Although bankruptcy could seem a reasonable option, it was risky for those who feared the release of secret documents on thousands of priests. Federal judges who oversee the bankruptcy process enjoy broad powers to compel institutions to turn over paperwork to anyone who might be a creditor. Every single plaintiff suing for abuse would have standing as an individual creditor and demand volumes of confidential materials to aid his or her pursuit of damages.
Both sides were aware of the possibility that the evidence might show that Cardinal Mahony and the Vatican were negligent in supervising priests and may have actively protected criminals. Jeffrey Anderson had long believed that the Pope and the Roman bureaucracy were responsible for the abuse crisis and should bear responsibility for the past crimes of priests and bishops and for reforms to safeguard the future.
Church officials, despite the Pope’s claim to ultimate authority, insisted the responsibility for priests stopped with bishops. In the spring of 2002 Anderson found a case that might let him defeat this claim. It involved an Irish priest who was sent to America after confessing to abusing a child in his home country. When he was sent to America, Andrew Ronan remained a member of his order, which was based in Italy. The international element of the case strengthened Anderson’s assertion that Ronan, like all priests, was under the Vatican’s control.
In John V. Doe v. Holy See Anderson sought to make those who set the rules for clergy responsible for their conduct. To make the charges stick, he had to show that his case qualified under a law that allows for sovereign states to be sued in American courts under special circumstances. One of these exceptions permits suits against employees of a foreign power who harm another person, thereby committing what’s legally called a “tort.” Another exception allows for suits to proceed if a sovereign state involved in substantial business activity committed a commercial fraud. Here, Anderson believed, he could show that Ronan was ultimately an employee of the international Church and that the same Church, led by officials of the Holy See, had committed fraud as they sought to protect institutional assets. (Although the paperwork was filed on April 1, and defense attorneys scoffed at Anderson’s premise, it was no joke. In the years to come Anderson would beat back efforts to dismiss the case and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court would reject the Holy See’s claim of sovereign immunity and allow the case to proceed.)
In Southern California, the names of more than two hundred and fifty accused priests emerged from the documentation released in the early stages of trials. This roughly doubled the number of clergy facing claims by more than a thousand victims. In Northern California, Anderson pressed a handful of cases to trial with co-counsels Larry Drivon, Rick Simons, and Joseph George, suing separate dioceses in San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, and Fresno. In each jurisdiction the attorneys got mixed results that eventually led to general settlements for large groups of plaintiffs. In Southern California the big dioceses of Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego marshaled greater resources to defend against greater numbers of complaints that put much more valuable assets at risk.
* * *
As he took up the job of defending the archdiocese of Los Angeles, attorney Michael Hennigan believed his charge was to help “save the Church” from its worst crisis since the Reformation. One of his first calls on the case was to the prominent Catholic layman William Clark, who had been President Reagan’s national security adviser. (In this capacity he would have had access to every secret element of America’s Cold War relationship with the Vatican.) As Hennigan would recall it, Clark spoke first in spiritual terms, suggesting that God may be using the crisis to make the Church “a smaller, humbler institution than we have become.” He then told Hennigan that the Pope and his closest aides “haven’t made up their minds yet” on the question of whether clergy abuse was an “American problem or a global one.”
Others Hennigan contacted in the early stages of his work shaped his perspective on the nature, causes, and proper response to the claims made against priests. In his own mind Hennigan separated acts committed against prepubescent children from those perpetrated against adolescents. Even though both were illegal, and represented violations of trust, he could understand why “a typical male might find a seventeen-year-old attractive.” Hennigan also concluded that while the priest scandal “needed addressing,” other major institutions had similar problems that just weren’t receiving the same media attention.
The media was a major player in the crisis and in Los Angeles it was led by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who repeatedly criticized Cardinal Mahony for his changing statements on the crisis and refusing to report all claims against priests. To help turn around public opinion, Hennigan brought in a high-powered consulting firm called Sitrick and Company, which had previously guided both the Enron Corporation and Orange County through bankruptcies. He then focused on the civil complaints made in various courts and the demands of grand juries seated in both Ventura and Los Angeles counties. In all these proceedings, which numbered more than a dozen, Hennigan would have to negotiate requests for testimony from Church officials and respond to demands for documents.
At the height of the Boston scandal Cardinal Mahony had said of the records, “We want every single thing out, open and dealt with, period.” But in the calmer season that followed he retreated from this stand. Under Hennigan’s guidance the archdiocese withheld papers requested by civil lawyers and prosecutors.
Sought by the press to comment on this change, Richard Sipe was blunt. “What’s happening is that the bishops, who say they want transparency, are exposing themselves as liars.” Michael Hennigan insisted the cardinal had the right to discuss sensitive subjects with priests without fear of losing his privacy.
One of the city’s best-known litigators, Hennigan was a tall man with bright blue eyes and white hair. His face was weathered by days spent in the Western sun “relaxing” while competing on horseback in rodeo events. In state and federal court Hennigan had represented both plaintiffs and defendants in cases worth hundreds of millions of dollars and involving high-profile parties including movie studios, major banks, and investment firms. Hennigan had also pioneered the use of technology to manage the flow of documents in complex cases. When other lawyers were still carting files around in wheeling briefcases, Hennigan was able to access tens of thousands of searchable pages on his laptop computer.
Throughout his career Hennigan had dealt almost exclusively in matters where the stakes involved money and reputation. In the church cases he encountered, for the first time, clients responsible for disturbing and personally damaging crimes and courtroom opponents who had suffered deep psychological and spiritual harm. The sincerity of the plaintiffs was demonstrated before Easter, 2003, when Manuel Vega conducted an eight-day vigil and fast on the sidewalk in front of the cathedral. Palm Sunday crowds attending Mass at the cathedral offered him a mixed reaction. Some expressed their gratitude. One complained that he “mocked the house of God.” But Vega would persist for eight days, sitting and standing in sunshine, darkness, wind, and rain beneath a banner that read. “Innocence is a child’s right. Sexual abuse is not.” One night the cardinal visited Vega and gave him rosary beads. When Steve Lopez then asked Vega to compare the cardinal to a figure from the life of Christ, Vega said, “Judas.”
Michael Hennigan was moved by Vega’s story, but as much as he empathized with victims, he recognized the archdiocese and Cardinal Mahony “as my clients” and he believed his duty was “to protect them and bring the cases to a close.” In order to accomplish these tasks, Hennigan resisted demands that Mahony submit to depositions and fought requests for documents. Other lawyers followed similar strategies as they represented the Church against claims from coast to coast. On a national level this behavior so distressed Frank Keating that he told a journalist that the Church was behaving like “la Cosa Nostra.” A week later the former governor of Oklahoma resigned his position as head of the national panel of laypeople formed a year before to inve
stigate the abuse crisis. Keating was supposed to lend his credibility to this effort. Instead he affirmed the worst fears of its critics. “To resist grand jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization,” he said upon his resignation, “not my church.”
Cardinal Mahony couldn’t resist criticizing Keating publicly, calling him “off the wall.” But otherwise Mahony stayed quiet as Hennigan began working on a massive settlement that would resolve most of the Los Angeles claims. The courts and plaintiffs cooperated by consolidating about five hundred suits and empowering Raymond Boucher to negotiate the terms of a proposed settlement with Hennigan. (Anderson was excluded as opposing attorneys fought to prevent him from being admitted to the bar in Southern California.) This process would take years. In that time a similar settlement was negotiated in suburban Orange County, where some cases dated to a time when the region was still part of the archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Boucher and Hennigan labored to find common ground and to grant concessions where they could. Boucher would recall that he agreed to “a modified request for documents” in exchange for a promise that Hennigan would not use the Los Angeles cases to ask a court to declare the “window” legislation unconstitutional. (Both men held to the agreement, technically, though Hennigan did try and failed to have the statute overturned in San Diego.) No such arrangement was reached in other jurisdictions, which is why, in the fall of 2004, Cardinal Mahony found himself seated in front of more than a dozen attorneys in a conference room on the twenty-sixth floor of a Los Angeles office building. Besides the lawyers, the deposition was attended by Richard Sipe and Patrick Wall.
* * *
Videotaped for posterity, Mahony’s second-ever deposition (the first occurred in the O’Grady case) began with a display of attorney wrestling interrupted occasionally by testimony from the witness. For twenty minutes almost every question posed by the plaintiffs, who were led by John Manly, was greeted by an objection from the defense team led by Hennigan and a lawyer named Donald Woods. A snippet from the official transcript illustrates the tenor of the day. The passage begins after Manly asks the cardinal if he ever forgot the very first incident of sexual abuse reported to him as a bishop, in 1981:
MR. WOODS: I’m going to object. Irrelevant to the subject matter. There’s no difference whether he forgot or didn’t forget at some point in time. I’ll let him answer.
MR. MANLY: Do you want to have a running objection to every question under all bases so you don’t have to object to every question?
MR. WOODS: I’ll take it, but I need to voice the objections anyhow.
MR. MANLY: Because I think what you intend to do is what you did in the last deposition, which is object to every single question to delay the proceedings.
MR. WOODS: If you’d ask standard questions. I mean … ‘How do you feel about it?’ those, those aren’t the type of questions you should be asking here.
MR. MANLY: Don, you know what, we’ve all worked very hard to get here. And I would ask that you behave courteously, as I am, not be nasty, not be insulting, because we’re going to get this done a lot faster and get His Eminence out of here.
MR. HENNIGAN: We’re going to quote a line from a movie some time ago, “If you think you’re being courteous, you must be from New York City.”
MR. MANLY: Well, I’m certainly not from Hancock Park.
Hancock Park is, of course, an old-money neighborhood of Los Angeles, and it was home to Michael Hennigan and much of the region’s business and legal elite. By invoking it, Manly called attention to his opponent’s rarified social connections. New York City, as Hennigan deployed it, represented bad manners and worse, something foreign to Los Angeles. Neither were part of the subject at hand, but then again, Donald Woods’s objection to questions about how the cardinal might “feel” was plucked out of thin air as well. No one had used the word “feel” or “feelings” or “emotions,” and Woods was clearly straining to find a reason to interrupt the flow of Manly’s questions.
The flare-up actually calmed the opposing counsels a bit and they did manage to conduct an extensive deposition in which Mahony described how he handled complaints against priests, including the one involving Oliver O’Grady, and recounted his own evolving awareness of the sexual abuse problem among clergy. Perhaps the most important revelation of the day was Mahony’s acknowledgment that he had dealt with two serious abuse cases prior to the complaints against O’Grady. This testimony contradicted what he told Jeff Anderson during the O’Grady proceedings. Memos that Mahony had written on these two cases provided proof of his involvement, but he insisted that the discrepancies in his testimony were due to memory lapses.
Mahony, who wore black and a white Roman collar, used the words “don’t recall” more than seventy times during his deposition and in several moments he launched into longer explanations for these lapses. “We had many events in the archdiocese of Los Angeles, and I was very preoccupied,” he answered at one point. “We had the visit of the Holy Father. We had the earthquakes. We had riots. We had everything. And I simply did not remember everything that happened many years ago in Stockton.” Manly reacted incredulously when Mahony said he didn’t remember police investigations of complaints against priests, and that during the first five years of his priesthood he was unaware of the possibility that some men broke their vows of celibacy.
However, the most telling response of the day was a single-word answer Mahony offered when Manly asked, “If if it had come to your attention that Father O’Grady told your Vicar General that he had sexual urges towards a nine-year-old or a ten-year-old or an eleven-year-old, is that cause to remove him from ministry?”
“No,” replied the cardinal.
* * *
For John Manly and the other attorneys pressing cases, the Mahony deposition would help establish the evolution of his approach to complaints against priests. However, no one could have predicted the greater impact it would have when the video was made public by the courts. Filmmaker Amy Berg put the footage to use in a startling documentary she had already begun to develop. Beginning in the U.S., Berg tracked O’Grady’s crimes by interviewing his victims and their families. She then traveled to Ireland, where Manly had engaged a private detective to find O’Grady, who had settled there after his release from prison in California.
Ian Withers was an old-fashioned shoe leather investigator who operated out of a small compound of houses in rural Antrim, Northern Ireland. The place was hidden down a leafy lane and guarded by a herd of dairy cows. From this base he pursued cases all over the world. Much of his work was paid for by British newspaper editors who didn’t want to know everything about how he gathered information. A short, stout man with gray hair, Withers cultivated an air of mystery and insisted that his activities helped protect the public from the power of institutions that sought to hide their misdeeds. The way he saw it, every time he pushed the limits of the law to get some bit of secret information, he blazed a trail for others to follow.
In the O’Grady case, Withers and his men started with the basic public documents, including the priest’s birth certificate, which led them to his hometown where the family still maintained a home. Records “found” in trash set out for collection yielded an address at a house on Dublin Road in the Thurles in County North Tipperary. When a stakeout revealed O’Grady was present, Withers’s men served him with a subpoena requiring him to be deposed by John Manly and lawyers for the diocese of Stockton. O’Grady responded without the help of a lawyer, drafting a letter denying the charges and attaching a drawing of a child’s rectum and his own erect penis with a notation indicating that based on the size of the two body parts, he could not have raped someone younger than twelve.
Despite the argument he made in his illustrated letter, O’Grady agreed to be questioned and Manly flew to Ireland with Patrick Wall. They drove to a countryside hotel near Cork where they were joined by opposin
g counsel. The lawyers for the diocese had collected documents, including some they found in Ireland, and handed copies to Manly and Wall as they entered the room. In the cache was a letter, dated 1971, that showed Church officials were aware of the priest’s criminal impulses as he was sent to serve in America.
O’Grady arrived dressed in a white shirt that hung loosely on his shoulders, a black tie, and a gray cardigan. He came without an attorney and when told that none of the lawyers present would offer him any legal assistance he acknowledged this fact and agreed to proceed anyway. With Manly gently prompting, he described having sex with his nine-year-old sister when he was twelve and explained how this experience and a sexual relationship he had as a teen with a local priest shaped him.
“To me, it was not a very pleasant experience on some occasions, but it was a very normal thing,” said O’Grady. “No one ever talked about it.”
Sent to America in 1971, O’Grady began abusing prepubescent boys and girls almost immediately. At times, said O’Grady, he would pause before acting and wonder, “Do I really want to do this?” However, he added, “On the other side there were urges in me to be sexual with him and this was an opportunity.”
Most damaging for the Church was O’Grady’s insistence that he confessed his crimes to then bishop of Stockton, Merlin Guilfoyle, in 1976, and wrote out a detailed apology to the mother of one victim. Neither Guilfoyle nor his successor, Roger Mahony, acted to protect children in the parishes where O’Grady served until 1984. When Manly asked O’Grady, “If you were the bishop of Stockton, would you have appointed you as the pastor?” O’Grady answered, “No, I would not.”
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 35