No hats were plucked in Rome. Instead, the Pope, who considered every one of the American cardinals a loyalist, continued to support them. He did describe clergy abuse of minors as a crime and express “solidarity and concern” for victims and their families. However, he still spoke in the oblique manner that left room for evading full responsibility. He said he regretted the way that “the Church leaders are perceived” but said little about the way they had acted. And he reiterated the idea that sexual offenses committed by priests represented a problem in “society as a whole.” As for any solutions, the Pope once again stressed the supernatural, urging the cardinals to be concerned “above all else, with the spiritual good of souls.”
On his flight home, Archbishop Gregory let a reporter for The New York Times sit with him for an interview. As the paper reported the next day, Gregory felt the American bishops were not yet united in their response to the scandals. One major point of disagreement involved accusations of abuse that were many years old. Some Church officials felt they should be regarded with the same seriousness as recent allegations. Others wanted to be able to deal more leniently in cases where priests had an otherwise clean record. The differences would be hashed out in Dallas.
Gregory spoke with the urgency of a chief battling a windblown forest fire that was sending dangerous embers across the countryside. More than three hundred new lawsuits had been filed in five months and prosecutors had convened grand juries to investigate the Church in Los Angeles, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and on Long Island. Jeff Anderson had filed a federal racketeering lawsuit against three dioceses, and several states were considering legislation to extend statutes of limitation in clergy abuse cases. Across the board, the Church stood to lose money, members, and moral standing. In a handful of cases the effects of the crisis were even more serious. Two American priests accused of abuse had committed suicide since the scandal flared at the start of 2002. A third was shot and wounded by a young man who said he was victimized by him when he was a minor.
Viewed from any angle, the Catholic landscape was devastated. When asked to assess the situation from the perspective of a man who warned of just this outcome, Fr. Tom Doyle offered a typically sardonic analysis. “The Church in America is a dinosaur with a head the size of an ant, and the head thinks it’s in charge. The bishops need to understand just how precarious their situation is.”
20. CATHOLIC GUILT
Before she walked down the aisle, Barbara Blaine handed her cell phone to David Clohessy and told him he would have to respond to any calls from the press or victims looking for SNAP’s help. Blaine may have allowed her activism to take over her life, but she wasn’t going to let it disturb her wedding. This much she had promised to her fiancé Howard Rubin.
Rubin and Blaine had met at DePaul University, where she had returned to school in her thirties to study law. He was director of the legal aid clinic that connected students with poor clients who might otherwise be defenseless in court proceedings. A first date at a hockey game had grown into a solid partnership. Neither of them could have guessed that the date they chose to be married at a former chapel on the DePaul campus would fall smack in the middle of the frenzied crisis begun by the Boston scandal.
The original plan, or at least Howard Rubin’s hope, had involved a honeymoon in Italy. A compromise took the couple to New Mexico, where he was delighted to discover that his wife’s cell phone couldn’t receive calls at their bed-and-breakfast. She did her best to set aside work, but whenever they went out driving she turned on her phone and searched for spots where she got a signal. Hilltops were best, and Rubin did allow for stops so Blaine could respond to the most urgent calls, especially those from other SNAP leaders who were preparing to meet with the bishops at their upcoming national conference in Dallas.
By the second Monday in June 2002, there was hardly a city in America where there hadn’t been a scandal of note. For all practical purposes, every one of the two hundred and eighty-five bishops who came to Dallas had dealt with complaints of priest abuse or been required to take some sort of position. Most had offered generalities like “zero tolerance” but since God was in the details, real answers awaited their conference.
The details would prove elusive. Well before the conference, the bishops invited members of SNAP to meet with them, but then publicly withdrew the invitation because SNAP was a party to a class-action suit brought against them by Jeff Anderson. When the victims group removed itself from the suit, the bishops welcomed them back. This push-pull process made the Catholic leaders seem more like bosses negotiating with a union than pastors tending a flock. However, one bishop did manage to act decisively days before the conference opened: accused of abuse by three former altar boys, Bishop J. Kendrick Williams of Kentucky resigned. (Williams denied the allegations but the claims would eventually be resolved as part of a $25 million settlement. Williams was not prosecuted.)
Amid the preconference chaos, the producers of the TV news program 60 Minutes II, put together a one-hour report titled “Tale of Shame,” which recounted the key points in the twenty years of scandal going back to Gilbert Gauthe. More than 7 million households tuned into 60 Minutes II, to hear a woman who was raped as a girl by a priest recall him saying, “It’s okay. God knows about this” as he covered her mouth with his hand. The witness accounts in “Tale of Shame” were heartrending but the most trenchant statement came from the reporter, Ed Bradley, who said, “Perhaps the most shocking thing about these scandals is how long they’ve been going on.”
* * *
On Wednesday, June 12, big TV satellite trucks idled on the street outside the Dallas Fairmont Hotel, throwing extra heat into the ninety-degree morning. Picketers of various sorts stood on the sidewalk holding carefully lettered signs. Some of the placards, like those held by the members of a group called Our Lady’s Warriors, demanded the bishops remain steadfast in defense of their authority and dogma. Others wanted the world to know that the bishops inside were, in their view, part of the problem. One man in khaki pants and a button-down shirt held a sign above his head announcing “The Bishops Have Sinned.”
Beyond the demonstrators, private security officers and local police guarded the entrance to the hotel and walked the hallways. Catholicism, like other big powerful organizations, can provoke violence from both rational enemies and disturbed individuals. Pope John Paul II had been subject to attacks from would-be assassins of both types. Church leaders were always concerned about security. But the scandals, and a tragedy that took place the day before, had cast an even greater sense of danger over the Dallas meeting. In rural Missouri an elderly man had taken a rifle into a Benedictine abbey where he killed two priests, wounded two others, and then committed suicide. No link to sexual abuse had been established, and in the end the shooting was found to be unrelated, but in Dallas it made the bishops and their guards extra nervous.
Besides the Catholic activists, the meeting of the American bishops attracted correspondents from the nation’s major networks and newspapers, and many from overseas. The estimated 750 journalists came expecting, if not substance, spectacle. They knew that at the very least, the conference would be confronted by victims of abuse who had, during more than a decade of campaigning, become comfortable with conflict. Between them David Clohessy, Barbara Blaine, and Peter Isely had given more than a thousand interviews and spent hundreds of hours in front of television cameras. They also knew more about how the Church as a whole had responded to sex abuse claims than almost any member of the clergy.
Blaine, having come to Dallas after her honeymoon, struggled a bit in her first encounter with the press in Dallas. Taken aback by the dozens of microphones thrust in her face and by the way that some of the journalists jostled in front of her, Blaine felt for a moment like the teenager she was when Chet Warren abused her. She felt overwhelmed by the idea that so many people wanted to hear what she had to say about the Church and its failure to protect children. In her hand Blaine clutched a sheaf o
f papers given to her by David Clohessy. He had scoured press accounts from the previous decades to come up with quotes from bishops who had promised to act after previous scandals. She read some of these quotes and quickly gained confidence.
Besides recalling broken promises, Blaine and other victims pushed for a tougher policy than the bishops were considering. A draft made by a committee of bishops, which had already been sent to the Vatican, called for defrocking priests who confessed or were otherwise proven to have molested even one minor. However, the committee would enforce this policy only in future cases. Bishops would have discretion when dealing with priests who committed a single crime in the past. This exception was unacceptable to victims who likened it to giving murderers or bank robbers one free crime as long as they weren’t caught a second time.
This objection, and others, emerged in a closed-door session held Wednesday afternoon in a conference room guarded by security agents. Twenty-five male and female victims sat in a circle with four cardinals and a handful of bishops. (Boston cardinal Bernard Law, who avoided press by flying to Dallas in a private jet, was conspicuously absent.) As she took a chair, one member of SNAP, Helen Daly, opened a laptop computer and began typing as the people in the circle introduced themselves. Unbeknownst to all, she was making a verbatim transcript of the session. As Daly’s record showed, survivors from Boston were among the first to speak and they were blunt.
“I was abused by two priests. I am here to bring up the abuse of adult women as well,” announced the first.
“I was raped by a Catholic priest,” said a woman who formerly was a nun. “My order and his order tried to gag me, so I left.”
“I’m here to support my son,” said a middle-aged father, “who was sodomized and raped by Fr. James Hanley.”
From this beginning the group spent about an hour reviewing the toll of abuse carried out by Catholic priests and the effects of inaction by their superiors. The parents of Eric Patterson, one of the five abused boys who committed suicide in Kansas, told the story of how their son had killed himself. Peter Isely held up a photo of himself when he was a boy. Standing beside him in the photo was the priest who molested him. “I’m here to try to help you guys out,” he said. “We’ve been trying to help you guys out for fourteen years.”
In fact the clerics said they wanted help devising their policies, but they seemed unable to respond forthrightly. One victim asked, “Can you change this proposal so that all known offenders have their collar removed now?” Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., answered, “We can’t speak today on that. That’s something to speak to the whole conference.”
“Would you support that?”
Cardinal McCarrick answered, “I can’t say it at the present time. We all feel that anyone who had done what you have indicated has been done to you should not be a priest anymore.”
Another victim noted that his abuser had confessed his guilt but remained a priest. “He’s still getting a pension check. He is still called father. He is still a priest. Do you think that someone who had pleaded guilty should still be a priest?”
Philadelphia cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua dodged the question, but Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles rose to it. “I have a couple of people like that. They have disappeared on us. I can’t follow the canon system while finding the guy.”
“Are you saying you have no known men [abusers] in your diocese?” asked Isely.
“I’ve got several in the process of being laicized,” answered Mahony. “We need this process very, very desperately. I am not keeping these people as priests.”
Isely respected Mahony’s commitment as an individual in charge of one archdiocese, but he wanted a stronger system to govern not just priests but the actions of bishops. “The Church fights like hell to keep divorced Catholics from receiving Communion,” he noted, “but I don’t see that fight about thousands of people who have been devastated. There is no accountability in this draft for bishops who have knowingly transferred [priest abusers]. We need accountability for future actions and past actions.”
Although many victims cried and tears welled in the eyes of a cardinal or two, most of the session was conducted in a calm way. Bishop Bevilacqua caught an angry response when he complained about false claims, but this brief exchange marked the only flash of anger in the session. At the meeting’s end Barbara Blaine, social worker/attorney/activist/victim/Catholic, tried to sum things up in a way that would promote progress. She asked the bishops to stop fighting so hard against claims made by adults who were abused as children. “The impact of the abuse forces us to deny that it happened and by the time we realize it, we’ve come to adulthood and you know that. Please settle the suits and stop playing hardball,” she said.
Blaine also challenged the hierarchy to come out of their defensive crouch and greet victims as partners and not adversaries. “We’re offering a gift because we’re naming this evil and putting light on it and you bring light to us. It’s a really healing experience to know your concern, to meet with you face-to-face and to hear that your hearts and minds are good. By being so distant and not seeing each other face-to-face, it’s been easy to see each other as the enemy.”
* * *
In June 2002, America’s Catholics were more aligned with SNAP and other victims than with their bishops. This truth was revealed in a poll conducted at the start of the month by the public opinion center at Quinnipiac University, which found that 80 percent wanted priests defrocked after one incident of abuse. Nearly as many, 70 percent, said that bishops who transferred accused priests to keep them in service should resign their positions.
By the end of the bishops’ meeting, conference president Archbishop Wilton Gregory spoke like a leader who understood he had failed. In a sober and confessional public statement he connected the Catholic abuse scandal to a larger child protection movement that was a positive force for good around the world. In contrast to this movement, he admitted, “We are the ones, whether through ignorance or lack of vigilance or, God forbid, with knowledge, who allowed priest abusers to remain in ministry and reassigned them to communities where they continued to abuse. We are the ones who chose not to report the criminal actions of priests to the authorities, because the law did not require this. We are the ones who worried more about the possibility of scandal than bringing about the kind of openness that helps prevent abuse. And we are the ones who, at times, responded to victims and their families as adversaries and not as suffering members of the Church.”
The policies approved by the bishops called for immediate suspension of any priest accused of abuse—past, present, and future. Until cleared, they would not be able to dress, function, or speak as Catholic priests. Bishops pledged to report all allegations to civil authorities, cooperate fully with investigations, provide full reports to parishes receiving new priests, and to conduct background checks on church personnel involved with children. The policy statement, formally known as the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, was brief and left much open to interpretation. This vagueness became evident in the critique Tom Doyle wrote in response to all the reporters who called him at Ramstein Air Base. Doyle pointed out three dozen issues raised by the document that was intended to be a response to the crisis. Most pointedly, Doyle noted, “The bishops did not address the issue of their own responsibility for the cover-up.”
Nevertheless, as David Clohessy said, the charter was the most ambitious Church response in the long history of the crisis and though they wondered about how the bishops might put their words into action, activists in Dallas gave them high marks. Special praise was offered for the creation of a national review board to oversee its new commitments. Former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating agreed to lead the group, which would also include former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and the Washington attorney Robert S. Bennett, who had helped to defend President Clinton against impeachment. Keating was an outspoken person who was raised Catholic and educated mainly in Catholic s
chools. A former federal agent and prosecutor, he was just the person to lend credibility to the bishops’ crisis response. Keating thought that many of the problems the bishops faced were self-inflicted and he considered payments made in exchange for confidential agreements “hush money.” He believed that bishops may have acted criminally in covering up crimes and he intended to “apply some good, old-fashioned Catholic guilt” to protect children and restore the integrity of the Church.
Keating’s call for some Catholic guilt to be heaped upon the bishops showed how the Church leaders could be confronted with the same principles they typically used against others. Guilt, most especially sexual guilt sown in childhood, was the tool clerics had deployed for centuries to control the lives of the faithful. However, the Church had also identified itself with other moral imperatives including the defense of the weak and the vulnerable. Child abuse and the protection of sexual offenders could never be reconciled with this commitment, which meant that bishops were forever vulnerable to anyone wishing to hold them to their own standard.
They were also made vulnerable by the structure of the Church itself. Highly developed and widely dispersed, Catholic institutions enjoyed autonomy in most matters outside essential doctrines. At the same time, they communicated with each other and with Rome through a formal and outdated system that depended upon carefully crafted letters and personal visits. In the Internet age, this system could not maintain an effective flow of information. Indeed, plaintiffs’ lawyers and critics of the Church ran circles around the bishops by using confidential communities on the Internet to share information and strategies. They also pursued so many separate initiatives, like insurgents conducting attacks on a traditional army, that bishops were often caught off-guard.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 33