Altogether, Neuhaus spelled out a defense of the Church that would echo through the coming decades. He said that the abuse cases showed not that the Church was corrupt, but that it needed to “mend the culture [of the modern world] after the devastations wrought by the sexual revolution.” After noting a growing sense of skepticism over “whether some of the acts were committed at all” Neuhaus concluded that, contrary to the alarms sounded by Greeley and others, the abuse scandal was not the worst crisis since the Reformation. Indeed, he said, it was not “even the greatest crisis of the last ten years.”
Months after Neuhaus offered his argument, Pope John Paul II met with a group of American bishops and called attention to both the injuries suffered by victims and the damage inflicted upon the Church. Seven years after the case of Gilbert Gauthe first focused attention on the problem, the Pope finally addressed it directly. In a letter that followed the meeting John Paul II acknowledged the abuse perpetrated by priests, called it evil, and expressed his concern for how much his brother bishops and the faithful “are suffering because of certain cases of scandal given by members of the clergy.”
It was the scandal, not the rape and molestation of children, that was the main problem, according to the Pope. Indeed, he didn’t mention the pain, suffering, and loss of faith among victims, nor did he use words like “abuse” or “rape.” Instead he referred to “certain offenses” and “sins” and said that the bishops had two responsibilities in the face of the crisis: to deal with problem priests and their victims, and to address the damage done to society when the Church is swept by scandal.
In selecting the blandest words available to refer to the acts committed by abusive priests, the Pope occupied one extreme in an ongoing struggle over the terms used to discuss sexual victimization. In many jurisdictions, legal authorities had come to define any unwanted sexual activity carried out by an adult with a child as “rape.” However, others, including some defense lawyers and Church leaders, would use words like “molestation” or “fondling,” which tended to soften a reader’s or listener’s impression of what had occurred. The conflict over terms would continue, with parties on all sides communicating their perspectives, and priorities, with their differing choices.
By any measure, John Paul II’s sentiments were focused primarily on the welfare of the Church. The problem of clergy abuse was, in his mind, a product of America, a society that “needs much prayer—lest it lose its soul.” Prayer was the primary remedy recommended by John Paul II, but he also suggested temperance on the part of the mass media. “Evil can indeed be sensational,” he wrote, “but the sensationalism surrounding it is always dangerous for morality.” This point was echoed in repeated complaints by priests and bishops who said the media and plaintiffs’ lawyers were exaggerating claims, stirring public animosity, and singling out Catholicism in a bigoted way.
Anyone who missed the Pope’s point could turn to his spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls for clarification. “One would have to ask if the real culprit is not a society that is irresponsibly permissive, hyperinflated with sexuality and capable of creating circumstances that induce even people who have received a sound moral formation to commit grave immoral acts.”
The media came in for more papal scolding when John Paul II visited Denver in August 1993. At outdoor services for an international youth conference the Pope made his first public remarks on sexual abuse by clergy, acknowledging “the pain of the suffering and scandal caused by the sins of some ministers of the altar.” In the same speech he also denounced abortion and euthanasia as a “slaughtering of the innocents.”
In Denver the Pope was met by huge, adoring crowds of fervent Catholics who had come to Colorado from around the world. His criticism of the American media prompted much applause, as did his attacks on alcohol, drugs, pornography, and “the moral evil which flows from personal choices.” At various points he was interrupted by cheers of “John Paul II, we love you” and, as usual, he responded by offering his love in return. In all, the visit was a triumph of inspiration for believers and a demonstration of John Paul II’s persistent popularity. It also obscured the few signs of caution, if not dissent, expressed by American Church leaders. As Jason Berry would report, Cleveland bishop Anthony Michael Pilla actually rejected the idea of holding the Pope’s youth rally in his diocese out of concern that a visiting youth might be sexually abused.
The Pope’s visit also confirmed the thinking expressed by John Neuhaus as he had linked the abuse crisis to social ills outside the Church and argued that the institution itself, though damaged by scandal, was poised to lead the world back to traditional morality. In fact, as the political scientist James Kurtz explained just prior to the Pope’s visit, in the Vatican’s view the big problem facing the Church was not abusive priests but American individualism.
Interpreting Rome for Americans, Kurtz noted that the title “pontiff” meant “bridge builder” and he described the Vatican as a religious state led by a figure who believed he provides a personal connection between the earthly world and the divine. Kurtz wrote that America represented to the Church an “idolatry of self” growing out of excessive freedom and uncontrolled capitalism. In the century to come, he suggested, the Vatican’s former partner in the battle against Marxism might become its main opponent in the struggle over morality.
In this context, the very highest Church officials were not likely to regard the sexual crimes of priests as a product of their own failure to follow Church law, or the clerical culture they inhabited. From the Vatican’s perspective, the scandal was a North American phenomenon rooted in individualism. It was significant, from this point of view, that the United States was a mostly Protestant place and that it was the center of both mass media and materialism. It was noteworthy, too, that no one was suing the Church for clergy abuse in the mainly Catholic countries of Western Europe. Under this analysis, Neuhaus was right. The abuse scandal wasn’t a big deal, and the Vatican could expect America’s bishops to resolve it in time.
15. PUSHBACK
Joseph Bernardin was in New York when the rumor finally caught up to him. The date was Wednesday, November 10, 1993, and the cardinal had given the annual Thomas Merton lecture at Columbia University. After the talk, he stayed overnight at the Madison Avenue mansion of the archbishop of New York. It was the archbishop, John O’Connor, who told him that an American cardinal was about to be accused of sexual abuse.
O’Connor and Bernardin were very different people. The cardinal of New York was a tall, thin, blue-eyed man of Irish descent who was theologically conservative and comfortable taking strong public stands on issues like abortion. Long a military chaplain, he was known to be one of John Paul II’s favorites and was widely credited with maintaining the antiabortion movement in America. He was appointed to his post in New York even though his name didn’t appear on a list of candidates sent to Rome by the American bishops.
Bernardin was the brown-eyed son of Italian immigrants and a theological liberal who had recently joined the Dalai Lama in a call for women’s rights. For much of the 1970s he was considered the most powerful figure in Catholic America and leader of a liberalizing movement that sought to put the Church at the center of political discussions. In 1982 his peace activism landed on him on the cover to Time magazine. In 1983 he gained more fame by calling for a Consistent Ethic of Life that joined mostly left-wing politics to antiabortion sentiment in a way that alienated many conservatives.
All the attention heaped on Bernardin in the early 1980s obscured the fact that his side in the struggle for the future of the institution was losing to the conservatives led by the new Pope. By the early 1990s, Bernardin’s influence had waned while O’Connor and other pro-Vatican bishops gained power. But as different as they were, both men were devout, ambitious, and accomplished. They both loved the Church and feared for its reputation. And they enjoyed the bond that came with membership in one of the world’s most exclusive bodies in the world, the 180-member College of Ca
rdinals.
Upon appointment, cardinals receive the heavy gold rings that identify them as “Princes of the Church,” and they are required to swear that they will not bring scandal upon the institution. Once elevated, they serve as the pontiff’s chief advisers and bear the responsibility of representing his views in major cities that are centers of culture, finance, politics, and media. Upon the Pope’s death they select a successor, who typically comes from their number. Given their status and power, an abuse allegation against one of them would reverberate around the world.
As of 1993 America claimed eight active cardinals. If the rumor were true, the odds were better than one in four that the accused was in the room as O’Connor and Bernardin spoke of it. Both men had expressed their worries about the abuse crisis in open forums, dwelling on the damage being done to victims and their Church. Earlier in the year, for example, O’Connor had told seminarians in Rome that “real horrifying damage” had been done to victims but that the press’s pursuit of the story had been “merciless” where the Church was concerned.
In his later recollection of his discussion with O’Connor, Bernardin offered scant detail, except to say that his fellow cardinal reported that the source of the story was “uncertain” and the content frustratingly vague. These factors, Bernardin would write, “made it seem unworthy and yet ominous at the same time.”
The “unworthy” part echoed Bernardin’s automatic assumption that an ordained Catholic man was celibate until proven otherwise. (In fact the opposite was more likely true.) “Ominous” referred to the personal threat—were Bernardin or O’Connor the target?—signaled by the rumor. Any priest accused of abuse confronted a daunting challenge to defend himself. Having dismissed more than twenty accused clergy, Bernardin understood this reality better than most.
Bernardin got a sense of the storm to come when he returned to his office in Chicago on Thursday, November 11. Phone calls from friends around the world brought the news that he was the subject of the rumors. While aides scrambled to gather more information Bernardin, who told them the accusations were unfounded, thought for a moment about how Christ had been falsely accused before his crucifixion. As he later wrote, he asked himself, “Was this what the Lord was preparing me for, to face false allegations about something that I knew never took place?”
Soon the cardinal’s staff delivered more details. His accuser had been a seminarian in Cincinnati when Bernardin served there as archbishop from 1972 to 1982. His attorney was expected to file papers on Friday. More pieces of the puzzle were offered by a TV reporter who called to say she had heard the allegations recited over the telephone. The accuser’s name was Steven, said Mary Ann Ahern, and he claimed to have pictures.
By the end of the day, the world would know that a man named Steven Cook was saying that Bernardin pressured him into a sex act when he was a high school sophomore. Cook was a recovering drug addict who was suffering from AIDS. Bernardin would say he could not recall the man, but somehow he knew that Cook had previously filed a complaint against a Cincinnati priest named Ellis Harsham. Now Bernardin guessed that Cook was unhappy with the response he had gotten from Cincinnati’s current archbishop, Daniel Pilarczyk, and had decided to expand his complaint. This decision had brought a caravan of television news trucks to the curb on Superior Street, directly beneath the window of Bernardin’s office. Reporters from all the major networks had come to report on the lawsuit and hear the cardinal’s response. He didn’t speak to them but issued a brief statement including this simple declaration:
“I have never abused anyone in all my life, anywhere, anytime, anyplace.”
The lawsuit was reported on the 10 P.M. local news programs Thursday night. Bernardin would not speak to the press until the next afternoon, after the suit against him was actually filed. In the morning the cardinal met with advisers and, following the policies he had put in place, notified the diocesan review board of the allegations. He then spent an hour alone, which ended when he called a close friend for support. At 1 P.M. Bernardin walked into a small, wood-paneled auditorium at Church headquarters where he was met by seventy reporters and photographers and a bank of television cameras. Dressed in simple clerical black, with a gold chain crossing his chest and his cardinal’s ring on his right hand, he walked to a bouquet of microphones affixed to a podium as photographers fired their cameras.
For the ensuing hour, Bernardin stood before the press and steadfastly repeated that he was innocent of the charges, which had left him “flabbergasted” and “saddened.” He said he had no recollections of Steven Cook, and was most concerned about the effect the suit would have on the faith of Chicago’s Catholics. “I am not really concerned about myself,” he said. “I know that I am innocent. I’m more concerned about my people, the people whom I love, the people whom I shepherd.”
When a reporter asked, “Are you sexually active?” Bernardin paused for a moment and said, “I am sixty-five years old, and I can tell you that all my life I have lived a chaste and celibate life.”
Although most would take Bernardin’s declaration at face value, experts on celibacy knew it was open to interpretation. When they felt free to speak plainly, few clerics said they believed that “chaste” and “celibate” meant a life lived entirely without any sexual experience. Most made exceptions for the occasional lapse, as long as they confessed and resumed their commitment to the ideal. On rare occasions, high Church officials even addressed the topic in a public way. At about the time when Bernardin faced accusations, a correspondent of the British Broadcasting Corporation asked Cardinal Jose Sanchez, then Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy, about the findings of Richard Sipe and others who said that at any given time between 45 and 50 percent of Catholic priests were sexually active. His response: “I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of those figures.”
Sipe, who had continued his research and writing after publication of Secret World, was deeply disturbed by the sexual hypocrisy he discovered in the Church, especially when it involved men he knew and admired. One high-ranking Jesuit told Sipe that a priest who “has sex a couple of times a year” qualified as celibate, even if his version of chastity and celibacy produced a host of offspring. Indeed, Sipe had never met someone who had actually lived a “chaste and celibate life” in a literal way. To him, Bernardin’s claim was yet another example of the way men who demanded so much of others when it came to sexual morality, used self-deception and even lies to protect themselves.
No matter what anyone thought of Bernardin’s description of his own sexual experience, the spectacle of a Roman Catholic cardinal answering such questions was something no one in the room could have imagined a decade earlier. It was an almost surreal occurrence even to those who devoted themselves to the cause of abuse victims and overcoming church cover-ups. Also, of all the major figures in the American church, Bernardin may have been the most popular with victims because he had met the problem of abuse more directly than most other bishops and seemed genuinely affected by their experiences.
As one of the main advocates for victims, Barbara Blaine heard from many members of SNAP who remained loyal Catholics and were shaken by the idea that a favorite leader of the Church had been accused. Blaine, who had enrolled in law school, had recently moved out of the Catholic Worker House on the South Side and into a tiny apartment where her walk-in closet became SNAP headquarters. She was hard-pressed to answer every person who called to talk about Bernardin and somewhat shocked, herself, by the news. As the case progressed she would be won over by the cardinal’s openness. “He has set a perfect example of how to respond to allegations,” she told one reporter.
“I didn’t know him at the time,” recalled Blaine, years later. “But he had a good reputation with people like the Catholic Workers because he had made very significant gestures to deal with homelessness.” Blaine would support any victims who came forward with a credible claim and Cook’s complaint contained specific details that merited a proper investigatio
n. Nevertheless, she feared that a case brought against a man who was so well-regarded by so many people could end badly for the small movement that had been coalescing around the cause of abuse victims and the conflicts over Catholic sexual morality.
Indeed, Bernardin represented the friendlier face of Catholicism for those who questioned the Church’s stands on sexual morality and the status of women. Although he never broke directly with Rome on any essential issue, the cardinal was most receptive to hearing opposing views. And he never expressed the Church’s antiabortion and antigay views in an aggressive way. Indeed, he frustrated many antiabortion activists who considered him to be soft on the issue and viewed him as a weak ally, at best. Indeed, as the charges against Bernardin became known, some of his supporters imagined that archconservatives were somehow behind it all.
The notion that conservatives lurked behind the charge against Bernardin got some support when a priest named Charles Fiore told a Chicago radio station that he believed the accusations. Fiore, who made his comments even before the lawsuit was filed with the court in Cincinnati, was outspoken on the issue of clergy sex abuse, and upset over priests who would violate young people. His analysis of the problem pinned much of the blame on homosexuality in the priesthood. An ultraconservative, Fiore had been ousted by the Dominican order and allied himself with a traditionalist movement. Bernardin would eventually claim that Fiore had spoken with Steven Cook before he filed his lawsuit and encouraged him to add Bernardin, whom he once called “an evil man,” to the suit. Fiore disputed this claim.
As an ancient, secretive, and opaque institution infused with mystery, the Church was an ideal focus for anyone who feared conspiracies and hidden agendas. Historically, the Church was rife with intrigue, power plays, and even mysterious deaths. Those inclined to assume that the hierarchy kept innumerable sordid secrets could point to this record and wonder how anyone could believe anything uttered by a pope or a bishop. In modern times this view found further encouragement from the evidence that emerged from scandals like the sex abuse cases. Every time a lawsuit forced the disgorgement of documents or a high-level cover-up was revealed, people like Fiore could feel affirmed in their belief that the Church was corrupted by secrets. As the old saying goes, even paranoids have enemies. In this case, even extreme critics of the Church could find disturbing stories to prove one point or another.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 23