As parents, the Gastals understood the shame, guilt, and fear Gauthe had instilled in their child and worried that other boys might be harmed in the future if the public didn’t know about what had happened. They chose a Cajun lawyer named J. Minos Simon to raise the alarm.
Theatrically gifted and relentlessly aggressive, sixty-two-year-old Simon fancied white suits and broad-brimmed hats and enjoyed hunting alligators with a handgun. As a child he had lived on the edge of a Louisiana swamp in a house without indoor plumbing, and he didn’t speak much English outside of school. Simon went to college after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps and then graduated from the law school at Louisiana State University.
After he passed the Louisiana bar, Simon found he was shut out of a local legal establishment that was inclined toward quiet deals that benefited the powerful and preserved the status quo. Left to practice on his own, he became famous with a suit against the governor that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. There he won a ruling that limited the state’s power to investigate labor unions. Confident in the extreme, Simon was a hero to fellow Cajuns like the Gastals and a nightmare for opposing counsel. He was so uncompromising and unpredictable that his letterhead was enough to jangle the nerves of anyone he targeted with a lawsuit. When Bishop Frey received notice that the Gastals wouldn’t accept a settlement and Simon was suing the diocese on their behalf, he immediately dashed off another report to Washington.
On the day when Frey’s update arrived at the embassy, Tom Doyle took it to Pio Laghi but saw that his boss didn’t quite grasp the seriousness of the matter. In the ambassador’s experience, no one actually sued the Catholic Church and problems like Gauthe’s crimes were resolved in private. Doyle, who understood the limits of Catholic power in America, tried to explain how the case could become a big scandal.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “In America this can happen.”
Laghi still didn’t seem to catch on. Too busy for a civics lesson, he told Doyle to contact the Lafayette Diocese, learn what he could, and report back.
Doyle’s first call to Lafayette was answered by a monsignor named Henri Alexandre Larroque, who was so matter-of-fact about the ghastly facts that Doyle wondered if there was something wrong with the man. In the days that followed he noted, with some shock, that besides the Gastal civil suit the Lafayette diocese was implicated in a criminal case that would be brought against Fr. Gauthe by local prosecutors who believed he had assaulted several boys. (Among them were some who had settled unlitigated complaints against the diocese.) Neither Doyle nor anyone he consulted could recall a case in which a Catholic priest had been charged in criminal court with abusing many different children. For the Church the big danger in all this lay in the scandal that might emerge as lawyers used the legal process called “discovery” to pry documents out of diocesan files and to compel testimony, under oath, from priests, even bishops.
In late summer the press in Louisiana began reporting on the Gauthe cases. Doyle found himself dumbfounded by the way that Frey and Larroque handled things. Every time he spoke with them they minimized the extent of the problem and downplayed the risk faced by the Church. Worse was the almost flippant way Larocque spoke about the kids.
“By the way, what are you doing for the boys?” asked Doyle before ending one of his chats with Larroque. As Doyle would recall it, Larroque’s response was succinct, if disappointing.
“As far as I know, nothing.”
* * *
If Tom Doyle was taken aback by Larroque’s casual attitude and his lack of interest in Gauthe’s victims, he was alarmed by what he learned from Michael Peterson about the overall problem of pedophilia and the priesthood. Fr. Peterson, who ran a small mental health treatment center for clergy, was both a priest and a psychiatrist. These roles made him the obvious man for Doyle to consult about Gauthe. Conveniently, his clinic was located in a Washington suburb ten miles away from the Vatican embassy. Named the St. Luke Institute, Peterson’s clergy treatment center was one of several that operated quietly across the country. By offering care only to ordained men, these clinics assured patients of their privacy and helped the Church to keep secret the extent of its problems with troubled priests. Few outside the circle of clergy and therapists even knew such institutions existed.
During their very first conversation Peterson told Doyle that in the past, priests and bishops with sexual problems were routinely diagnosed with depression, alcoholism, or some other, less stigmatizing problem. In therapy some of these men would eventually refer to sexual misconduct, but Peterson suspected that far more kept these behaviors secret. They preferred to say they were alcoholics, or even drug addicts. Anything to avoid being labeled a sexual deviant. Nevertheless he was seeing an increasing number of priests referred by their bishops after they had been directly accused of some sort of sexual impropriety or crime that could not be readily denied. As a priest, Peterson believed these men had betrayed their victims in profound ways. As a physician he was compelled by the challenge of finding a way to bring their behavior under control.
Peterson had first become interested in the persistent quality of sexual compulsions during a psychiatry residency when he met an exhibitionist who just couldn’t stop exposing himself in public. To Peterson, the man’s compulsion seemed to mirror many aspects of alcohol and drug addiction, which also seemed to overwhelm the human will. With this realization, he began to treat patients with sexual compulsions with many of the same techniques therapists used with clients who were dependent on drink or drugs. He adapted the “steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous, which begin with an individual’s acknowledgment of his powerlessness, gathered patients for group meetings, and offered them intensive psychotherapy.
In the six years since Peterson had founded St. Luke, addiction had become the subject of intense public and professional interest. A host of problems that had once been considered character flaws or simply bad habits were being redefined as disorders and people were addressing them with the same regimen that had long been deployed against drug and alcohol abuse. Food addiction, sex addiction, and even shopping addiction were creeping into the vernacular and turning up in popular magazines and on television shows.
At the St. Luke center, Peterson encouraged sex offenders to accept responsibility for what they had done but he couldn’t help but notice that the atmosphere inside the closed world of priests—he called it the “clerical culture”—contributed significantly to their problems. With elevation a man gained a superior spiritual and practical status. Among the ordained this status created an all-for-one, one-for-all attitude similar to the code that is found among the officers in many police departments. Outside this subculture the Constitutional separation of church and state, as well as a general deference granted by everyone from cops to kindergarten teachers, protected priests from suspicion and accountability. In short, a priest could get away with a lot more than the average man.
Not surprisingly, the culture of sexual secrecy and the almost unattainable requirement of total celibacy made the priesthood attractive to some men who already had psychological or sexual difficulties and considered it a kind of shelter. Church officials knew this for certain long before the modern abuse crisis began. In 1969 Pope Paul VI consulted directly with Dutch psychiatrist Anna Terruwe, who had found a high rate of immaturity among Catholic priests and estimated that as many as 25 percent suffered from serious psychiatric illness. Terruwe and her American colleague Conrad Baars subsequently reported that “Priests in general—and some to an extreme degree—possess an insufficiently developed or distorted emotional life.” Addressing America’s bishops in 1971, Baars warned that some men joined the priesthood to “make amends for past sexual sins.”
Baars, who emigrated to America after being freed from a Nazi concentration camp, was a pioneer in the study of emotional deprivation. In America, he found that many Catholics were emotionally deprived because they believed that feelings “were potentially harmful to one�
�s life in and with Christ.” Clergy were especially susceptible to this belief, according to Baars. “More often than not, a priest comes from a ‘fine Catholic home,’ a strict one with little emotional love.” In seminary these men, who already suffered from a “maturity gap,” were trained to function without an emotional life. “The consequences of this system,” he concluded, “have been largely disastrous.”
As he explained what he had learned from working with more than a thousand priests, Baars opened up a topic that was rarely considered in a direct way. Talk of alcoholism or loneliness among priests was common, but here was an expert who said that institutional Catholic culture, and the process for selecting and training clergy, produced a corps of men who were ill equipped to care for themselves, let alone serve others. The picture was bleak, especially since it was drawn by a specialist who was a committed Catholic who supported celibacy.
After Baars made his report the American bishops were so concerned about the priesthood that they commissioned their own study, which was completed in 1972. In The Catholic Priest in the United States: Psychological Investigations Eugene Kennedy and Victor Heckler noted that a large proportion of priests “do not relate deeply or closely to other people” and use the institution and their status as “cover-ups for psychological inadequacy.” Their report described priests whose “growth had been arrested” and who “function at a pre-adolescent or adolescent level of psychosexual growth.”
The phrasing used by Kennedy and Heckler echoed the terms used by experts who tried to explain why any adult man would seek sex with children. As Peterson explained to Doyle, many pedophile priests seemed, to him, to be like children themselves, except they enjoyed an adult status that gave them power and influence. Laypeople, who believed that men were called to priesthood by God, gave clergy the benefit of the doubt and generally assumed that they were extremely good and trustworthy people. Children who were victimized by priests stayed silent out of fear, respect for the collar, or because they had absorbed the shame-bound Catholic sexual sensibility.
The informal conspiracy of silence that protected pedophile priests was reinforced by more widespread ignorance and denial about sexual abuse. As recently as 1965, an authoritative medical guide suggested that most incidents of sexual abuse were extraordinary events for the perpetrators who rarely committed another offense. Among mental health professionals it was generally assumed that people who reported being abused as kids had confused dreams or fantasies with reality.
The modern notion that pedophilia was a rare occurrence was first challenged in 1953 when Alfred Kinsey reported that 25 percent of the women he surveyed said they had experienced sexual abuse in childhood. At first Kinsey’s report didn’t do much to change public perceptions. In the ensuing decades, however, feminist writers drew attention to the sexual abuse of children as they also addressed violence against women. In the same time new laws required doctors, teachers, and others to report signs of abuse and authorities saw a surge in referrals to police and child welfare agencies. In 1971 the American Humane Association noted 9,000 cases of sexual abuse of children in New York City. This report helped move professional opinion toward the gradual realization that the problem was far more common than previously believed.
Although experts, activists, and lawmakers began to change the ways the professions and public officials regarded child sexual abuse, the mass media played the lead role in shaping public perception about its traumatic effects. In 1976 the TV movie Sybil introduced millions of viewers to a character whose sexual trauma broke her psyche into a host of personalities. With Sally Field in the title role and Joanne Woodward cast as her psychiatrist, Sybil was a “based-on-a-true-story” work that would provoke enormous controversy and charges that it was a fabrication. However, the subject matter and Fields’s performance opened a national dialogue on the effects of child abuse. Similar themes subsequently appeared in a flurry of books and films, including The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. A year later the ABC network broadcast the film Something About Amelia, which revolved around incest.
While the media prompted public discussions, the academic study of abuse became a kind of growth industry as psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and others sought to gauge the size of the problem and understand its effect on individuals. University of New Hampshire sociologist David Finkelhor surveyed more than eight hundred students and found that 19 percent of females and 9 percent of males had experienced sexual abuse before age eighteen. Finkelhor’s work was confirmed by others and by 1984 a subject that had once been taboo—sexual abuse—had become such a prominent issue that President Reagan noted it in his state of the union speech. “This year,” he said, “we will intensify our drive against … horrible crimes like sexual abuse and family violence.”
Just weeks after Reagan’s speech, the press reported the shocking news that the staff at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, had been charged with more than two hundred counts of sexual abuse. Years of furor would pass before trials that produced no convictions. (Jurors who said they believed that some sort of abuse had occurred couldn’t separate truthful statements made by children from fabrications created as adults coached them to reconstruct events.) But in the short term the case contributed to a sudden spike in public concern about child sex abuse. Between 1980 and 1990 officials would note a 300 percent rise in allegations. The overwhelming majority of these claims were judged to be well-founded.
No one who worked with children or in the mental health field failed to see the implications in changing attitudes about child abuse. At schools, day care centers, and other facilities staff rushed to create policies and procedures that would prevent a McMartin-like crisis. At St. Luke, Michael Peterson considered the number of pedophile priests he had begun to treat and the changing social landscape and knew that the Catholic Church faced almost certain disaster. Bishops were still handling complaints with apologies, promises that offenders would be disciplined, and transfers. Parishes receiving an accused priest weren’t told why he had been reassigned, and feelings of shame typically guaranteed that victims and their families wouldn’t tell. On occasions when parents hired lawyers, payments were made in exchange for secrecy agreements. Sometimes these pacts also required that the offending priest be kept away from parish duties, but often they returned to ministry.
Troubled clergy who wound up at St. Luke received round-the-clock attention in a private setting. Peterson once believed that pedophiles might be cured, or at least brought under control. This belief was consistent with the Christian concepts of forgiveness and redemption and conformed to the code that governed how ordained men—priests, bishops, cardinals, and even the popes—related to each other. As a matter of belief and practice, clergy expected extra privileges and consideration and protected the Church by closing ranks and keeping secrets. Indeed, upon their elevation bishops and cardinals usually took an oath to keep secret any information that might cause scandal.
An isolated set of problems in a small diocese like Lafayette would bring scandal to the Church, but as Doyle and Peterson considered the issue they realized that a much bigger crisis would arise if Catholic Church leaders didn’t face the larger problem of sexually abusive priests squarely, and immediately.
In the fall of 1984 Doyle invited Peterson to visit the Vatican embassy for lunch so that he might spell things out for Laghi. He hoped that a little expert advice might move the ambassador to seek a shake-up in Lafayette and conduct a real review of the problem throughout the Church. When the moment arrived, however, Laghi was hosting some bishop friends from Latin America who drew almost all of his attention. As Doyle would recall, Peterson tried to get the ambassador’s attention but with little success. Instead Laghi and his buddies gossiped in Spanish, English, and Italian about an endless number of topics, including how hard it was to find Latin American priests who would make good bishops. Too many of them had children.
Frustrated by
Laghi’s inattention, Doyle and Peterson were left to pray that bishops elsewhere handled things better than the crew in Lafayette, where Bishop Frey and his aides had covered up charges of abuse against a number of priests for many years and quietly placed known abusers into jobs where they would continue to have access to kids. As a clinician, Fr. Peterson believed that priests who were pedophiles would inevitably find and exploit new victims. Fr. Doyle, the canon lawyer and loyal church bureaucrat, worried about the potential for future scandal, lawsuits, and suffering. Of course neither of them could be at all certain of the true shape and size of the hidden crisis. Up to this point hardly anyone inside the Church bureaucracy would speak to them about the problem. Most of what they knew came from their own experience, scattered articles in the press, and confidential conversations with a most unexpected source: Gilbert Gauthe’s lawyer.
2. THE CHURCH KNOWS
When F. Raymond Mouton agreed to represent Fr. Gilbert Gauthe he had never dealt with any sort of sex crime. He was repulsed by the idea that adult men might rape children, and appalled by the effects such abuse could have on a youngster’s development. However, he had defended people accused of murder and other serious offenses and he believed that everyone, even a priest who victimized little boys, deserved a vigorous defense. Also, he knew that the Catholic Church, which had agreed to receive his bills, would, as he said, “pay like a damn slot machine.”
Mouton needed the cash flow to support a lifestyle that included a fleet of expensive cars and a lavishly furnished mansion—complete with pool, horses, maids and a guest house—on a large and lush estate. The property was a comfortable fit for Mouton, who came from Cajun aristocracy. His ancestors had founded Lafayette in the early nineteenth century. They had donated the land for the local cathedral and then built it. In his youth, Raymond played quarterback for Our Lady of Fatima High School. A scrambling, creative playmaker, he was so good that he scored every one of his team’s points in one key game and kicked field goals to clinch several others. By the time he graduated he was the league’s most valuable player and a legend in football-mad Louisiana. When he returned and hung his attorney’s shingle, his football fame and the Mouton name brought clients to his door.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 3