Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal

by D'Antonio, Michael

  A few reporters who had interviewed Doyle during the height of the abuse scandal kept in touch by phone; so did Richard Sipe and Ray Mouton and a handful of lawyers who continued to press abuse claims. Dallas-based attorney Sylvia Demarest, who had visited Doyle in Florida, called regularly to keep him informed about a case she was working with a famous litigator named Windle Turley. Turley, who once thought he’d become a preacher, had recently won a $105 million verdict against General Motors for a faulty truck design that contributed to three hundred accident deaths. In 1993 he and Demarest teamed up to represent several young men who said a priest named Rudolph “Rudy” Kos had raped and molested them when they were as young as nine. By the time the case neared trial, the number of plaintiffs had reached eleven and included the parents of a victim named Jay Lemberger, who had committed suicide by shooting himself at age twenty-one. Rudy Kos had conducted the funeral.

  Working for the better part of three years, Turley and Demarest conducted more than 150 depositions as they prepared their case. Although high courts in other states such as Minnesota, California, and New York were limiting victims’ access to the judicial system, the two Texas lawyers worked as if they were certain of a trial. The effort was a demonstration of virtues Demarest cherished most—persistence and the ability to delay gratification—that she had acquired very early in life.

  Like Raymond Mouton and Minos Simon, Demarest was a Cajun with roots that grew deep into Louisiana’s past. Her family settled in watery Cameron Parish, on the Gulf shore, before the Civil War. Demarest was born in the summer of 1944 to parents who spoke patois French. She picked cotton as a child and learned the concept of negligence on the day when herbicides used at a neighbor’s farm killed the entire Demarest crop. Observing that “there are people with power and people without power” she did everything she was told she couldn’t do, including going to college and then law school at the University of Texas.

  After passing the bar exam, Demarest took legal aid jobs and spent much of a decade suing various institutions on behalf of the poor. Next, in private practice, she took on cases ranging from medical negligence to sexual harassment. Her first clergy abuse client was a young man who was fourteen when he was sexually assaulted by a priest who had invited him to the military base where he was serving and got him drunk. The boy was discovered running naked around the base housing complex. He was brought home by a second priest who promised to explain what happened to his parents, but in fact said nothing.

  At the start of the Kos case, Demarest and Turley consulted with Jeff Anderson, who gave them a quick survey course on the record-keeping practices of the Church and suggested the sources they might pursue to discover what the officers of the diocese knew and when they knew it. Anderson also urged Turley and Demarest to cooperate with reporters who might want to publicize the case. In his experience, media reports often prompted calls from witnesses and other victims whose statements propelled the discovery process. The Dallas attorneys had the same experience after the press reported on the suit. As Demarest would later recall, a host of key witnesses called her out of the blue to say their complaints to bishops about Kos and other priests had been ignored.

  As they investigated, the lawyers learned that Fr. Kos had been married and divorced and had obtained an annulment in order to become a priest. When church officials considered his candidacy for the priesthood they heard from his ex-wife, who told them that Kos “was gay and was attracted to boys.” The lawyers also learned that Kos’s brother informed the Church that Rudy had molested him when they were both children. Despite these warning signs, Kos was ordained and placed in parishes where, from the very start of his ministry, people reported him keeping minors in his room overnight. After many complaints the diocese consulted a social worker who determined Kos was a “classic, textbook pedophile.” Kos orally and anally raped or molested boys as young as nine, often giving them drugs or alcohol to make them compliant. He had a foot fetish, which moved him to masturbate with boys’ feet, and many of his victims said they had been abused by the priest hundreds of times.

  In an effort to put Kos in some context, Demarest and Turley turned to Doyle and Sipe, who provided expert witness statements and promised to testify if needed. Based on what they heard from these insiders, Demarest and Turley believed they saw a broad conspiracy throughout the Church in America and targeted the national bishops’ conference as well as the local diocese. They commissioned Doyle to write a report that laid out the responsibilities assumed by various bishops of the Church and showed how higher authorities, including the national bishops’ conference, might be liable for the damage done to his victims. Doyle was most definitive when it came to questions about standard Church practices regarding priests who abuse minors and claims that the problem was something new and not well understood. He wrote:

  The sexual abuse of adults, adolescents and children by the Catholic clergy is not an issue that only began to happen in 1984. It has always been a serious problem for the Church. This is evidenced by the fact that there is on record Church legislation going back to the fourth century concerning priests who sexually abuse people but especially children. This legislation was first codified in 1917 and revised in 1983.

  In modern times, Doyle noted, bishops have known that clergy who abused minors were committing criminal acts and went to great lengths to protect them and keep their crimes secret. When complaints arose, the subjects were transferred and victims were persuaded to stay quiet. “Evidence from cases across the country indicates there has been a conscious and organized cover-up of this problem,” added Doyle. “There is little evidence that I know of that Church officials followed State reporting statutes and reported incidents of child abuse to civil authorities.”

  Richard Sipe had come to view sexual secrecy as the main problem of the clergy, and believed it governed behavior throughout Catholicism. Much of what he wrote was based on his own research, which was leading him to ever-more-painful conclusions about the institution that had served as the foundation for much of his life. As he would recall it, “priest by priest, person by person, student by student, consult by consult, text by text” he had found further evidence that the Church was rife with sexual blackmail and cover-ups that were both the cause and the product of great suffering. Then an attorney from Arkansas named Morgan “Chip” Welch travelled to Sipe’s home in Maryland to ask him to testify in court for the first time.

  Welch and Sipe sat at a big round oak table that had been made at St. John’s Abbey. Sipe was moved by Welch’s story of a young girl who had been assaulted by a priest, but he was reluctant to appear in court and issue opinions. Then his wife and research partner Marianne asked him if he didn’t have a duty to help the victim in the case. Sipe chose to testify. The victim won more than $1 million. Sipe’s abbey-built oak table became the place where dozens of attorneys (including Sylvia Demarest) and reporters and victims sat to ask and receive similar help. In the process, Sipe would also continue a painful personal reassessment of Catholicism and the institutional Church he once gave his life to. Sometimes this experience made him feel depressed, if not despairing. But he found that once he started working for victims and their supporters, he could not turn away any of them.

  For his report to Demarest, Sipe used his own data and also cited a recent survey of Spanish priests that found that more than a quarter of them had “acted-out sexually with minors” and an American study that found a similar number of Franciscan friars at one Catholic school “had inappropriate sexual contact with minor students.” In the United States, the national bishops’ conference set guidelines for the selection and training of priests and for responses to abuse claims. In Sipe’s view this group should have warned the public about dangerous priests and had failed to meet its obligations to keep certain men out of ministry.

  Turley and Demarest hoped that the Doyle and Sipe reports would allow them to sue national Church agencies but in pretrial rulings Judge Anne Ashby found the respons
ibility for Kos stopped with the Diocese of Dallas. However, this was one of the few rulings that went against the plaintiffs. At other key junctures Ashby threw out a First Amendment defense raised by the Church, and she accepted delayed discovery of harm arguments that helped the plaintiffs get around the statute of limitations.

  The essential arguments in the case were clear to Demarest long before the jury was even selected. She saw Kos as “a sexual predator with a long history of preying on little boys before he ever became a Catholic priest.” Warnings about his behavior had been ignored by higher-ups who failed to investigate despite repeated complaints. On the other side of the case, Randal Mathis, who would represent the diocese, settled on a strategy that would paint Kos as a brilliant deceiver who victimized his bosses as well as the boys he abused. “Kos is a serious, serious sociopath,” he said before the trial began in May 1997, “and he’s good at fooling people.”

  The proceedings were held in a small courtroom in the George S. Allen Courthouse on Commerce Street, directly opposite the austere plaza that memorializes the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred a block away in 1963. From the start, no one contested Rudolph Kos’s sociopathy. The sides also agreed that he had committed the acts described by the plaintiffs, including the rape of a preteen boy who had become unconscious after the priest gave him alcohol. Providing his victims with drugs and drink were part of Kos’s routine. He also brought boys on vacation trips and kept them overnight in his bed. During trial, two young men testified that Kos had abused them hundreds of times when they were minors.

  Details of the abuse were offered without much objection from the defense and a bishop named Michael Sheehan even apologized on the witness stand for what had happened, saying:

  I thought he was a good man and would be a good priest. He deceived us. I’m deeply saddened by what Rudy Kos did to his victims. I apologize to the victims and their families.

  Sheehan’s statement reflected the dilemma experienced by many bishops in abuse cases. They felt pastoral desires to comfort faithful Catholics who had been betrayed, but also believed they should defend Church coffers and protect its special status under the Constitution. This second priority—defending the Church—put them in the position of deferring to attorneys. The lawyer for the Dallas diocese chose not to emphasize these arguments but instead focused on the efforts made by the Church as it followed its due process and was ill-served by experts. “The diocese relied in a number of instances—and now wish it hadn’t—on the advice of doctors that turned out to be very, very wrong,” he said. “We as a diocese have egg on our faces today. We’re embarrassed, upset, regretful. This diocese wasn’t negligent. It was fooled with the help of a lot of other people.”

  For nine weeks the jury heard often sordid testimony about Kos’s sexual behavior and complex descriptions of the canon law procedure for disciplining priests. Witnesses representing the diocese spoke about how they felt limited by the content of the complaints they received and constrained from taking action. Demarest would call two pivotal witnesses. Bishop Charles Grahmann steadfastly defended the way he and his predecessors responded to complaints dating back ten years or more. As Windle Turley pressed him to acknowledge that “red flags” of warning had been waving the bishop said, “They were yellow flags.” Turley replied, “Unless you’re colorblind. How are your eyes? Do you see well?”

  The second key witness for the plaintiffs was Thomas Doyle, who took the stand wearing a white collar and a black suit. Doyle thought to himself “bring ’em on” as he faced a courtroom packed with clergy—he called them the “Dallas Sanhedrin”—and contradicted much of the testimony offered by Church officials. He said that the bishops had possessed the authority, under Church procedures, to move suspected abusers out of ministry quickly. As he addressed Church procedures, Doyle spoke as a canon law expert. When asked to assess the clerical culture, he spoke as a still-active priest with broad experience. His most powerful contribution came when Demarest referred to a bishop’s testimony in the trial and asked, “Would a bishop lie?” Doyle replied, “I know a bishop would lie, and he did.”

  The judge prepared a forty-three-page questionnaire for the jurors to consider as they reviewed the case. Altogether the answers would determine, among other facts, whether Kos and the diocese had harmed the plaintiffs in ways that affected their lives in an ongoing basis. They were asked to consider whether the Church had committed fraud, concealed information, and conducted a conspiracy to hide crimes committed by Kos. Finally, they were to weigh whether years of abuse by Kos was the “proximate cause” of Jay Lemberger’s suicide. Once all these issues were resolved the jury could determine compensation for the victims and, if they found “gross negligence” by the diocese, they could award punitive damages.

  After Judge Ashby gave the jury their charge and they departed, she asked the plaintiffs and defendants to wait a moment before leaving the courtroom. She took off her black robe and told the court reporter to stop making a record. She then came off the bench, took a seat in the jury box, and began to speak, not as a judge, but as a person who had been deeply affected by the proceedings. The only record of what she said was published by The Dallas Morning News and its reporter, Brooks Egerton. In her account she wrote that the judge addressed both parties and said:

  If anything like this can ever be positive, then let there be healing and let there be hope … everybody in this courtroom has been grieving.… You’ve been horrified. You’ve been hurt. You’ve been miserable. I’ve been so close to your tragedy it just breaks my heart.

  As Ashby spoke, the young men who brought the lawsuit leaned forward in their front-row seats so they could catch every word. “Each and every one of you is a valuable member of this community,” said Ashby as she addressed the plaintiffs. “I know that your Church and your God is very, very important to you. Don’t give it up.” Turning to the defendants she said, “You’re never going to be the same again, but you’re going to get through this. The Church has many wonderful things ahead of it.” When she finished talking Ashby volunteered to answer questions from anyone in the courtroom. One lone woman raised her voice to praise the judge for her conduct in the case and then the crowd in attendance burst into applause.

  Unprecedented in the experience of any of the lawyers present, Ashby’s monolog left defense attorney Randal Mathis stunned, red-faced, and at a loss for words. Demarest and Turley were quietly thrilled by Ashby’s remarks but they were also sensitive to the possibility that the judge might rule on future motions. They restrained themselves when asked to comment. Turley allowed that what she had done was “unusual” but he insisted it was not “improper.”

  More unusual jurisprudence came when the jury reported it had reached a verdict. Their notice to the judge had included a message they wanted read aloud. She agreed to the request, but wanted their findings announced first. As Ashby looked down on the packed courtroom she saw the young men whom she had counseled and about sixty of their friends and family gathered around them. Conspicuously absent from the courtroom were the bishops of Dallas. Only a single monsignor sat with defense attorneys as Ashby announced that the jurors had found for the plaintiffs and awarded actual and punitive damages of $119.6 million to be shared by about a dozen victims.

  The number reached by the jury was so large that some in the courtroom had trouble grasping it. As the shock passed, Ashby called the courtroom to order and said that she had agreed to read the jury’s message. Its most important passage began with a declaration that the Church, in considering abuse claims, should recognize that “the child is of the utmost importance.” The jurors also called for the Dallas diocese to adopt stricter rules and practices regarding clergy conduct and added a plea. “Please admit your guilt,” they said, “and allow these young men to get on with their lives.” As Ashby fell silent, the plaintiffs, their families, and friends stood as one and applauded for a full thirty seconds.

  If required to pay the plaintiff
s nearly $120 million, the Diocese of Dallas might go bankrupt. With this in mind defense attorney Mathis promised appeals that he would take all the way to the United States Supreme Court. However, such an appeal would have put the Church in danger of adverse rulings which, issued from a federal courthouse, might establish the kind of precedents that the Church as a whole wanted to avoid. Appeal would also keep Rudy Kos in the news for as long as the process required. The diocese was already suffering withering attacks even from conservatives like William F. Buckley, a Catholic, who suggested the Church “Crank up the polygraph, FBI style, and then ask the postulant: ‘Have you ever, with sexual motive, fondled a boy?’”

  Faced with such image problems the Church negotiated a settlement that required a far lower payment—$23.4 million—but also a formal apology. Rudy Kos learned of the agreement while serving a fifteen-year prison sentence he received after being convicted on criminal charges. In a prison interview he told a reporter that he too was a victim and that given the chance he would ask his victims for forgiveness. “If I offended you, you know, tell me, give me your forgiveness, let me make it up to you, let me do something,” he pleaded. “That is the way it is with all sin.”

  17. OLIVER O’GRADY

  The Kos verdict showed that some judges and some juries were willing to set aside the statute of limitations and punish a priest whose crimes were proven and a diocese that failed to protect children. False memory, the Bernardin affair, and the Pope’s moral vision had not been considerations for the court in Dallas. Instead, the jury weighed the documentary evidence and witness testimony as they would in any fraud and negligence case. In the end they denied the Church special protections under the First Amendment and found it responsible for one of its priests in the same way any corporation would be responsible for an employee.