Knowing the Globe was working on a major investigation, Cardinal Law tried to do everything in his power to stop the story. His lawyer threatened legal sanctions against the Globe if it published any information taken from confidential records in the lawsuits. The newspaper also reported that Law’s attorney “warned that he would seek court-imposed sanctions even if Globe reporters asked questions of clergy involved in the case.”
The Globe stories were a pumped-up version of our own “Father Hollywood” story: they detailed how the Catholic Church protected a predatory priest and ignored his victims. My convenient theory—that Harris was an isolated case—started to crumble.
I was a member of the Religion Newswriters Association, a group of professional journalists who cover the faith beat for media outlets across the United States. As soon as the Globe published the first of its stories, a buzz swirled among religion reporters. We recognized that the story had the potential to leap across the fire line of the Archdiocese of Boston and spread to other dioceses. And sure enough, when a Boston judge released 30,000 pages of internal church documents later in the month, the scandal broke wide open.
The Boston church file—spanning the decades of the late 20th century—revealed the pattern for how the church handled nearly every case of clergy sexual abuse: first, move the offending priest to a new, unsuspecting parish or, in extreme cases, another diocese or country; second, lie or intimidate the victims and their families. The police were never called to investigate these felonies; no one in the new parishes was warned of a potential problem.
Notes from Law and his aides turned the stomachs of Boston parishioners and Catholics across the country. They included a warm note from Law to Geoghan in 1996 after the priest was forced to step down.
“Yours has been an effective life of ministry, sadly impaired by illness,” the cardinal wrote. “On behalf of those you have served well, and in my own name, I would like to thank you. I understand yours is a painful situation. The Passion we share can indeed seem unbearable and unrelenting.”
In referencing the Passion, Law apparently saw a parallel between the suffering experienced by Christ on the cross with Geoghan’s compulsion to rape children.
The cardinal sent a similar letter of appreciation when Father Robert M. Burns, another serial molester, was forced out of ministry in 1991. “It would have been better were things to have ended differently, but such was not the case,” Law wrote. “Nevertheless I still feel that it is important to express my gratitude to you for the care you have given to the people of the Archdiocese of Boston…I am certain that during this time you have been a generous instrument of the Lord’s love in the lives of most people you served.”
In the documents, the cardinal euphemistically labeled the molestations “inappropriate activity,” “boundary violations” and “inappropriate affection.” Inappropriate affection? He gave a high recommendation to one particular priest who was being considered for a new assignment in California, even though the cleric had publicly advocated for man–boy sexual relations.
Similar stories, including Father Hollywood’s, had arisen occasionally during the previous two decades, but they hadn’t jumped the local firewalls. Yet in 2002, the church could no longer contain the controversy. Church officials had always relied on Catholic-friendly police officers, district attorneys, judges and media to keep clergy sexual abuse out of the public eye, but this Old Boy’s Network had broken down. Credit for the new era of openness belonged to the advent of the Internet, which provided wide and instant dissemination of the news, sparking the media to launch similar investigations in other dioceses. The Internet also became a clearinghouse of information for abuse victims, allowing them to track their molesters, to find out whether they had been accused before and to gain strength from other survivors. For many, it was the first time they had realized they were not alone and that they had power. The Internet tore away the veil of secrecy the church hid behind, and the sins of the Archdiocese of Boston echoed across the country.
In just the first two months of the Catholic sex scandal, nearly 100 priests in 11 states were accused of molestation by previously silent victims or by reporters’ investigations. And that was just the start. It soon seemed the Catholic Church was projectile vomiting decades of cases of sexual abuse that had been covered up and had caused great sickness within the institution. In a report released by United States bishops in February 2004, they found that 4,392 priests—4 percent of all clerics—had allegedly abused as many as 10,000 minors since 1950. Because the bishops compiled the report themselves—and many victims never step forward—the numbers in the report, as large as they were, underreported the scope of the scandal. For me, the most revealing statistic was this: only 2 percent of the molesting clerics had received prison sentences. It gives you some idea of the power of the church and the extent of the successful cover-up.
The priests and their bishops hadn’t taken Jesus at His word when He told His disciples, “But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6)
Though I continued to work other religion stories, my editors wanted my primary focus to be the Catholic sex scandal. I began to live a dual life. By day, I investigated the local dioceses, dug up documents in courthouses, talked with a seemingly endless string of victims and interviewed bishops, their aides, attorneys and priests. In my off-hours, I put in my final months of training to become a Catholic.
I learned a lot from my Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults classes. I knew that the Immaculate Conception referred to Mary herself being born without sin, not to her getting pregnant without intercourse. I could correct the misconceptions about the doctrine of papal infallibility, which had been invoked only once since it was established in 1870; Pope Pius XII declared it in 1950 to include the assumption of Mary as an article of faith. I liked knowing that embedded in most altars is a small box that holds a relic, or bone, of at least one saint, often the person after which the church is named. I discovered the beauty of walking through the 14 Stations of the Cross—reliefs or paintings in Catholic churches that depict the final hours of Jesus’ life. Mediating and praying in front of each piece of art allows you to be an eyewitness to the Passion, from the moment Jesus was condemned to death to when He rises from His tomb. I couldn’t wait to go through my last rite of initiation into the church on March 30, 2002—on Easter Vigil, or Easter eve—little more than two months away.
As I wrote about the clergy sexual abuse scandal during the day and went to church at night and on weekends, I had no idea that I had placed my Christian beliefs in mortal danger. I believed in Jesus and the church; the institution might be rotten, perhaps, but its purpose was pure.
One evening, Father Vincent addressed the scandal head-on. He warned us Catholics-to-be not to be poisoned by a relatively few bad clerics. He said the priests who molested children could be rightfully convicted of committing spiritual murder on their victims. But, Father Vincent warned, if we let their actions kill our faith, that would be spiritual suicide. His words resonated with me, and I vowed never to take that road.
Yet I would eventually find Father Vincent’s assumption wrong. Spiritual suicide infers that people make a conscious decision to abandon their faith. Yet it isn’t simply a matter of will. Many people want desperately to believe, but just can’t. They may feel tortured that their faith has evaporated, but they can’t will it back into existence. If an autopsy could be done on their spiritual life, the cause of death wouldn’t be murder or suicide. It would be natural causes—the organic death of a belief system that collapsed under the weight of experience and reason.
But in early 2002, I still felt that believing in God and in Jesus was a choice, and I had made mine. I loved the passage in the Hebrew Scriptures in which Joshua lays out his faith plainly for his fellow Jews, whose belief in one God was unsteady at best:<
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But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.
—JOSHUA 24:15
I was with Joshua. I felt sad for those around me who didn’t choose to serve the Lord. It wasn’t because I thought they would end up in hell; I believed a loving God would be merciful to all His children, no matter how far they strayed. But I did think they were missing out on a deeper, more satisfying, more significant life—a life I had found and wasn’t going to give up. For someone with a faith as deep as mine, it would take more than corruption within the Catholic Church to turn me away from the Lord.
It was clear to me that the real story wasn’t about the molesting priests, but rather the bishops who covered up for them and caused thousands of additional children to be sodomized, orally copulated, raped and masturbated. Even today, most of these bishops are still in office; some have been promoted and all are revered by the faithful who deferentially call them “shepherds” and, in the case of a cardinal, “Your Eminence.” Cardinal Law, who was run out of Boston by his parishioners and priests, is now the archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome and celebrated one of Pope John Paul II’s funeral masses.
Pope Benedict XVI has said that less than 1 percent of priests are molesters and that the Catholic sex scandal in America was an “intentional, manipulated…desire to discredit the church” by the media.
Larry Drivon, an attorney from Northern California who represents victims of clergy sexual abuse, uses an analogy to explain why the scandal was about the bishops, not the priests or sex: If a man-eating tiger eats a zoo patron, is it the tiger’s fault or is the zookeeper who knowingly left open the cage responsible? These bishops knew they had predators working for them, but they let them continue to roam free.
When it comes to the sex scandal, there is, for now, an unbridgeable disconnect between the vast majority of the Catholic clergy and the rest of society. Because of their training and culture, transparency and sharing of authority are foreign concepts. For 2,000 years, the church has policed itself and rarely answered to anyone. Despite words crafted by the bishops’ public relations people, this mindset hasn’t changed overnight—and won’t for the foreseeable future. To many in the clergy, the public scrutiny during the sex scandal seemed like an attack on the church, which they believed was the sole possessor of the truth. I think that’s why the bishops and church’s attorneys attacked the victims who came forward in the past with disproportional viciousness. The victims threatened to bring scandal to the church, and therefore could diminish the holiness of Catholicism in the eyes of some. They weren’t just plaintiffs, but enemies who needed to be vanquished in such a way as to repel even the thought of future attacks. If a child fell down some stairs at a parish and became quadriplegic, church attorneys might argue that the church was not responsible for the fall, but they wouldn’t personally attack the kid in the wheelchair.
Just as many in the clergy see the journalists’ reporting and the public’s outrage as basically Catholic bashing, most of society simply can’t comprehend how people of God failed to protect children in their care. The opening paragraphs of a 2005 Philadelphia Grand Jury (which included several practicing Catholics) summed it up succinctly:
This report contains the findings of the Grand Jury: how dozens of priests sexually abused hundreds of children; how Philadelphia Archdiocese officials—including Cardinal Bevilacqua and Cardinal Krol—excused and enabled the abuse; and how the law must be changed so that it doesn’t happen again. Some may be tempted to describe these events as tragic. Tragedies such as tidal waves, however, are outside human control. What we found were not acts of God, but of men who acted in His name and defiled it.
But the biggest crime of all this is: it worked. The abuser priests, by choosing children as targets and trafficking on their trust, were able to prevent or delay reports of their sexual assaults, to the point where applicable statutes of limitation expired. And Archdiocese officials, by burying those reports they did receive and covering up the conduct, similarly managed to outlast any statutes of limitation. As a result, these priests and officials will necessarily escape criminal prosecution. We surely would have charged them if we could have done so.
…Sexually abusive priests were either left quietly in place or “recycled” to unsuspecting new parishes—vastly expanding the number of children who were abused. It didn’t have to be this way. Prompt action and a climate of compassion for the child victims could have significantly limited the damage done.
Philadelphia’s lead investigator, a veteran assistant district attorney named Will Spade, would later tell the National Catholic Reporter that interviewing the scores of victims affected him like no other case in his career.
“It was like working in a factory,” Spade said. “And in this factory was a conveyer belt of damaged people. Every day it was another damaged person.
“There would be times when I would come home after a particularly bad day,” he continued, “and I would lie down on the couch with my head in my wife’s lap and cry, uncontrollably cry.”
As a reporter, the victims got to me, too. Nearly every day I heard from at least one more victim, and each story was simply heartbreaking. It made it worse that I was the father of four boys; I could easily imagine the devastation to our family if a trusted priest sodomized one or more of my kids. I couldn’t get the victims’ stories or the bishops’ lies—many of them written on their own stationery, undeniable and permanent—out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes and other violent crimes, senseless deaths and tragedies. But this was different—the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.
The only thing that quieted the victims’ voices for me was alcohol. Since my born-again turnaround I hadn’t been a big drinker, and it was rare when I had more than a beer on a weeknight, but now I found myself coming home and pouring several stiff drinks. I started to look forward to the end of the evening, usually after the kids had gone to bed, when I could feel the buzz of the tequila or rum working its magic to numb my emotions. It troubled me that I needed this self-medication; it wasn’t good for my health and I hadn’t earned the right to the pain. I had only listened to the stories of the real victims. I kept my pain and drinking a secret, except from my wife. With her, I shared the stories I had heard. This turned out to save our marriage. Our talks insured that we were traveling down the same spiritual path, no matter where it led.
Unbeknownst to us, it was leading toward skepticism. We would find, in fact, a deep connection between faith in the church and faith in God. The Catholic Church presents an extreme case of institutional deference, which helps explain the success of the cover-up of abuse for so many decades. Members of the laity aren’t supposed to question their “fathers.” This is more than just a simile to faith in God, which involves a leap beyond question. There’s a reason why atheists and agnostics used to be called free-thinkers.
I don’t think Greer and I could have lived happily in our marriage with one of us devoutly religious and the other a nonbeliever. The gap in worldviews would have been too large to bridge or ignore.
As I was collecting pain, many of the victims were shedding some of theirs. The scandal had given them a voice at last. It was liberating, freeing an explosion from below. I wrote about it on March 21, 2002:
After years of being disdained, dismissed or simply ignored, longtime crusaders against sexual abuse by priests suddenly have entered a kind of promised land. It’s an unfamiliar place where Catholic bishops apologize, prosecutors and politicians listen, and a friendly media army helps fight their battles.
And, perhaps most soothing to the victims’ scarred souls, people finally believe them.
“I’d never thought
I’d see this day,” said David Clohessy, national director of the St. Louis–based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, one of the nation’s two largest such groups, with 3,500 members. “We’ve been crying from the rooftops for someone to notice what’s going on for so long.”
The sex scandal provided fertile ground for stories. The unfolding drama—with its secret documents, lies, tragedies, lawsuits, villains, heroes and million-dollar payouts—provided me with the raw material for many high-profile pieces of journalism that began to get national attention. I felt like a television reporter in the eye of a hurricane, speaking to the camera while tied to a palm tree. By March other Times reporters, who normally could care less about religion coverage, asked to be put on the team. They could smell the blood in the water.
I now was within a few weeks of my Catholic conversion. I still viewed the scandal as a necessary evil that would give the institution a badly needed cleansing. I believed my own reporting, in small part, would contribute to the movement that would force the United States bishops to enact reforms to protect the parishioners’ children and to bring back holiness to the Catholic Church. I saw the process as anything but anti-Catholic. The church was on a corrective course that would bring it much closer to the principles of Jesus than those of a corporation.
I studied my church history. Catholicism had strayed before from the path blazed by Jesus, only to be placed back on the straight and narrow by a reformer—someone who bucked the establishment, was hated for it, but usually ended up a saint. Many students of history know about the corruption of the Renaissance, when popes and their underlings fathered children and lived licentiously. But sexual abuse has an even older history. In the fourth century, St. Basil of Caesarea got so fed up with sexual abuse that he set up a detailed system of punishment to deal with clerics at his monastery who molested boys. Perpetrators were to be flogged and put in chains for six months; they were never again allowed unsupervised interaction with minors. In the 11th century, St. Peter Damian, a Benedictine monk, wrote a treatise called the Book of Gomorrah that he gave to Pope Leo IX circa 1050, pleading for him to get serious about stopping clergy sexual abuse, including the molestation of minors.
Losing My Religion Page 13