The rulings that closed the courtroom doors to most clergy abuse victims in Wisconsin enforced a strict standard for the statute of limitations and gave higher Church authorities shelter under the First Amendment’s provisions for freedom of religion. In one case the court said these protections “prevented state courts from determining what made one competent to serve as Catholic priest since such determination would require interpretation of Church canons, policies, and practices.” In another important case brought by Jeffrey Anderson on behalf of seven men and women, the court denied clergy abuse victims the same leeway under the statute of limitations laws enjoyed by people who were abused by family members or psychotherapists. About a year after the decision, one of Anderson’s clients committed suicide.
Eventually well over one hundred suicides would be connected to clergy abuse. A few shamed priests would be among the dead, and in one extraordinary case in Hudson, Wisconsin, a court would find that Fr. Ryan Erickson almost certainly murdered a man named Daniel O’Connell, who knew Erickson had abused children.
As a Wisconsin judge would ultimately find, O’Connell had decided to expose Erickson to the police. The priest learned of his intention and drove to O’Connell’s funeral home, where he killed him with a gunshot to the head. James Ellison, who was working at the funeral home, ran in to see what happened and was also killed by the priest. Erickson fled and was not immediately connected to the killing by police.
Days after killing him, Erickson presided over O’Connell’s funeral. Police investigated for about a year before they interviewed Erickson and seized his computer. The next day, Erickson hanged himself from a church fire escape.
Records that emerged in the case showed that Erickson had long been the subject of abuse complaints but his superiors had permitted him to stay in ministry. When they learned this, the O’Connell and Ellison families retained Jeffrey Anderson to sue every bishop in the United States, demanding they disclose the names of accused offenders so communities could be warned in the way Hudson was not. The bishop of Wilmington, Delaware, did release a list, but all the others resisted and the court would not require them to comply with the request.
The tragedy in Hudson was actually exceeded in rural Kansas, where five young men who had accused the same priest of molesting them when they were altar boys killed themselves. Fortunately the overwhelming majority of abuse victims never reached the desperate point of self-destruction. A much larger number found more productive outlets for their responses to abuse. Thousands joined groups like SNAP, which offered them self-help meetings, one-on-one peer counseling, and opportunities to be public advocates for legal reforms. Many victims told their stories to reporters, who presented them in print and broadcast media. The stories found a receptive audience in a world where sexual ethics had evolved to the point where deception, the abuse of power, and betrayal of trust were regarded as important sources of harm.
Western societies were becoming more sensitive to the ways that position and power came into play in cases of sexual misconduct. This trend had begun in the 1970s as courts recognized that employees who were disciplined or denied benefits and advancement because they turned away sexual advances were victims of real discrimination. In the ensuing decades, courts found that employers could be held liable for the behavior of managers and workers and legislatures created new penalties for sexual harassment or discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation. While different branches of government brought legal changes, highly publicized events involving the more general abuse of power and the hypocrisy of men in leadership positions encouraged people to look askance at anyone who claimed great authority. From Watergate to Iran Contra to sex assaults committed by priests, the crimes of the powerful and their subsequent cover-up schemes gave ordinary people reasons to look everywhere for hypocrisy and self-dealing and to believe that reports of scandal were based in facts.
In this context, Jason Berry found himself receptive to shocking stories of sexual abuse and drug use by the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder and leader of a religious order called Legionaries of Christ. Little known in America, the legionaries operated mainly in Latin America and Europe but maintained their worldwide headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut. In America they would enjoy the greatest protection from interference under the cover of the Constitution. However, those who considered themselves Maciel’s victims felt free to bring their stories to Berry. The first had contacted him in 1993. That was when he began the long process of learning about Maciel, his order, and its place within the Church.
With hundreds of priests in service and hundreds more in training, the legionaries operated schools, seminaries, media, medical missions, and many other ministries. Maciel also founded a group for laypeople called Regnum Christi that claimed tens of thousands of members. Both organizations embraced intensely conservative Catholicism and supported the authority of the Pope. John Paul II ordained sixty of the order’s priests in 1991 and invited Maciel to accompany him on visits to North America.
Working with a Hartford Courant staff reporter named Gerald Renner, Berry coauthored a series of articles exposing the complaints against Maciel, which included charges that he sexually abused boys as young as twelve. The allegations were made by a man who had been a priest and president of the Legionaries in America. Juan Vaca said he had first reported Maciel to higher Church authorities in 1978. The complaints went as far as the Vatican, but were apparently ignored.
The assignment for the Courant set Berry off on a reporter’s odyssey that continued into the next decade and beyond. Much of what he discovered would appear in a book he authored with Renner titled Vows of Silence and a subsequent documentary film he produced based on the book. (A second book by Berry, Render Unto Rome, would explore the issues even more deeply.) Altogether, Berry’s reporting would reveal Rev. Maciel to be a morphine-addicted man of the cloth who fathered between three and six children, stood accused of multiple counts of pedophilia, and had sexual relations with at least twenty seminarians. Maciel got away with it, in Berry’s estimation, because he enjoyed support at the highest levels in the Vatican and sent large amounts of money to Rome. Much of this money was delivered as cash in envelopes handed directly to individuals in the Church bureaucracy.
Remarkably, Berry’s reporting on Maciel caused barely a ripple in the American media. In part this was because the tale was incredibly complex and involved an institution that was little known in the United States. But Berry also noticed that, in general, people were no longer shocked by reports on criminal behavior by Catholic clerics. By the end of the 1990s the phrase “pedophile priest” had appeared thousands of times in major newspapers and thousands more in smaller print outlets and on TV and radio broadcasts across America. Documentary filmmakers had addressed the subject in Canada, Ireland, and America and priest abusers were becoming a target for comedians. Denis Leary mocked them and the Church to a merciless degree in a national cable TV broadcast. But five years after Sinéad O’Connor was met by a blast of criticism when she tore up a picture of the Pope, Leary provoked no outrage.
* * *
Depending on one’s perspective, Americans had either folded the problem of abusive priests into their overall concept of the Catholic Church, or they had become inured to the outrage. Fr. Thomas Doyle feared that as big cases like the ones in Dallas and Stockton were resolved, laypeople and clergy were becoming complacent about the problem. Fr. Doyle had continued to consult on abuse cases as he was transferred from the Azores to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma and then to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Each year brought him greater numbers of cases. Indeed, he would eventually deal with almost two hundred American dioceses. For the most part his involvement in a case was meant to signal to the Church that he was ready to testify and this threat often encouraged them to settle.
In trips back to the United States Doyle made a point of visiting with Richard Sipe, who had moved to La Jolla, California. The two renegades would walk along the water
and talk about cases, men they knew in the Church, and their shared disillusionment. Doyle’s temper was hotter that Sipe’s, and he would often vent his frustration. “The Catholic Church is basically a crooked institution,” he would say. “You know it. I know it. How is it that everybody else doesn’t get it?”
Sipe understood the ambivalence of Catholics who could not reach a firm conclusion about the Church because he had long wavered in his own relationship to it. Born into the faith and seasoned in both the seminary and the priesthood, he had worked within the Catholic world most of his life. Though he was pained by the facts he had uncovered in his research, he had maintained his emotional attachment to the Church until he learned that his old order at St. John’s had covered up abuse cases while he was chairing its sexual trauma institute. This realization, and the spiritual example he saw in Doyle and Jeffrey Anderson, converted Sipe to a new kind of spirituality. He saw in their example, as members of AA, a faith in action that seemed more selfless and sustaining. (Anderson’s honesty about his past, which Sipe called “radical,” was particularly inspiring to him.) To understand it better he stopped drinking and began attending meetings even though he was not technically an alcoholic. In the fellowship of sobriety he found a community and a unique and intriguing combination of self-determination and group support.
More solid in his sobriety with every passing year, Doyle would talk about himself as “a good AA guy.” He would say, “I’m going to take care of my resentments so I’ll be sober today and sober tomorrow.” However, experience had taught him that this struggle, to contain his emotions, would require regular attention. The problem of abusive priests was broad and deep and the quiet resolution of hundreds of lawsuits had allowed the Church to escape making the kind of reforms needed to protect children. Instead of opening itself to change, it seemed to be perfecting the practice of quiet diversion and delay.
As Fr. Doyle knew, the Church was now facing challenges on sex abuse in countries other than America and in arenas beyond the courts. The summer of 1998 had found John Paul II in Austria where he tried to stem the defections from the Church caused by the abuse scandal that brought down Cardinal Groer. The percentage of Catholics in the country was in the middle of a long, steady decline. Hundreds of thousands of Austrian Catholics had signed petitions opposing the Church on matters of sexual morality and the country was the center of an Internet-based organization formed to promote the power of laypeople within the institution. But while he told Austrians “Don’t leave the Church!” the Pope did not mention Groer, or the disillusionment of ordinary believers. At the historic Heldenplatz, where Hitler had announced Germany’s annexation of Austria, the Pope appeared draped in bright green vestments and wearing a tall white and gold miter. He warned against “premature or inadequate involvement of public opinion” in matters of faith and morals. In other words, the crisis in Catholicism was a matter of too much talk among ordinary Catholics.
Standing in the vast square among 50,000 people, one Catholic priest felt deeply disappointed in the Pope. Rev. Eduard Fischer was one of the many men who had said that Cardinal Groer had molested them when they were young. In response, Fischer’s bishop had disciplined him in the way that bishops refused to discipline priests accused of sex crimes. He immediately dismissed Fischer from his parish position. A faithful priest devoted to Christianity, Fischer considered his own experience, and what he heard at the Heldenplatz, and said, “The Pope is visiting a burning house, but instead of speaking about the fire, he talks about the lovely flowers in front of it.”
Bad as things were for the Roman authorities in Austria, they were worse in Ireland, where an intensely traditional Catholic society was rapidly throwing off its old attitude of obedience. Here the media played a far bigger role than the courts as a series of print and television reports revealed both individual cases of minors being abused by priests and the systemic maltreatment of Irish children in schools and institutions operated by Catholic orders.
The process began in 1993 when the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity in Drumcondra sold land near their convent to developers as property values began to rise across Ireland. The run-up in real estate prices heralded the arrival of the Celtic Tiger, an economic boom that transformed the country from one of the poorest in Europe to one of the richest. It occurred thanks mainly to policies that encouraged foreign countries to build manufacturing and operation facilities that took advantage of a well-educated but underemployed workforce. By the mid-1990s, 40 percent of the computer software used in Europe would come from Ireland and a country that long sent young people abroad to find work became a net labor importer. Farmers and other large landholders became rich overnight as builders in need of sites for industry, housing, and retail centers snapped up properties at record prices.
After their land deal was made, the nuns in Drumcondra discovered that more than a hundred women had been buried on the land they had sold. The bodies were dug up and cremated. Local reporters, curious about how a cemetery could become a development, discovered that the women had lived and worked in servitude at one of twenty so-called Magdelene laundries. They had been placed by families or various authorities because they were pregnant out of wedlock, accused of prostitution, or orphaned. Locked in at night and required to work without pay for twelve hours per day, these outcasts often remained at the laundries for years, even decades. More than 30,000 women had been relegated to these institutions over the years. Their plight had been known, but never recognized, as shame and respect for the Church silenced families, authorities, and the women themselves.
Stories published in local papers led to a public outcry and a play and a film about the Magdelene laundries. It also prepared the Irish public for a searing, three-part television documentary—States of Fear—that revealed generations of abuse and the Dickensian conditions in a Church-run system of residential schools and reformatories for poor and troubled children. Filmmaker Mary Raftery documented sexual abuse, malnutrition, beatings, and neglect on a systemic scale. The nation was so appalled that Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern addressed the parliament after the last episode of the series was aired. He promised the government would appoint a Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse that would scour the country to document the extent of the mistreatment of children. “The government wishes to make a sincere and long overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse,” said Ahern, “for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue.”
As Raftery’s documentary series prompted an official inquiry and opened a national conversation on child abuse and Irish Catholic culture, the stories of individuals who had been abused by priests also came into view. In 1995 the Irish media revealed Andrew Madden’s settlement over abuse perpetrated by a priest named Ivan Payne. The abuse Madden experienced beginning when he was twelve likely shocked the Irish public, but much of the outrage around the case came as Archbishop Desmond Connell declared that Church funds had “not been used in any way” to resolve the case. As viewers of the TV program Prime Time had heard, the settlement had been paid with Church funds lent directly to Payne. The bishop had looked into the TV camera and lied. As usual, the deceptions intended to deflect scandal were considered, by many, to be worse for the institution than the crimes committed by an individual inside it.
Soon after the Madden case became known, a priest named Sean Fortune was arrested and charged with twenty-two counts of sexual abuse of minors. In January 1996 authorities added forty-four new charges. Attempting to respond to critics, the Irish bishops issued what they called a Framework Document that seemed to set a standard for a prompt response to claims of abuse, including reports to civil authorities. But while the framework called for all bishops to adopt its policies, this never happened.
The bishops didn’t act because Archbishop Luciano Storero, the Vatican’s ambassador to Ireland, intervened. In a secret letter sent to every diocese he ordered the country’s bishops to ignore their own plan, espec
ially the part about reporting claims to the police. Storero noted that canon law gave accused priests options that might well thwart the kind of quick action the bishops hoped to take. He also expressed “moral” reservations about mandatory reporting to police. Besides, wrote Storero, the Vatican had commenced “a global study” of abuse policies and “will not be remiss in establishing some concrete directives with regard to these policies.”
* * *
Like everyone else in Ireland, the young man whose charges led to the arrest of Sean Fortune had no idea that the country’s bishops were caught between their own need to respond to a growing number of complaints about criminal priests and the power of the Holy See. Colm O’Gorman knew only that he wanted to stop Fr. Fortune from raping other boys in and around his parish in Wexford. When his complaint was followed by accusations from six other young men, O’Gorman agreed to be identified in the press and quickly became the public face of the issue.
O’Gorman’s choice was brave in many ways. First, it required him to be honest with his entire family, including a very traditional Irish father, about his identity as a gay man. Second, he had to risk living “out” in a place where, as he told his father, “There are people who would cheerfully kill me for being gay.” Finally there was the matter of challenging the Church in a country where Catholicism was practically universal and the institution was thoroughly entwined with the government and social organizations. Ninety percent of Irish elementary schools and half of the country’s high schools were run by the Church. The influence of the Church had kept divorce illegal until 1995 and abortion remained so. Medical care was dominated by Catholic-run hospitals and even when the Church didn’t own or operate a clinic its practices were ruled by a religious ethos. In one famous case, women had to fight to receive a new cancer drug at a state-run hospital because officials opposed a protocol that required doctors to prescribe birth control to patients they were providing with the medicine.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 29