The two priests agreed with Mouton and they settled on a plan to change the way the Church dealt with sexual abuse by priests. Together they would draft a report outlining the scope of the problem. Peterson would handle the medical issues. Mouton would address liability as well as civil and criminal law. Doyle would write on canon law and the Church’s institutional response to the problem.
In the meantime Doyle received input from various members of the American hierarchy, including cardinals Bernard Law of Boston and John Krol of Philadelphia. He also urged Laghi to ask the Pope to appoint an outside bishop to go to Lafayette to look through files because he feared they held evidence of other victims. He suggested Bishop A. J. Quinn of Cleveland and prepared a report for the Pope to back up the recommendation. Cardinal Krol took it to Rome on a Sunday night. Quinn was appointed before the next Sunday.
Doyle chose Quinn because he had been trained as both a canon lawyer and a civil attorney and seemed to have the right temperament for the job. He had been pleased when Laghi made sure the Vatican dispatched the bishop to Louisiana. Perhaps, Doyle thought, the nuncio was waking up to the impending crisis.
With Laghi and Quinn encouraging them, Mouton, Doyle, and Peterson aimed to deliver something to the American bishops when they gathered for a conference at Collegeville, Minnesota, in the middle of June. Knowing church politics, Doyle and Peterson sought and received support from key hierarchs, including Philadelphia’s Cardinal John Krol, Bishop William Levada of Los Angeles, and Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston. Law and Levada served on a committee that would likely take up the report. As winter turned to spring, the paper evolved into a primer on the problem of pedophile priests that warned of “a real, present danger.” The three authors agreed that the Church should create a formal Crisis Control Team to manage cases as they arose and an official Policy and Planning Group to investigate what was going on and devise a long-term response.
Peterson, Mouton, and Doyle worked with the belief that they were racing against a gathering tidal wave of litigation as publicity about the Louisiana case would make victims and their families in other dioceses more likely to sue. Plaintiffs’ lawyers, recognizing the deep pockets of the Church, would line up to take these cases and, even when the law went its way, the Church would pay a heavy price in negative publicity. Mouton had already been contacted by a New Orleans–based journalist named Jason Berry who was investigating the accusations against Fr. Gauthe. A hard-digging reporter with a bushy brown moustache and deceptively casual demeanor, Berry moved comfortably with people as varied as sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta and political power brokers in Baton Rouge. His recent work had exposed toxic waste dumping and politically motivated audits by the Internal Revenue Service. As Mouton told his clients, a reporter who was willing to take on Gulf Coast chemical companies and the IRS wouldn’t be deterred by stonewalling monsignors and bishops.
3. SEXUAL INTELLECTUALS
A son of the Church, and of Louisiana, Jason Berry was perfectly suited to write the story of the sex abuse scandal in the Diocese of Lafayette. As a young man he had worn the crisp khaki uniform of New Orleans’ Jesuit High School and continued his education with the Church’s intellectual elite at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Berry had left the university with lots of contacts in the priesthood and a truly Jesuitical respect for the pursuit of knowledge. In this case he was able to work his own contacts, lawyers in Lafayette, and Minos Simon’s secret inside source, whom he called “Chalice,” to piece together a narrative that was a compelling tale, but also a blow to his own faith as a Catholic.
Before he heard about Gilbert Gauthe, Berry knew, in his soul, that the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world. In New Orleans the parochial schools were integrated long before anyone even thought about integrating the public system, and across the South priests and nuns had risked their lives in the wider cause of civil rights. As a youth he was uneasy with the white backlash he witnessed in otherwise genteel New Orleans. He would never forget, for example, the boy he saw bicycling in circles in the street chanting, in an almost hypnotic state:
All we want is
A clean white school
A clean white school
A clean white school
All we want …
In contrast with the bigotry in the street, Berry grew up with Catholic parents who taught him to reject racism and he attended peacefully integrated Catholic schools where his teachers talked about the evil of prejudice. Of course he had a few brushes with odd characters in the clergy. One priest at Jesuit High demonstrated what he’d like to do to lazy students by dipping a net into a fish tank, scooping out a guppy, and flushing it down the toilet. But he had dismissed these oddballs as bit players in the comedy of life. Growing up in a place where adults put on costumes and danced in the streets at carnival, young Berry’s outlook was one part irony to three parts optimism. He had to believe that everyone, from demagogue politicians to fish-flushing priests, had inside them more than a little goodness.
Fr. Gauthe became the exception that disproved the rule for Berry. The more he dug into the case, interviewing families of his victims and reviewing files and depositions, the more he realized that the man was devoid of empathy. Gauthe’s entire life seemed to be built around winning the trust of parents so he could sexually violate their children. Even after he had been found out and the damage he caused was made clear, he showed little appreciation for the pain he had caused, and little remorse. Worse, he seemed to believe that he shared some sort of love with his victims.
Although he was disturbed by Fr. Gauthe’s character and crimes, Berry was outraged by the way the priest’s superiors neglected his victims and covered up his offenses. Here the source he named Chalice was indispensable, pointing him toward patterns of bureaucratic denial and secrecy he could not have seen on his own. In many ways the man functioned like the storied figure “Deep Throat” in Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s unraveling of the Watergate conspiracy that destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency. With the portrayal of their secret source in both the 1974 book and film about the reporters’ work—both were called All the President’s Men—the principled individual who reveals important truths became a heroic icon in American culture. Ever since, reporters, lawyers, and others have sought Deep Throats to overcome secrecy, and outraged individuals who fear the consequences of speaking public have known there are ways to share what they know confidentially, and to great effect. Indeed, the model of Deep Throat made every cubicle-dwelling bureaucrat and disgruntled functionary a potential hero.
In Lafayette, Chalice told Berry that Fr. Gauthe wasn’t the only credibly accused priest being sheltered by the diocese. And in the case of Fr. Gauthe, others had failed to act on evidence that should have moved them. Afraid their suspicions would be regarded as false accusations, nuns in one parish had kept silent as Fr. Gauthe made a habit of keeping boys overnight. A monsignor who heard parents complain that Fr. Gauthe made advances on their sons sent him for counseling, but then allowed him to take groups of boys on overnight trips. When pressed by superiors to explain how he could restrict the priest’s access to boys in one moment and allow it in another he had answered, simply, “I am trained as a priest to forget sins.”
Considering what he heard from Chalice and what he learned about pedophiles in general, Berry concluded that Fr. Gauthe had likely abused many more boys than he had said. (A social worker Berry interviewed said the number could easily exceed one hundred.) Because of the special status a priest enjoys—they are addressed as “father,” after all—these crimes were as psychologically devastating as incest. However, the same status seemed to prevent the Church leaders from acting on complaints. The clergy considered themselves a type of family. They protected their own and projected to the world an image of perfection. As a comparison, Michael Peterson would eventually offer Berry the example of members of an Irish Catholic family who go to extraordinary lengths to project a public image of perfectio
n and deny problems like alcoholism and domestic violence. Given the number of Irish names found in the ranks of the American Catholic clergy, the analogy fit.
With all that had been laid out for him by Chalice, plaintiffs, lawyers, and experts, Berry made himself into an authority on a subject that, months before, he would have considered beyond the pale. The notion that a Catholic diocese would be shot through with sexual scandals and cover-ups sounded to the reporter like the kind of stuff one might read in a conspiracy theorist’s pamphlet. Historically, the worst of hateful attacks on the Church always included something about abusive sex and secrecy. However, Berry also knew that between depraved popes, the Inquisition, and inaction during the Holocaust, the Church had given its harshest critics ample ammunition over the years.
Of course, it’s one thing to get the story and another to publish it. As Berry sought an outlet for his investigative article he met a somewhat queasy response. An editor at The New York Times Magazine, where some of his previous work had appeared, said she and her colleagues were interested in publishing something about child abuse, but not if it involved the Catholic Church. Editors at The Nation and Rolling Stone, hardly shy about taking on the powerful, couldn’t imagine a way to publish the story and Vanity Fair didn’t respond at all. Most surprising to Berry, the liberal Mother Jones magazine balked at the prospect of calling pedophile priests to account. Finally, Berry found welcome at the Times of Acadiana, a scrappy weekly newspaper that served Lafayette and surrounding towns. Editors at the Times said they would go all-in, risking the loyalty of readers and advertisers who might resent an exposé about pedophilia in the Church. Berry also struck a deal with the National Catholic Reporter, which would use a condensed version of his reports to reach an international audience with a package of more wide-ranging stories, after the paper in Lafayette got its exclusive.
By May 1985 Berry was deep into his research. He had seen much of the evidence gathered in the Gauthe case, and interviewed the Gastal family and officials in the Church. He also sought the most current thinking on pedophilia from experts like John Money of Johns Hopkins University and David Finklehor at the University of New Hampshire. Money, who treated sex offenders, did not dispute the intractability of pedophilia, which can last a lifetime, but he minimized its effects on children. Finklehor was far more concerned about the negative impact of a grown man’s sexual advances on boys and girls that, like the pedophile’s pathology, could also last a lifetime. These conversations left Berry thinking that church leaders faced a problem that was much tougher than they knew. As he shared some of what he was discovering with Ray Mouton, the lawyer agreed, and predicted that once the dam was broken by the Times of Acadiana and, in particular, the National Catholic Reporter, major media outlets would find the story irresistible.
* * *
“CBS news is going to be landing helicopters on their lawns,” said Ray Mouton. “Maybe that’ll make them realize they better get ahead of this thing.”
Mouton wanted to scare the American bishops into action and the helicopter warning, or something close to it, was going to be included in the report he was crafting with Peterson and Doyle. Mouton was sure that a cascade of media reports would follow Berry’s exposés and the publicity would begin a cycle of lawsuits, scandal, and negative press that might whirl around the country and well into the future, draining the Church of its resources and reputation. As someone still inclined to call himself Catholic, he dreaded this prospect.
Two weeks before Berry’s series was to be published, Doyle and Mouton met in a Chicago hotel to finish drafting their report, which would incorporate pages sent to them by Peterson. Before they started, Mouton turned to Doyle and told him that the document they were about to draft would either save the Church or end any hopes he might have for a successful career.
“You’ve got the most to lose,” he told Doyle, who had a bright future in the Church bureaucracy.
“Screw it,” said Doyle. “Let’s get to work.”
The men hired a typist who worked for the Chicago Symphony but freelanced on weekends. She borrowed a typewriter from the symphony office and brought it to the hotel where she pounded on the keyboard to record the final draft of the memo. Doyle and Mouton began by counting up all the cases they had unearthed in one fashion or another, and realized they knew of at least thirty instances where priests had been credibly accused of sexually molesting children. Extrapolating from Lafayette, where more than $4 million had already been paid to hush up complaints, they estimated the American church faced more than $1 billion in liability.
Beyond the monetary damage, bishops were confronted by the prospect of being subjected to depositions, subpoenas for sensitive documents, and even police raids on chancery offices. They could expect this onslaught because they, and ultimately the Pope, were responsible for the priests who served under them. Doyle and Mouton would also warn that victims of priest offenders, their families, and the Church as a whole would be spiritually demoralized by these scandals while the press would “portray the Church as hypocritical, as an organization preaching morality and providing sanctuary to perverts.”
The recommendations that flowed from the long list of problems in the report revolved around a few basic principles. The Church should provide counseling and other services to victims and their families. Offenders, who faced possible criminal consequences, should be suspended from their duties immediately. After a psychiatric evaluation the only viable treatment would be at in-patient facilities where they could be safely confined while receiving a range of services. However, the authors could say nothing conclusive about if, and when, an abusing priest might return to work.
Where the Catholic community and wider public were concerned, Mouton and Doyle saw that the Church needed to face the problem of clergy abuse squarely. They wrote:
The Church must remain open and avoid the appearance of being under siege or drawn into battle. All tired and worn policies utilized by bureaucracies must be avoided and cliches such as “no comment” must be cast away. In this sophisticated society a media policy of silence implies either necessary secrecy or cover-up.
Once they had drafted eighty pages of assessment, analysis, and recommendations the men decided to propose a sweeping, national response to the looming crisis. At its core would be a three-person “crisis control team” comprised of a canon law expert, a psychiatrist, and a lawyer—individuals identical to Mouton, Peterson, and Doyle—who would develop a standardized approach to allegations so that every Catholic institution would follow the same procedure. This crisis group could deliver a level of expertise beyond what most smaller dioceses, like Lafayette, might be able to deploy. As outsiders they could claim a higher level of credibility than local officials facing parishioners angered by discovering that priests had committed crimes and/or violated their vows and that they had been enabled and protected by their superiors.
As the typist clacked through the last pages of the report, Fr. Doyle left Chicago for Montreal where he was going to perform a first communion mass for a niece. Mouton stayed behind to copy and send the document to the bishops who had expressed their support and could present it at Collegeville.
The paper, titled The Problem of Sexual Molestation by Roman Catholic Clergy, was both a withering evaluation and a cautionary forecast. It also offered the American bishops a way to respond to the sex abuse problem with a Christian spirit. The authors believed they were offering the bishops a lifeline. And at least one agreed. Bishop William Levada of Los Angeles, who was a rising star in the American Church, encouraged them to move forward. Doyle would recall that he also agreed that it should be distributed at an upcoming conference of bishops to be held in Collegeville, Minnesota.
“He admitted it was a big issue,” said Doyle, years later. “He also said something like, ‘Thank God we don’t have any of these problems in Los Angeles.’”
Levada’s enthusiasm for the work done by Doyle, Peterson, and Mouton was short-lived. Before th
e Collegeville meeting he called Doyle to say the report would not be presented. Levada’s about-face troubled Doyle, who believed that the Church faced a true emergency. But in an institution defined by intrigue and secrecy he would never get a full explanation of what happened to derail his campaign. Left to guess, he wondered if Monsignor Daniel Hoye, executive director of the bishops’ conference, had sabotaged him.
Doyle knew that Hoye had resented his involvement in the selection of bishops candidates. (Hoye had made his displeasure known to others.) However, Doyle also had to consider that bishops coveted the authority they wielded in their dioceses. If the Pope was a king, they were like dukes who enjoyed, in every sense of the word, unassailable authority within their estates. Few would welcome outsiders promising to solve a difficult problem. Finally, it seemed to some, that Doyle was devising an employment project for his little group. They asked why the Catholic Church should pour millions of dollars into an operation that duplicated functions already carried out by local officials and their attorneys.
The Roman Catholic Church had weathered storms in the past and bishops who knew this history couldn’t believe that a little bad publicity, even if it related to the sexual crimes of priests, would have much effect. This wasn’t Watergate circa 1972, and they weren’t elected officials subject to public opinion.
* * *
Jason Berry’s series on Gilbert Gauthe finally appeared in the Times of Acadiana at the end of May 1985. A week later the National Catholic Reporter presented his reporting and expanded it with references to fifteen similar cases around the country. The NCR special report included an article on a victim who had committed suicide. However, it did not trigger an immediate response by mainstream media. Indeed, even in the cities where NCR identified priests who had been charged, such as Bishop Levada’s Los Angeles, the local press did not take up the issue.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 5