. From 1990 to 1995, he molested a boy in his hospital office. In 2002 Wempe was finally fired after his older transgressions made the news. Less than a year after Stogner, Wempe was charged in a new case. Without releasing Wempe’s treatment files, Mahony blamed the Paracletes’ facility in New Mexico, which was driven out of business by litigation in the midnineties.

  Mahony gave me a telephone interview on February 12, 2005, for a National Catholic Reporter profile. Hundreds of civil cases were grinding slowly forward. The cardinal insisted that the Paracletes’ “prognosis” was that if Wempe “continued his spiritual direction and counseling he was getting, that he would not reoffend. And they recommended that he serve in a limited capacity such as a chaplain to a hospital or a prison facility. At the time, I believed their prognosis to be accurate … It wasn’t until after he was taken out of ministry that some
one made a report that has been subject to criminal prosecution.”38

  Here was John Paul’s rationalization from the 2002 cardinals’ meeting, cemented into an alibi: the therapists are at fault, they gave us bad advice. What happened to moral standards for a religious life? Why were pedophiles recycled into ministries and church jobs with access to new victims? Mahony had unseemly proximity to several men like Wempe. Father Carl Sutphin lived in the same rectory with Mahony in two cathedrals over a span of seven years until a 2002 LAPD investigation of charges that Sutphin molested two sets of brothers, which caused the cardinal to force his retirement. Sutphin had been a classmate of Mahony’s at St. John’s Seminary on the hilly estate in Camarillo. In 1991 Mahony removed him from ministry when a Phoenix man said that Sutphin had abused him and his twin brother in the 1970s. Mahony sent Sutphin to St. Luke Institute in Suitland, Maryland, but did not report him to authorities; California at that time did not include clergy as “mandated reporters” of abuse. Sutphin came back to be chaplain in a retirement home. In 1995 Sutphin moved into the St. Vibiana rectory with Mahony, and on to Our Lady of Angels, until his 2002 removal.

  “Father Sutphin was another example of someone whose prognosis was favorable,” Mahony told me calmly. “One of his ministries had been dealing with men in jail, so the old cathedral rectory, which is right downtown near the jail, seemed to be a good place for him to be in residence, and certainly under supervision … We have absolutely no report of any reoffense on his part the whole time.” He seemed detached from the reality of what Sutphin had done.

  Monsignor Richard A. Loomis had been vicar of clergy with the responsibility to investigate sex abuse allegations in the 1990s. He was himself accused in a civil case, as Mary Grant, a California SNAP leader, wrote in a February 23, 2004, letter to the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Office of Child and Youth Protection in Washington, D.C.

  Although Msgr. Loomis was being sued for sexual molestation, the church deemed him innocent, largely because but a single accuser had come forward. On February 8 of this year, SNAP leafleted [Loomis’s] church, only to be mocked and scorned by parishioners. But the publicity from the event caused another victim of Msgr. Loomis to come forward, apparently with a story sufficiently credible to cause the removal of Msgr. Loomis from ministry on February 15, one week later.39

  “The case proves that our procedures are working,” Mahony said in his mild, unruffled way. “If there’s sufficient credible evidence and the board decides to recommend that he be taken out of active ministry, and they did in this case, I obviously concurred in their recommendation.” As to why SNAP had to leaflet in the first place, Mahony said, “You know, I can’t remember the exact sequences. A lot of these problems with civil suits filed in 2002–2003 are because we did not have names of victims or any way to talk to them.”

  “John Doe” names were routinely given to the church, attorneys told me.

  The archdiocese cited expenses of $4,871,000 “related to legal fees, and other costs related to sexual abuse claims in fiscal year 2004. As of September 30, 2004, the Archdiocese has received $4,070,000 in reimbursements of legal fees and settlements” from insurance companies—leaving $801,000 presumably covered by church funds. The insurance companies were reimbursing the expenses for Michael Hennigan’s white-shoe firm as part of the policy coverage. In January 2005 three insurers asked the court to relieve them of responsibility, on grounds that the archdiocese had withheld documents. In November California superior court judge Haley J. Fromholz, a yeoman figure in keeping the complex proceedings in motion, ruled for the archdiocese.

  In a 2004 Report to the People of God, Mahony stated: “I acknowledge my own mistakes”—but he did not explain them. The report summarized charges against several of the 113 priests and 130 religious brothers, deacons, and seminarians accused over seventy years. It said that 16 priests, unnamed, had been falsely accused. “My goal as your Archbishop is to do all in my power to prevent sexual abuse by anyone serving our Archdiocese now and in the future. Moving the healing and reconciliation process forward requires the fullest possible disclosure.”40

  The first survivors’ group, involving the Orange diocese, settled on December 3, 2004, with $100 million to eighty-seven victims. “We were up till two a.m. on December second, hashing it out on not settling for $99 million,” explained Steve Rubino. “Kathy Freberg, Ray Boucher, and I knew the $100 million mark was historical and it would drive up the value of the other cases. It took us four days to push the church and insurance lawyers to $1.2 million per case. It almost came to fisticuffs. We turned down $99,960,000 because it was $40,000 short. We wanted $100 million as a benchmark. We were in year three by then.”

  “Mahony put huge pressure on [Orange bishop] Tod Brown not to settle,” Boucher told me at the time. “Mahony was trying to shut us down.”

  But the Orange diocese, which had once been a part of the larger archdiocese of Los Angeles, had a $171 million investment portfolio and $23.4 million in cash to tap for the agreement. During the litigation Bishop Brown had suspended the fund-raising to build a new cathedral. A diocesan attorney announced that the sale of property, funds from cash reserves, and loans secured by church assets would raise the diocese’s portion of the settlement, shared with eight insurance companies. The Los Angeles archdiocese was still in negotiations with attorneys for 554 plaintiffs. Loyola of Los Angeles Law School professor Georgene Vairo remarked, “It’s like a market is being established for settlements and the price can go up or down.” Mahony’s lawyer, Hennigan, told the Los Angeles Times that some of the cases “will just break your heart,” and speculated that the fifty worst cases could reach jury verdicts of $5 million.41

  Those words were like a signal flare to the insurance lawyers. The only way to get insurance companies to settle was by proving it would cost more not to settle—gambling on a trial. Insurance covered wrongful acts from early years of a given policy. Few carriers insured churches for clergy wrongdoing anymore. Catholic dioceses sank funds into self-insured risk pools, and prayed for no new perpetrators. Still, the Orange settlements left a key issue unresolved: disclosure of church files on the perpetrators. SNAP leaders were relentless in the media about demanding that the church post all of the relevant clergy documents.

  In a complex agreement with the court, Mahony’s lawyers agreed to provide the plaintiffs with information summaries, called “proffers,” from the requested files. Soon afterward, the archdiocese filed a voluminous motion challenging the law under which the victims had sued. “We had a deal that they wouldn’t do that,” groused Boucher, sitting in his Beverly Hills office. “Hennigan is a consummate soldier. The guy will burn paper in his hands to show his loyalty. This is part of the appeasement of the insurance carriers.”

  A GIFT FROM ROME

  As Boucher locked horns with Hennigan in Los Angeles, Jeff Anderson was immersed in Bay Area preparations; the San Francisco archdiocese faced sixty cases. The strategy was to take the first few cases to trial, in hopes of inducing settlement negotiations. During the Easter week that Manny Vega protested at L.A.’s cathedral, SNAP members in San Francisco rallied outside Sts. Peter and Paul, the iconic church on Washington Square where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe posed for photographs after their 1954 wedding at City Hall.

  The North Beach parish was run by the Salesians of Don Bosco, an order founded in Italy in the nineteenth century with a special focus on the care of young people. The young DiMaggio played sports at the Salesian Boys’ Club. Now, as reporters gathered, the abuse survivors railed about the Salesians and their associate pastor, Father Stephen Whelan, who were defendants in a civil case Anderson and Rick Simmons had brought for Joey Piscitelli. As a fourteen-year-old at Salesian High in nearby Richmond, Piscitelli had drawn pictures of Jesus regurgitating on the cross and a priest leering at boys in the shower stall. Joey Piscitelli was fifty now: short, bearded, with sledgehammer intensity. “Whelan, the priest who molested me, is in that rectory,” he kept saying.4
2

  “It’s a spurious accusation,” Whelan told TV reporter Dan Noyes, who got a moment inside the rectory. The Salesians announced that Whelan had no contact with children, though he was still saying Mass. In the long buildup to the trial—which yielded a $600,000 verdict to him—Joey Piscitelli kept saying, “The priest who molested me is a block away from Bishop Levada, and he has left that priest in ministry with kids.”43

  Born in 1936 in Long Beach, William Levada had gone through the Camarillo seminary with Roger Mahony. As a young theologian he worked for Cardinal Ratzinger at the CDF in the early eighties. Back home in 1985, boosted by Mahony, he became an auxiliary bishop. A man of compact build with receding gray hair, Archbishop Levada lived in the rectory of St. Mary’s Cathedral around the corner from the Salesian provincial headquarters, which housed a religious brother who had served time for child abuse and three priests, dripping guilt from civil cases, who were beyond the statutory reach for criminal charges. Religious orders serve at the discretion of a bishop.