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

by D'Antonio, Michael

  In Boston, Sipe helped Rezendes and the others on the team to see beyond collars and cassocks to recognize priests and their superiors as men who embody all that was good and evil about human beings. They experience the same emotions as everyone else, were motivated by the same desires, and were capable of the very best and worst actions. And like everyone else, they mostly muddled through life, making compromises and balancing the generous and self-sacrificing Christian values they promised to uphold with self-interest and ambition.

  For journalists who were raised Catholic, Sipe’s insights came as an antidote to whatever lessons they absorbed as children who were taught that priests were possessed of supernatural powers and were deserving of special respect. In fact, Catholic priests could and did commit rape, murder, and theft and often got away with their crimes because others assumed them to be especially good men. Indeed, the Constitution and the institutional strengths of the Church and the Vatican state provided them with protections others did not enjoy.

  The Globe journalists were not without their own powers, however. The same First Amendment that sheltered religion also protected the freedom of the press, which gave reporters more rights than ordinary citizens as they pursued their work. Rezendes, Pfieffer, Robinson, and Carroll also enjoyed the backing of New England’s most powerful media outlet, including its attorneys. They were informed by the growing utility of the Internet, which exceeded the highly developed human network of the Catholic Church in its ability to transmit information. And they felt a calling to their profession similar to a religious impulse. Reporters were just as susceptible to corruption as anyone else, but newspaper pay was so low, and the work was so demanding that those who worked long enough and hard enough to rise to a place on the Spotlight Team were the ones who still believed it was their job to check the power of important institutions.

  As they interviewed Geoghan’s victims and found men and women who had been abused by other priests, the Globe reporters discovered that more than thirty Boston diocese priests had been subjects of abuse complaints and that many of these cases had been resolved by cash payments from the Church. They also figured out that priests assigned to long sick leaves were often being sent to places like St. Luke’s after charges from sexual abuse victims. By tracking their assignments and finding the gaps, they were able to make educated guesses about which clergymen were trouble. As they dug, the reporters kept returning to Sipe to ask him if what they were being told could be true. He informed them that yes, it was common for a bishop or cardinal to move a sex offender priest from parish to parish; and yes, the Church often sought advice from doctors and therapists who really were not qualified. In Geoghan’s case, the archdiocese of Boston relied on one doctor who was a general practitioner and described himself as the priest’s “longtime friend” and another who was a psychiatrist with no special education in sexual deviance. Both wrote evaluations that failed to protect the public but did allow Cardinal Bernard Law to say that he had consulted experts who cleared Geoghan for duty.

  Law became the key target in the Globe’s investigation because, as Rezendes would recall, “We did not discover clergy sex abuse. Our story was about the institutional cover-up.” Court files on lawsuits settled by the Church seemed a logical place to start looking for documentary evidence. In midsummer a Globe staffer named Kathleen Burge reported that Law had admitted that he knew, as early as 1984, that Father Geoghan had been accused of molesting seven boys. Burge’s report, which was published on the inside of the paper, also noted that Law’s lawyers had asked Superior Court Judge James McHugh to seal the records.

  Although some readers may have been struck by Law’s admission, the Spotlight Team found the archdiocese’s request for secrecy more intriguing. With a little work they discovered that judges across the state, but especially in Boston, routinely sealed records in suits involving the Church to spare it negative publicity. One local attorney, Mitchell Garabedian, had filed more than eighty abuse-related suits. In order to get around the law protecting charities he had named individuals, including Law, as defendants. However, almost all of the documents, depositions, and other evidence in Garabedian’s cases—thousands of pages—remained sealed. Garabedian believed that some key evidence remained in about a dozen related suits where the Church had failed to obtain confidentiality rulings.

  Through the summer and fall of 2001, Rezendes conducted a kind of courtship of Garabedian. He visited the lawyer’s office—a space piled with papers and empty coffee cups where Garbedian worked alone—and telephoned him frequently. Rezendes earned the lawyer’s trust but Garabedian was subject to confidentiality orders and couldn’t share what he knew directly. He eventually told Rezendes that he had included some key information in files for other cases that were not restricted. Hoping to save a bit of time Rezendes said, “Why don’t you just give me copies?” Garabedian said Rezendes would have to get them himself, at the courthouse, but he told him that he had put the most important documents into fourteen different case files not covered by secrecy orders.

  “I had already asked for those,” recalled Rezendes years later. “The documents he said had been placed there were all gone. They were empty files.”

  An appalled Garabedian couldn’t explain why the case files had been stripped, but he wasn’t going to risk angering a judge by giving the stuff to the newspaper. The solution would be a lawsuit filed by the Globe’s attorneys. This challenge would be heard by a judge named Constance Sweeney, a no-nonsense Catholic woman with short brown hair who peered at lawyers over eyeglasses perched at the end of her nose. In more than fifteen years on the bench, Sweeney had overseen several high-profile trials and once approved a TV station’s petition for police videotape showing the line-ups used as a witness was asked to identify a murder suspect.

  Sweeney’s ruling on Garabedian’s files was kind to her fellow judges, noting that their secrecy rules had the “unintended effect of impeding the access of the public and the press to certain aspects of the case.” As in the murder case, she favored disclosure, and ordered that the documents be released after a thirty-day period, during which names could be blotted out to protect the privacy of victims and others. Referring to Church claims that the documents were shielded by the First Amendment she wrote that the Constitution “does not automatically free them from the legal duties imposed on the rest of society.” A second woman jurist, appeals court judge Cynthia Cohen, upheld Sweeney and the documents were set to be made public in January 2002.

  Although the Globe’s lawyers won the ruling, the documents would be available to anyone who asked for them. The prospect of another paper, or TV station, getting the story at the same time was unsettling. But as the reporters and their editors worried over how to be first with the news, they got some help from Mike Rezendes’s new friend, Mitch Garabedian. Late in December Garabedian mentioned that Judge Sweeney’s order opening the records of suits against the cardinal applied to future cases as well as those on file. He intended to deposit new copies of them at the clerk of courts’ office on the first Friday in January. Once again Rezendes asked for copies. Once again Garbedian said no. However, he did agree to make his visit to the courthouse at 4:15 P.M. Rezendes and his colleague Matt Carroll could stake out the place and get first shot at the papers.

  Garabedian was good to his word. At about 4:20 P.M. the reporters appeared at the superior court clerk’s office and saw the papers on a rolling cart. The staff woman who heard their request said she couldn’t hand over the documents because they were subject to the waiting period the judge had imposed when she ruled on the old cases. Hardly equipped to make a legal argument with someone who wasn’t empowered to rule anyway, the two journalists appealed to a supervisor. Neither woman seemed to know that the Globe had prevailed in the court of appeals. However, they told Rezendes and Carroll that they could have the ruling faxed from the Globe to the clerk of courts and see a judge who was on duty for eventualities like this one.

  Judge Viera Volterr
a occupied chambers several floors above the clerk’s office. The elevator in the old building creaked slowly in response to the call button and the two reporters felt like it wasn’t actually moving as it carried them up. The judge made them sit quietly in the jury box as he considered their request and the files they wanted, which were on his desk. “These are very sensitive documents” he noted as he leafed through psychiatric records, depositions, and internal documents from the Church. “Where is the editorial responsibility in publishing these?”

  Rezendes wouldn’t recall exactly what he said, only that, “In my most earnest voice I defended journalism’s role. Other than that, I was sweating and begging.” As he ran out of things to say, a clerk appeared with the fax from the Globe. Judge Volterra took it in hand, studied it, and said, “Yep, that’s it. You can have it.”

  Returning by elevator to the floor where they could find a copying machine, the reporters were met by a court employee who had just locked the door to the room where it was kept. “I can’t open the door,” she said, adjusting her winter coat. “I’m meeting my daughter in Kenmore Square.”

  With a little more begging, Rezendes and Carroll persuaded her to stay late so they could copy the files. The men caught their breath in a taxi that took them from the courthouse to their office. Working through the night and the next day, the team produced the first article on the scandal, which appeared on the front page of the Sunday paper. For generations the front page of the Sunday Globe had been the most important media space in New England and despite the decline of newspapers it retained this status. More than one million people saw the headline “Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years” and the facts laid out in the article shocked the six-state region.

  Geoghan was the main focus of that first report, which explained that the Church knew that more than a hundred victims had complained about him and that they were as young as four when the abuse began. The priest had apparently abused seven boys in one extended family and when the aunt of these victims wrote Law’s predecessor, he asked her to “love the sinner and pray for him.” The documents provided proof that Cardinal Law was warned about Geoghan and nevertheless transferred him into parishes where he would have access to children. It also foreshadowed an avalanche of future scandal as the records for eighty-four lawsuits became public later in the month.

  In the week that followed the original article, the Globe published a dozen more. Cardinal Law, who at first refused to answer questions, publicly apologized to victims “particularly those who were abused in assignments which I made.” Seventy years old, Law was a solidly built man with white hair and bright blue eyes. His face flushed red as he spent an hour answering questions at a press conference that was broadcast live on television. He promised a “zero tolerance” policy for priests who abused minors and said that “no one who is guilty of sexually abusing a minor” was serving in a parish.

  The public reaction surprised Rezendes and others at the Globe. Although he expected picketing by Catholics incensed over the Sunday article, Monday brought only a trickle of reader responses and most of those were positive. By midweek a phone line set up to receive reader calls was jammed. Many callers wanted to discuss how they too had been abused by a priest. Among those who were accused were many of the priests who had been identified by the reporters as they did their early research.

  Days after Law made his dramatic pledge of zero tolerance and promised that no abusers remained in ministry, a local priest named Kelvin Igubita was arrested on charges of raping a girl who did housekeeping for him. On the day when the arrest was reported, Globe columnist Derrick Jackson issued the first call for Cardinal Law’s resignation. “The only way he can restore the Church’s credibility on abuse,” wrote Jackson, “is to leave his altar open for a successor who has both eyes wide open.”

  The scandal revealed in the first set of Globe articles was amplified as Geoghan faced a jury in a criminal trial and the national media turned its attention to the archdiocese of Boston. For weeks on end, almost every day brought a new revelation. By February the diocese itself had identified six more priests who were the subject of sexual abuse complaints and suspended them from ministry. The Massachusetts attorney general called for Law to reveal all past allegations against priests and attendance at vigils for victims, held outside Law’s office, grew to more than a hundred people. Cardinal Law flew to Rome to consult with Vatican officials and upon his return on February 8 told reporters that eighty priests in his diocese faced charges of abuse. He rejected calls for his resignation and the Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls confined his statements to a blunt assessment of gay clergy. “People with these inclinations,” he said, “just cannot be ordained.”

  American churchmen in Rome talked of fellow bishops “in hysteria” who compared the cascading scandal to the French revolution, when the besieged Church became more secretive. Long-standing tradition and practice called for superiors to protect the institution and individual priests by hiding cases from civil authorities. In late summer of 2001, the cardinal who headed the Vatican office that supervises clergy actually praised a French bishop for hiding sex crimes admitted by one of his priests. In a letter to Bishop Pierre Pican, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos wrote:

  I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration. You have acted well and I am pleased to have colleagues in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son and priest.

  The priest in question, Rev. Rene Bissey, was arrested in 1998 and convicted of raping and molesting eleven minors. During Bissey’s trial, Bishop Pican admitted that although Bissey had confessed to his crimes, he had kept quiet for two years and allowed the priest to continue in ministry. In a separate trial Pican was found guilty of failing to report sexual abuse. It was after this conviction that Cardinal Hoyos wrote to praise him. Years after the fact, with his own reputation in tatters, Hoyos would say that he had consulted with John Paul II before writing to Pican and “The Holy Father authorized me to send this letter to all bishops in the world and publish it on the Internet.”

  Cardinal Law couldn’t count on letters of support from officials in Rome. Instead, he returned to Boston intent on demonstrating he could manage through the crisis. He called on local leaders for advice and named a panel to prevent abuse in the archdiocese that included professor David Finklehor and other experts. He also began visiting parishes to show his concern. But even as he tried to be a pastor, he came across as someone who still didn’t put victims first. At a church in the suburb of Dedham, for example, he spoke most eloquently about his own trials. “I personally have these past weeks experienced closeness to Jesus on the cross in a way I never have before in my life,” said Law. Days later the cardinal’s face appeared on the cover of Newsweek next to a headline reading, “Sex, Shame and the Catholic Church.”

  The scandal in Boston was especially appalling to an unofficial defender of the faith named William Donohue, who generally agitated on behalf of the institutional Church as head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. For ten years Donohue had delivered outraged complaints about everything from sex education to media portrayals of Catholicism, all with the intention of calling out what he saw as religious bigotry. Just about everything Donohue said was voiced in fighting terms, and much of what he did was intended to incite others. In other words, the job was a perfect fit for his personality.

  Born in 1947, the same year as Jeff Anderson, Donohue came to his cause from a staunch Irish Catholic childhood dominated by his old-fashioned grandmother. Raised mainly without his father’s presence in suburban Long Island, he had led a very Catholic life except for a divorce from a wife with whom he had two children. In taking leadership of the league, he once explained, he gave himself permission to make the kind of points bishops couldn’t because of their pastoral roles. In his words he was “the pit bull, the feisty Irish guy.” Sometimes he chomped down on a
deserving target. Just as often, he came off as frivolous and his outrage seemed manufactured. But in viewing the bishops and sexual abuse he could only say, “I am not here to defend the indefensible.”

  With public opinion so united against the Church, the archdiocese needed just ninety days from the publication of the Globe’s first big article on John Geoghan to agree to a settlement with Mitchell Garabedian’s clients that would include payments totaling as much as $30 million. However, other victims who had long-standing suits, and the one hundred or so men and women who brought complaints since January 1, were not covered by this arrangement. Attorney Roderick MacLeish represented many of these people, including several who had been abused by a priest named Paul Shanley. At the start of the Boston crisis, Shanley’s name was noted among many others suspected of abusing minors. On Monday, April 8, 2002, thanks to MacLeish, he became as notorious as John Geoghan.

  * * *

  Roderick MacLeish’s first clergy abuse case involved a man who had been repeatedly raped by a priest starting when he was nine years old. He buried his bloody underwear to keep anyone from finding out. The pain expressed by this client, and more than a hundred others, drove MacLeish to pursue the release of church documents that would reveal who knew what, when, and how they had responded.

  When a judge finally forced the archdiocese to give MacLeish what he wanted, he combed through the pages, identified key passages, and then created a presentation that he could project onto a screen set up in the ballroom of the Sheraton Boston Hotel. On April 8, 2002, the members of the press who came to the early afternoon meeting saw MacLeish, wearing a wireless microphone, pace the floor as he described the importance of documents that flashed on the screen. The pages showed how Church officials discussed Shanley as a “sick person” but feared confronting him. Cardinal Law’s predecessor didn’t react at all when a Catholic layperson told him he had heard Shanley say “that he can think of no sexual act that causes psychic damage—‘not even incest or bestiality.’”