By 2005 Donohue had decided that it was the Church that was being victimized in the abuse crisis and he was convinced “that the Catholic Church had better learn to play hardball with those who are out to destroy it.” His Web site declared, “The time has come for the Catholic Church to put the vultures in their place.” While he waited for bishops to answer his call, Donohue built a war chest of more than $25 million to support his actions on behalf of the Church. Out of this he accepted a salary and benefits package that eventually reached $370,000 in 2008. As the chief of an organization that reported employing just two people and annual expenses of less than $2.7 million, this figure made him one of the best-paid executives in the nonprofit sector of the economy. In comparison, the median salary for charities with comparable budgets in the Northeast, the region with the highest pay in the country, was $120,000.
What did the Catholic League get for its money? Donohue was often quoted in the press, drawing attention to a point of view that might otherwise be passed over. However, his most inflammatory statements about the abuse crisis rarely received attention beyond his own Web site and the online echo chamber of like-minded activists. He also suffered from the demands of an agenda that took him in a dozen different directions as he engaged in battles over anything that might be deemed “anti-Catholic.” Films, TV shows, art works, and even a holiday greeting card sent by President Bush all raised Donohue’s ire. (The card bothered him because it omitted any reference to Christmas.) As a consequence of all this scattered activity, Donohue could only attack clergy abuse victims, advocates, and their lawyers in a sporadic way. While he occasionally popped up on a TV talk show to defend the Church, the media terrain was mainly occupied by his opposition. One comprehensive database shows that between 1995 and 2005, Donohue appeared in major newspapers about 650 times. During the same period SNAP was noted in more than 2,200 articles.
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While William Donohue was involved in many other issues—most notably the defense of actor/director Mel Gibson after a drunken, anti-Semitic tirade—Jeff Anderson worked on clergy abuse to the exclusion of all else. He spent much of the summer of 2006 preparing to bring his first suit against a Latin American prelate. So wealthy that he never needed to work again, Anderson poured millions of dollars into cases that were unlikely to produce any fees, but might push the institutional Church toward meaningful reform and lay the groundwork for future legal advances. In his mind, sexual abuse continued to be a problem for the Church because of its basic theology and hierarchical structure. As long as Catholicism cultivated sexual shame and kept true power away from women and other laypeople, it would suffer from the abuse of power expressed in terms of sexual crimes.
In September 2006, Anderson flew to Mexico to conduct a press conference about a lawsuit he had filed against Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City. Anderson’s clients included Joaquin Aguilar Mendez and others who alleged they had been raped, as boys, by a Mexican priest named Nicolas Aguilar Rivera (no relation to the cardinal) who had been sent to Los Angeles. In California the priest allegedly abused about two dozen boys in the 1980s. Wanted by the police, who were investigating a complaint from a boy in Los Angeles, Aguilar Rivera went back to Mexico in 1998 when Church officials permitted him to remain in the ministry.
After the priest fled, Mahony wrote to his counterpart in Tehuacán, Bishop Norberto Rivera, saying, “It is almost impossible to determine precisely the number of young altar boys he has sexually molested, but the number is large … This priest must be arrested and returned to Los Angeles to suffer the consequences of his immoral actions.” Bishop Rivera responded by providing some information about the missing priest, but said “You will understand that I’m not in a position to find him, much less force him to return and appear in court.”
In an echo of the blame-shifting Anderson saw in his first case in Minnesota, where bishops Watters and Roach tussled over who-knew-what-when, Rivera wrote to Mahony in 1988, claiming that in “the letter of presentation of January 27, 1987, I included an identification photograph, and in the confidential letter of March 23 of the same year, I provided a summary of the priest’s homosexual problems.” To be precise, Rivera’s January 27 letter said that “due to family and health reasons” Aguilar Rivera requested posting in Los Angeles. In that letter, the bishop reassured Mahony, telling him, “don’t have any concerns” about accepting him.
Mahony answered on March 30, 1988, “I would like to tell you that I have not received any letter from you dated March 23, 1987, nor any other information concerning ‘the homosexual problems of the priest’ … We have here in the archdiocese of Los Angeles a clear plan of action: We do not admit priests with any homosexual problems.”
Upon his return to his home state the Mexican priest, who could not be found by his bishop, was later accused of sexually assaulting Joaquin Aguilar Mendez, who was then thirteen, and several other boys. He was eventually arrested, tried, and convicted on a single misdemeanor abuse charge, but served no prison time. Mendez and others who were identified only as “Juan Does” turned to the civil courts only after years of efforts to obtain help from the Church failed. When Anderson filed his suit, Fr. Aguilar Rivera remained a priest and a free man. Norberto Rivera, elevated to cardinal of Mexico City, was on record saying the Church in Mexico did not have an abuse problem.
When Anderson arrived in Mexico he was accompanied by a small group. Among them were attorney Michael Finnegan from Anderson’s own office, SNAP director David Clohessy, and a Mexican journalist named Sanjuana Martinez. The group also included a lawyer named Vance Owen, who was associated with Raymond Boucher in Los Angeles. A U.S. citizen who was born in Guadalajara and was experienced with the Mexican justice system, Owen had arranged for the Americans to be met by a security team. At the airport they whisked the group into a pair of vans and brought them to the hotel where they would conduct a press conference the following day. Their purpose was to publicize the case, alert other victims, and promote a national conversation about the Church.
The next day, more than a dozen reporters, photographers, and TV technicians gathered around Anderson and Owen in a hotel meeting room. Anderson distributed copies of his complaint against the two cardinals and their archdioceses and then spoke about his clients and their allegations against Fr. Aguilar Rivera. After about an hour, Vance Owen turned toward Anderson and told him to wrap up the press conference immediately. The urgency in Owen’s voice caught Anderson by surprise. At first he resisted the suggestion and kept talking. Then he looked up and saw about a dozen men with suits entering the room. Two came directly to the podium, and as the crowd began to stir they spoke in slightly accented English, demanding to see Anderson’s travel papers.
Taken aback, Anderson turned toward Owen, who advised him to cooperate with the men, who claimed they were Mexican immigration officials. The private security detail Owen had hired remained in the meeting room and they tried to protect the Americans. Anderson agreed to go back to his room, where he showed two of the men his travel documents that admitted him to the country legally. When Anderson and the men returned to the hotel lobby he found others in his group were being questioned. The reporters, who had begun to leave, returned to see what was happening.
As the men in suits began to pressure the Americans to come with them, Sanjuana Martinez told Anderson, “Make them show you some identification.” Others telephoned the American embassy and Mexico City police. One of the intruders flashed open his wallet to reveal some kind of identification card. Another grabbed Michael Finnegan’s arm. Finnegan, a tall and muscular former minor league ballplayer, twisted out of the man’s grasp. As Anderson would recall, the crowd grew noisier and more intense, closing around the Americans to prevent their departure. He turned to Vance and said, “You’re my lawyers down here. What do I do? He said, ‘Pray to God.’” Anderson glanced around to see the private security team departing.
Smaller than every
other man in the room, Anderson nevertheless stood his ground as the self-proclaimed immigration agents tried to push him, Finnegan, and Clohessy to the door and the vans that waited outside. Suddenly about a dozen police cars arrived outside and twice as many uniformed officers poured into the hotel. As the police came rushing in, trailed by U.S. embassy officials, the men in suits tried to leave. Outside they found their vehicles were blocked. A senior police official, who took charge of the scene, told Anderson the men were kidnappers and his group was in danger. The police drove them to Mexico City’s international airport. American embassy officials escorted them inside, and remained with them until they reached the security checkpoint.
On the flight home, Anderson told Clohessy, “It’s too bad they didn’t get you and kill you. This movement needs a martyr.” Clohessy didn’t laugh. Weeks later Anderson, Finnegan, and Clohessy received letters from the Mexican government banning them from entering the country for five years. The letter claimed that they had declared they were tourists when they entered Mexico and violated the terms of entry by conducting business. Anderson said he had, in fact, noted on his entry form that he intended to work while in the country.
Anderson’s lawsuit against the two cardinals would proceed in Los Angeles, where both Thomas Doyle and Richard Sipe offered affidavits as experts. Doyle described the Church system of authority, with the Pope as the ultimate executive, judge, and legislator. Sipe described how the stilted communication between the churchmen contained disguised references to abuse. Cardinal Rivera had actually admitted that his own references to the offending priest’s “family and health reasons” was code for sexual abuse, which he was certain Cardinal Mahony, and any bishop, would understand.
Pretrial motions and legal maneuvering slowed the Aguilar Rivera suit to a crawl, but Anderson and his co-counsel Anthony DeMarco kept pursuing it despite receiving no payments for their time or expenses. In 2011, a federal judge would find they had sufficient grounds to proceed under the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows for individuals to sue foreign entities in America if they have inadequate access to justice abroad. The ruling marked the first time a clergy abuse claim was found, by a judge, to revolve around a plausible allegation of a crime against humanity, which was covered by the tort claims act.
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The crisis that was supposed to be a matter of “history” blazed on, despite efforts by Church leaders to declare it dead. The fire found fuel outside of North America as civil authorities from Australia, South America, and Europe received new civil and criminal complaints. And where the crisis had been most intense—the United States and Ireland—more scandal emerged in government investigations and ongoing litigation. This dynamic was at once the product of the Church’s vast interests in these countries where dioceses were confronted one by one, and a result of the slow-moving pace kept by courts. Indeed, as Church lawyers defended their clients with motions and requests for delays, they dragged out the process in a way that forced the institution to be tormented by years of publicity and new claims.
Some of the most extreme examples of unexpected legal consequences involved the archdiocese of Milwaukee, which had been largely protected from financial losses by favorable court decisions on the statute of limitations. The problem for the diocese, however, was that it might be vulnerable to suits filed in other states. This hazard became serious when Rev. Siegfried Widera was arrested in California on more than thirty charges of sexual crimes. As Church records later revealed, Widera had been convicted in the 1970s of committing a sex crime against a minor in Wisconsin. When he was assigned to new parishes, this history was never mentioned. After more complaints about Widera molesting children, the Milwaukee diocese sent him to Orange County with a warning that his record included “a moral problem having to do with a boy in school” and that he had suffered a “repetition” which required him to leave the state for “legal reasons.” The Church in California accepted him anyway, and Widera resumed abusing minors. He was defrocked in 1986, but was subject to no legal action.
Widera was finally charged by California authorities when the “window” opened in 2002. He fled, and for a brief time he was among the most-wanted fugitives in North America. Eventually tracked to Mexico, where he had reportedly been acting as a priest, Widera was trapped in a third-story hotel room by local police. He leaped from a balcony and died from the injuries he suffered when he hit the ground. His death ended criminal proceedings but not civil suits naming both the Milwaukee and Orange County dioceses. Eventually the Milwaukee Church would pay much of a $17 million settlement.
The Widera settlement came with a release of documents that revealed complaints filed by additional victims against Widera and others. More victims would come forward, requiring more payouts that dwarfed the value of counseling the Church had offered to Catholics in Wisconsin whose claims against clergy were barred by the state’s courts. Each time a settlement was reached, reporters gave victims in Wisconsin a chance to speak, which prolonged the public relations nightmare for the Church. In 2009, for example, SNAP leader Peter Isely used the occasion of a settlement to challenge the credibility of Archbishop Timothy Dolan. Isely reported that he had asked Dolan about the diocese’s negotiations with various victims and said, “He never mentioned this case. How many other secret negotiations of sex abuse cases has Dolan got the archdiocese in?”
Isely had a deep understanding of the region’s heavily Catholic culture and how it influenced politics, the law, and local media. And he probably knew more about the experience of Wisconsin’s clergy abuse victims than anyone in the state. Much of what he saw, including a countersuit filed to force one victim to pay the diocese’s legal costs, appalled Isely, but he remained a practicing Catholic and hoped the institution could change. “I think the Christian story is true,” he would explain. However, he interpreted the tale in a modern way. He didn’t consider God to be an otherworldly power in the sky, but rather a force for healing the human spirit. He saw miracles in the psychological recovery of victims who “say that a part of them died because of what happened to them and then come alive when they speak the truth.”
When Dolan took over in Milwaukee, Isely began working with him on a process to reconcile victims and the Church. At the start of this work, the state legislature was considering a new law that might open the courts to victims of clergy abuse in childhood. Isely believed that when the proposed law was not enacted, Dolan began taking tougher stands and the negotiation boiled down to offers from the Church which could be accepted or rejected. When the archbishop offered a settlement fund of less than $4 million for seventy-five victims, Isely rejected it and the process ended. Isely kept, as a souvenir, a letter from Dolan that contained a friendly negotiator-to-negotiator warning. “Don’t trust me,” wrote Dolan.
With the reconciliation process over, Isely spent more time meeting with victims and investigating cases. In one, he tracked down a priest named Franklyn Becker who was first charged with abuse of a minor in the 1960s and was the subject of complaints throughout his career. He was diagnosed with a sexual disorder in 1983 but remained in active ministry until 1993. Curious about the man, Isley went to see him in the small city of Mayville, Wisconsin, and knocked on the door of his home. Becker invited him to visit. Isley would later recall the encounter this way:
He lived in a house in a subdivision overlooking a playground. The place was immaculate, like a rectory, and there were stuffed animals on his couch. When I asked him about a priest who was accused in some cases that had been settled but disappeared, he turned toward this little octagonal cabinet and opened it like he was opening some sort of tabernacle. He took out these meticulous photo albums and showed me pictures of himself and the priest in a play dressed up like women with coconut bras.
He also showed me a picture of an eight- or nine-year-old boy sitting on his bed. He kept it with a ticket stub from a movie they went to together. He said the kid grew up to be a race car driver.
Accordi
ng to Isely, Becker was relaxed in their conversation and quite content to speak with someone who knew as much as he did about the way the Church operated and understood the priesthood. Isley was so well known in Milwaukee Catholic circles that he often heard from disaffected priests who supported victims of abuse, and even received documents from insiders. The most shocking of these were in a packet of handwritten letters between priests in a Wisconsin parish who wrote openly about their attraction to adolescent boys and described their sex lives in graphic detail. As SNAP leader, Isely also heard from victims who called from all over the state. Eventually he was contacted by the men who had been abused by Rev. Lawrence Murphy at the St. John’s School for the Deaf.
In the time since he had been the subject of leafleting around the school by alumni who printed up a fake “wanted” poster, Murphy had confessed to his superiors and was evaluated in 1993 by a sexual disorders specialist. She estimated he had victimized at least two hundred minors and noted that he believed that his crimes were really “sex education” and that by abusing boys he had “fixed the problem” of “rampant homosexuality” among them. The evaluator noted that Murphy was unable to acknowledge the harm he had done and that he was not likely to cooperate with treatment.
When Rembert Weakland asked then Cardinal Ratzinger to defrock Murphy, he received no reply until 1996 when the cardinal’s second in command wrote to instruct him to begin a secret Church trial. Murphy then wrote directly to Ratzinger, who told Weakland that the trial should be cancelled because the accused was sick and repentant and the particular crimes in question occurred beyond the canon law statute of limitations. Murphy remained a priest until he died in 1998. For years his victims searched for a way to sue Church authorities for both monetary damages and access to documents related to their cases. They were turned away by lawyers who saw no path around the statute of limitations. Then Isely introduced several of the men to Jeff Anderson and his associate Michael Finnegan, who believed they had found the route.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 39