Geraldo was a man of his word. He brought Palasch back for a panel discussion of the neo-Nazi movement that ended in a chair-throwing melee. Ten days later Rivera wound up on the cover of Newsweek, his scabbed and broken nose serving to illustrate the magazine’s article titled “Trash TV.” It may have been trash in Newsweek’s view, but the Geraldo program did reveal truths about important issues that more staid media outlets would soon address more aggressively. Among these were the threats posed both by violent racist extremists and by priests committing sexual assaults all around the world.
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Geraldo and other TV programs that focused on the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church—Donahue, Oprah, etc.—had a profound effect on men and women who had been molested or raped by priests when they were young. With each broadcast more victims began to connect their early trauma and later trouble in their lives. Hundreds and eventually thousands would turn to the Church, psychotherapists, and lawyers in an attempt to find some peace and justice.
A relatively new phenomenon, the shows relied on a formula that began with individuals who spoke about compelling issues—medical disorders and tragedies were staples—that were confirmed by writers and experts whose attention made the subjects more worthy of consideration. These authorities typically appeared alongside the people who shared their personal experiences. If possible, opposing views were added to create tension and drama. Books that served as the basis for programs were highlighted throughout the hour and at the end of a program viewers were offered phone numbers for agencies and groups related to the subject at hand.
The programs varied in style depending on the personality of the host. Geraldo Rivera was a tough-guy reporter and he tended to emphasize exposé and scandal. Highly empathetic and emotive, Oprah Winfrey took a more psychological approach, which led to hours filled with tears and what she called “healing” as guests described their ordeals and found affirmation and acceptance. Hugely popular, Oprah spoke a language of self-help and informal spirituality to become one of the most influential women in the world.
Eventually, Oprah and the others would provoke a backlash from social critics like Wendy Kaminer, who would write that “talk shows have helped transform victimhood into a kind of status symbol.” But in the short term, these programs contributed to a groundswell of support for people who wanted to declare themselves on a variety of issues. Very quickly the term “survivor” replaced the word “victim” as guests announced that they were “in recovery” from some form of abuse or dysfunction. For people who had been abused by priests, the shows suggested that they were not alone, and that the world would not be entirely hostile to their claims.
Critics who saw in these programs a threat to traditional mores were correct. In general, the talk shows offered encouragement and acceptance in ways that eroded the power of the usual authorities and boosted individuals. Minorities of all sorts found support as did just about anyone who stood up for his or her rights. Catholic Church officials rarely appeared on shows that dealt with abusive clergy and supporters of the faith often came across as defensive. In contrast, advocates like Jeffrey Anderson seemed dynamic, compassionate, and trustworthy. Each time he appeared, Anderson received a flurry of phone calls from people who had been sexually abused as children and wanted a lawyer.
As he took on cases and filed suits in more than a dozen states, Anderson ran up against different statutes of limitation and challenges to the claims of his clients. In Minnesota the law permitted adults who said they had been abused as children to make a claim within three years of turning eighteen. Lawyers tried to overcome statutory limits with two arguments. In some cases they said their clients suffered from trauma-induced amnesia that was overcome only through psychotherapy. In others they argued that their clients didn’t realize the extent of the harm caused by their abuse until they had psychological difficulties later in life. Both phenomena proved “delayed discovery”—an established exception to statutes of limitations—because the damage done by abuse was like a virus that lay dormant and didn’t show itself until years after time limits ran out.
Claims of delayed discovery by victims of sexual abuse faced tough criticism from defendants. Expert witnesses disagreed about the way memory functions and cast doubt on the idea that someone could forget abuse and then recall it reliably in adulthood. Plaintiffs suffered a major setback when the Supreme Court of Washington state considered Tyson v. Tyson, in which a twenty-six-year-old woman tried to sue her father for sexual abuse. State law allowed for a claim to be made after a child victim turned twenty-one and before he or she turned twenty-five. The court noted a lack of corroborating evidence and ruled that it wouldn’t rely on psychiatric testimony to waive the statute and allow the case to go before a judge.
The decision in Tyson v. Tyson gave pause to any lawyer considering a case outside a statute of limitations. A solution came in 1988 when a woman named Patti Barton, who alleged abuse by her father, lobbied the state legislature in Olympia to change the law. Barton succeeded as the Washington House and Senate approved a new statute that allowed adults to sue once they recognized they had been harmed, no matter their age. Once it was signed into law, Barton began traveling to other state capitols, with the statute in hand, urging lawmakers to give their constituents the same rights.
In Minnesota, the statute of limitations was attacked first by a lawyer named Mark Douglas, who had been molested by a family friend when he was a boy. Jeffrey Anderson joined Douglas in pressing the case with William Luther, chairman of the judiciary committee of the Minnesota Senate. Luther sponsored a bill that recognized delayed discovery and gave people the chance to sue, no matter their age, within two years of realizing their psychological suffering was linked to assaults they endured as minors. The legislation passed both chambers of the state legislature without attracting any press attention. Anderson was invited to attend the signing and have his picture taken with Governor Arne Carlson. Anderson passed on the picture, but he got a copy of the bill with the governor’s signature.
On the day after the new law was signed and took effect, Anderson carried his copy into a county courthouse thirty miles west of Minneapolis where he had brought a suit against a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. The Church was represented by Patrick Schiltz, who had recently returned to Minnesota from serving as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Schiltz had asked the judge to dismiss the claim based on the old statute. When Anderson handed the judge the document, and Schiltz got a look at it, he agreed that his motion had become irrelevant. The new law kept the suit alive and Anderson eventually obtained payment for his client in a settlement.
Variations of the law were passed in eight more states, and they deprived defendants of the main tool they had used to block lawsuits. With firmer ground to stand on, Anderson took on dozens of additional clients. In each case bishops were forced to consider the damage a trial might do to the reputation of the Church, and the possibility they might lose. The prospect of a jury hearing how a priest abused his trust in order to sexually violate a child, and the damages they might award, motivated many dioceses and religious orders to settle claims.
The settlements Anderson negotiated in this early period ranged from tens of thousands of dollars to in excess of a hundred thousand. Since he was working in a new area of law, he depended on his clients to judge whether the amounts offered were sufficient. Most were adamant about hearing Church officials acknowledge their injuries, removing priests from ministry, and protecting others from harm with a public disclosure of records. The first condition was met when Church officials agreed to pay a claim without receiving a confidentiality agreement. The second condition was a more difficult matter. As Anderson learned, priests enjoyed certain protections under canon law and could appeal a bishop’s sanction to Rome, where the bureaucracy worked very slowly. In the meantime they could move from diocese to diocese and even from country to country without much fear that their past would be kno
wn. Release of documents, the third condition, was the most difficult for Anderson to achieve. Every local bishop would respond differently to demands for records, and often their responses would be based on the concern that they might release information that would lead to more lawsuits or even criminal charges.
The workings of the Catholic system, which was governed by its own canon laws and steeped in ancient traditions, were a constant puzzle to an outsider like Anderson. He was often stumped by Latin terms and confused by the varied powers of the hierarchs. Understanding it all would require an advanced degree or expert help. As Anderson would recall, in his search for assistance he tracked Tom Doyle to Indiana, where he was a chaplain at Grissom Air Force Base. His home phone number was listed and Anderson called him one evening.
Tom Doyle had already helped a San Francisco lawyer who called him for advice on a case that was settled before he could appear as an expert witness. Like the few media interviews he had done, the process had given Doyle an emotional boost because it was a chance for him to use what he knew to help a family and push the Church to face its problems. But these occasional opportunities weren’t enough to ease the feeling that he was drifting sideways through life.
It wasn’t that he was unhappy with chaplain’s work or the Air Force officers. As a pastor, Doyle had never felt more comfortable than he did counseling military men, and he had plenty of friends at Grissom, including a few who liked to go shooting with him. Sometimes Doyle and his buddies shot targets they set up in some friendly farmer’s field. He would bring a few special guns from his collections—a .347 Magnum, an M16, an AK-47—and they would compete with each one. They also helped with the eradication program that dealt with animals that posed a problem to aircraft. (With the right scope Doyle could hit a groundhog at 300 feet.) But the camaraderie Doyle felt with his friends, and the satisfaction he received in his work, didn’t settle his soul. Too often he was almost overwhelmed by fear, anxiety, and even depression. When this happened during the day he went home for lunch, drank a half bottle of wine, and a chased it with a swig of Listerine. In the evenings he would escape with a drink, and then another, and then another.
On the night when Jeff Anderson called, Doyle was only partway into his off-duty drinking routine and he was still sober and alert. He knew who Anderson was, and had assumed that one day they would meet. Doyle shared with Anderson his thoughts about what he called “clericalism,” which he described as a Catholic mind-set that elevated ordained men above all others and led, inevitably, to corruption. On the other end of the line Anderson could feel Doyle’s disillusionment and sensed, also, a bit of anger. Without much prompting Doyle said he believed that children were still vulnerable to sexually dangerous priests and that the Church hierarchy was still not facing its problems squarely. He agreed to help Anderson any way he could.
10. THE MEASURE OF THE ELEPHANT
The rent tested Barbara Blaine’s faith.
Her hero Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, taught that God will provide. But in Blaine’s experience it wasn’t God who paid to house and feed the homeless of Chicago’s North Side. Rent, groceries, utilities, and other expenses depended on the money she and her partner Gary Olivero begged from donors and earned at jobs outside the eight-bedroom Catholic Worker House they ran near Loyola University. (Begun during the Great Depression, the American Catholic Worker movement includes about two hundred independent local groups of laypeople who voluntarily live in poverty and offer services to the poor.)
A bit older than Blaine, Olivero was a slightly built man who wore big, black-framed glasses and threw himself into causes with total abandon. Blaine was a bit more nuanced in her commitment. She often wondered if God was sending some sort of ironic message by requiring her to work nights at a city-run homeless shelter just to keep the shelter she had established going.
If God was saying anything, it was that everyone—even a selfless Christian on a mission—needs help from time to time. Catholic to the core, Blaine naturally looked to the Church, which had officially declared itself aligned with her cause. In the mid-1980s the otherwise conservative hierarchy maintained a ferociously liberal commitment to social programs that benefitted poor people. Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who met people with a “call me Joe” warmth, frequently called on Catholics to muster as much passion for the poor as they expressed in opposition to abortion. “To stand for life,” he told one audience in 1985, “is to stand for the needs of women and children who epitomize the sacredness of life.”
Determined that Bernardin follow his own values, Blaine went to see the officials who controlled the property of the archdiocese to ask them to give her one of their empty buildings to use as a shelter. A social worker by training, Blaine was a familiar kind of Catholic woman. Polite and respectful, she was nevertheless demanding, relentless, and willing to bully them with the Gospel. Her stubbornness stood in contrast with her appearance. A short, auburn-haired woman with fair skin and a ready smile, she was almost thirty but could have passed for twenty. Her voice was soft and agreeable and she always apologized for taking up anyone’s time. But what she said about the sin of letting perfectly good buildings stand empty while women and children lived in cars would have shamed a saint.
After realizing Blaine wouldn’t go away until they accommodated her, Church officials gave her an abandoned convent on the South Side of the city. Three stories high and flanked by a small gray yard, the place required some updating but it was solidly built and closer to the population served by the Worker House. By 1985 its thirty rooms sheltered dozens of women and their children along with a couple of elderly men, one of whom needed around-the-clock, hospice-like care. A big ground-floor kitchen fed all these people and more who came in off the street. A food pantry served neighbors who came by the hundreds for free groceries. Like all Catholic Workers, Blaine was paid $10 per week.
At the time, Barbara Blaine considered her impoverished Catholic utopianism a natural extension of the faith she was born into in Toledo, Ohio. Life in her childhood home was measured by first communions and confirmations, which were conducted at a church the family helped to found. The eight Blaine children went to Catholic schools. Priests and nuns were family friends. On most days one or more members of the family performed some sort of volunteer service at the church or school.
In Chicago, Blaine’s typical day would begin with bathing and dressing an elderly man named Ray Matthews, who had chosen the Worker house as the place where he would die. She would then oversee breakfast and dispatch a dozen or more children who lived at the house and attended nearby schools. Their mothers then needed help with job applications or welfare forms and at 11 A.M. Blaine took to the sidewalk to greet the crowd assembled for the food pantry, which opened at 11:30. By nightfall she might welcome a new family, dash to the emergency room with a sick child, or organize the kids to make decorations for an upcoming holiday.
Eventually Blaine would recognize she had lost herself in a kind of obsessive-compulsive form of sacrifice. (“A culture of the martyr” was what she would call it.) The demands of this life were so great that she rarely had a moment to think about herself. Of course this oblivion was perfect for someone who was afraid of the past and her own feelings. In the name of doing good she lost herself in others and let things like friendships, social calls, and even the mail slide for weeks or even months. In the summer of 1985, in a rare moment when no one else demanded her attention, Blaine she sat down with a stack of magazines, newsletters, and papers that had gone unread for many months. Included were back issues of the National Catholic Reporter.
Leafing through the Reporter, Blaine found Jason Berry’s first article on Gilbert Gauthe. As she read, her heart began to race and she broke into a cold sweat. Suddenly she felt unable to take a breath. She became light-headed and gasped for air. As she put down the paper she realized she had seen adults and children with the same symptoms. Though each one of them had insisted they were havi
ng some sort of cardiac episode they were, in fact, having panic attacks. Coming on as she read an article about priests raping children, her panic attack was a signal from the girl she once had been, who wanted someone to acknowledge her experience, her pain, and her existence. As an adult Blaine knew only that she needed help. She sought it through psychotherapy.
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In therapy Barbara Blaine would finally tell someone how she had been stunned into silence as a priest explained that she was “closer to Jesus” than anyone he knew and proceeded to kiss and then undress her. At last she told how Fr. Chet Warren had blamed her, a thirteen-year-old, for his sexual assaults. She was “too beautiful” to resist, he had explained. Then he told her that through sex they had become spiritually “engaged” and that after their lifetime of service to the Church—he as a priest, she as a nun—they would be married in heaven. Overwhelmed by divergent feelings she was too young to sort out—guilt, attachment, fear, pleasure—Blaine had said nothing and tried to erase what had happened from her memory.
All of it, from the seduction to the silence, would be textbook stuff in the eyes of experts in sexual abuse. For Blaine it was a devastating interruption of her adolescence that left her with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Eventually she would connect her anxiety, fearfulness, and low self-esteem to Chet Warren and learn to live with PTSD. In the meantime the ever-practical Blaine would try to hold him accountable and make sure he wouldn’t victimize anyone else. She called Warren’s superiors at the provincial headquarters of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales in Toledo. They agreed to see her on Halloween day, 1985.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 14