by Pearl Solas
Gutted, Veronica walked slowly back to her seat.
“As I was saying,” resumed the judge, “regardless of whether plaintiffs can prove their claims, we are not permitted to consider such proof. The law of this state is clear, and it does not permit the exception plaintiffs encourage us to adopt. Because plaintiffs’ lawsuit was filed after the applicable deadline, we are obliged to grant defendants’ motion.”
The judge pushed her chair back so quickly that the bailiff scarcely had time to intone, “All rise” before she had disappeared through the door in the wood-paneled wall.
Spent, Veronica flopped back in her chair. She didn’t stir until everyone at the defendants’ table had packed their gear and left the courtroom.
As she prepared to leave, she saw Andy standing in the back of the gallery near the door. “Tough break, Ronnie,” he said to comfort her, placing his hand on her shoulder. “You did the best you could with what you had to work with. What are you thinking about an appeal?”
“I’ll lick my wounds, and then I’ll probably file it.”
“Oh, Ronnie. There’s no way our state supremes are going to rule in your favor. Why throw good energy after bad?”
“It’s my energy. I’ll do what I want with it.”
Part II
Chapter Nine
“Getting old is the worst. I used to think that, if money ever got really tight, I could put on a slutty skirt and go get some dates on The Point. You’d keep an eye on the kids, right?”
Tavis’s wandering mind snapped back to the present and he covered his mouth and nose with his hand to keep coffee from shooting out.
“I mean, I guess it’s still possible,” she continued, smiling mischievously, leaning into her topic, “but at my age, I don’t think this fat ass would make more money than, say, a part-time job shelving books at the library. Ah, there you are. Welcome back,” she said as Tavis pushed air through his nose and shook his head in a half-laugh at her audacity. “I wondered what it would take to get your attention this time. I’ve already given you my dissertation on the Atlanta hip-hop scene, and I was about to move on to an article I just read about STDs in nursing homes. Old folks be gettin’ freaky in their golden years! At least that’s something to look forward to.”
Gisela’s twinkling eyes focused sharply as she observed her husband’s attempt to reward her comedic efforts with a smile. It looked more like a grimace, with the expression of mirth moving no higher than the bottom of his cheekbones.
“Oh, cariño,” said Gisela, moving around the breakfast table to massage the spot at the base of his neck that never failed to calm him. “Are you sure this work is right for you? Sure, it’s important, but you’re a mess.”
Tavis sighed. “You know how I feel about this, Sela. I can’t do much, but I can do this.”
A news banner caught his attention and he peered at the nearly muted television playing on the kitchen counter. He picked up the remote and increased the volume to hear the local reporter standing in front of a nondescript house with peeling paint, brown grass, and drawn curtains.
“In breaking news, Eyewitness News 9 is here at the home where police received reports this morning of the sexual assault of a nine-month-old infant. According to sources within the police department, law enforcement was called after the child’s mother discovered signs of trauma while changing the baby’s diaper early this morning. Police have not made any arrests, but we’re following this story and will keep you informed of further developments. Back to you, Lisa and Jim.” The reporter’s face caricatured an expression befitting the somber story she conveyed, but it was impossible to miss her poorly concealed glee at her assignment to such a sensational story.
“Fucking vultures,” muttered Gisela as she took the remote from Tavis’s hand and clicked off the television. “At least you won’t be investigating that train wreck.”
He pushed back his chair and crossed the sunlit kitchen, taking his breakfast plate to the dishwasher. “No,” Tavis said, not even trying to hide his weariness, “por lo menos I don’t have to do that.”
Chapter Ten
In the wake of the Paul Peña trial, the Colberg diocese, like the rest of the Church in the fallout from the broader clergy abuse scandal, found itself walking a fine line between facilitating meaningful justice for victims and minimizing damage to the institution. The global Church did not decree canon laws or implement policies or procedures that weighed the balance in favor of justice—it didn’t even work to even the scales.
Within the Colberg diocese, the bishop was quietly reassigned after it became common knowledge that he had been aware of allegations against Peña but had opted to minimize and conceal instead of holding Peña accountable. The new bishop, Eduardo Cólima, stepped in and addressed the issue head on. He committed publicly to formal internal investigations of every allegation of abuse, and to full cooperation and communication with law enforcement. Bishop Cólima needed a liaison who understood both the Church and law enforcement, who could be trusted to interact fairly and objectively with accusers, the accused, and anyone else who might have relevant information. The bishop’s need and Tavis’s own experience and calling seemed divinely aligned, and the bishop hired Tavis as one of his first official actions.
When parents or victims made complaints directly to law enforcement authorities, Tavis liaised with criminal investigators and with the applicable Church authorities to facilitate the criminal investigations and to conduct corresponding internal inquiries. When complaints were made exclusively within the Church, Tavis investigated before bringing, with Bishop Cólima’s blessing, any substantiating evidence to law enforcement.
When Tavis first accepted Bishop Cólima’s offer, he had felt competing loyalties: to the innocent victims, and to the priests he had been raised to believe were good and holy men, whose reputations shouldn’t be ruined because of a few bad apples. Before digging into the work, Tavis had felt that his loyalties were pretty evenly balanced. He thought that the snowballing media coverage around the abuse scandal had, at first, served a useful purpose by exposing a sickness that thrived in darkness. But later, it seemed to Tavis that the media frenzy was feeding opportunists who saw the pendulum swinging toward believing accusers, even in the absence of evidence, and who jumped on the bandwagon to see whether they could cash in on a low-risk gamble.
Not long into his work, Tavis found himself needing to pray to maintain those competing loyalties so he could approach the job neutrally. It got much tougher to stay objective when, in case after case, the evidence corroborated victims’ accusations. In a short amount of time, Tavis had learned to recognize two reliable patterns: if allegations against a particular clergyman received any level of media attention, the coming days often brought a number of calls to the diocesan center from unrelated individuals recounting uncannily similar details. If initial complaints were made directly to the diocesan center, without media involvement, investigations regularly yielded corroborating evidence and uncovered additional victims. Tavis soon discovered that, even if an accused priest had a clean record in the files maintained by the particular diocesan office in which he worked, when Tavis took Bishop Cólima’s letter of introduction requesting accommodation to the diocesan office from where the accused priest had transferred, that office’s file would often reflect that the transfer into the Colberg diocese had been motivated by the complaints of children or parents regarding sexually inappropriate behavior.
Seeing those priests’ files and realizing, in case after case, that the priests’ superiors in the Church had known about past complaints, and had just shifted “problem priests” to their next assignments without taking any steps to protect the flock in the new hunting grounds, wore Tavis’s neutrality to the nub. Because many parents of abused children had complained only to the Church, and not to law enforcement, the Church’s files were the only place to see the full story. The parents had trusted the Church to handle things, and the Church had “handled” things
by applying band-aids to severed limbs.
* * *
On the day he first heard Frank Muncy’s name, Tavis had been reporting to Bishop Cólima at the diocesan center for almost two years. Tavis liked to get to the office before most of the rest of the staff arrived. After filling his mug with the receptionist’s inconsistent coffee—it alternated between lightly tinted water and a semi-solid sludge—he usually cleared his mind with a couple of games of computer Solitaire before diving into the day’s tasks. He would get at least a solid hour of momentum under his belt before being distracted by the inevitable visitors who popped in on their way to or from the coffee pot.
These visits still surprised Tavis, especially because the office had been pretty standoffish when Bishop Cólima first installed him in the diocesan center. They thought Tavis was targeting priests they knew and admired, but most of the staff within the diocesan center eventually warmed to him and included him within the center’s collegial culture. Tavis joked that he had won them over with his wit and sparkling personality, but the more likely explanation was that the remarkably observant bishop had noticed his exclusion and pushed the staff to extend a more welcoming hand. As with most of the bishop’s actions, this effort was shrewdly calculated, not least because Tavis had to rely heavily on these people for the information and access required to conduct his investigations.
* * *
Tavis’s investigation into allegations against Father Francis Muncy began as so many others had: an outraged mother demanded that something be done about the pervert priest who had sexually assaulted her teenaged son.
During the intake interview with Dolores and her son, Dolores dominated the conversation to such an extent that Tavis had been forced to develop a strategy to enable the boy, Jeremy, to answer the questions posed instead of allowing his mother to answer. Jeremy explained that he had been volunteering at the diocesan food pantry, which Father Frank ran, and that although Jeremy’s mother was supposed to pick him up, she had been “stranded.” When using the word, Jeremy averted his eyes, suggesting that such mishaps happened fairly regularly, and that, resultingly, Jeremy often found himself stranded.
It had been dark and bitterly cold when the food pantry closed, and Dolores still had not arrived to drive Jeremy the five miles to their home, so Father Frank offered to give him a ride. On the way, Jeremy claimed, Father Frank stopped his small pickup near a city park.
“I don’t know why he stopped the truck, but we were in a really dark place at the edge of the park and he sort of jumped across the seat and tried to kiss me,” Jeremy blurted in a rush. “Then he grabbed my crotch with one hand, opened his pants, and rubbed one out.”
“I’m very sorry that happened to you, Jeremy. What did you do?” Tavis asked neutrally.
“I didn’t know what to do. I was freaked out so I just closed my eyes, tried not to breathe, and hoped it would be over soon. He finished and I jumped out of the truck and ran home across the park.”
* * *
Without drawing conclusions, Tavis noted that, at parts of the story, Jeremy used language identical to the words his mother had spoken when she called the diocesan office to make the complaint. That in itself didn’t mean much, but the series of events described by Jeremy and Dolores was also unusual in that, before the day in question, Jeremy had had no previous interaction with Father Frank. With adolescent victims, sexual predators tended to spend some time establishing a rapport with their targets as a means of making the victim’s silence more likely. Also unusual was that, even according to Jeremy, it did not appear that Father Frank had manipulated a situation in order to be alone with the boy—he had simply reacted to Jeremy’s need for a ride in dangerously cold weather. Upon completing the interview, Tavis assured Jeremy and his mother that their complaint had been heard, that he and Bishop Cólima took it seriously, and that the investigation would be rigorous and thorough.
Chapter Eleven
Before interviewing an accused priest, Tavis did as much background research as possible. As an agent of the Church itself, Tavis had access to records that the Church usually resisted providing in the context of civil or criminal legal proceedings. The guilty men often developed patterns of abuse so that, when historical allegations appeared in a given priest’s file, there were usually striking similarities to the acts described in the present complaint. In such cases, verifying that the abuser had had access to the accuser during the timeframe in question went a long way toward satisfying Tavis that the evidence sufficiently corroborated the allegations to justify turning over the investigation to law enforcement.
From the outset, the allegations against Father Frank were different. Father Frank had lived and worked in the Colberg diocese for the past ten years, and the transfer into the diocese was the only transfer in his file. Father Frank had asked to move into the diocese to care for his sick mother, who had died within two years of his return.
Father Frank’s file did not contain a single allegation of improper behavior with children—or any other complaints for that matter. Most abusive priests tended to work in roles with close and regular proximity to children, but Father Frank’s work provided very little opportunity for interaction with children. His primary responsibility was to administer the mental health clinic that served the diocese, and while he supervised therapists providing services to children, his own practice was limited to treating adults, with an emphasis on treating addiction. Father Frank’s patients and their loved ones sang his praises from the rooftops. Apparently he had been an early critic of twelve-step programs in the face of mounting evidence about their low rates of long-term success. Instead he focused on approaches that acknowledged the complexity of addiction, that analyzed motivation and comorbid conditions, and that emphasized behavioral methods for managing urges.
Although the center served congregants from the diocese, it was part of a broader service initiative. As was often the case, the community had a greater need for mental health services than it had qualified professionals, so the center also served those unaffiliated with the Catholic Church. Many of Father Frank’s clients came to him through referral from the criminal justice system. Father Frank was a priest, and he wore his clerical collar during sessions, but by all accounts, his patients appreciated that he did not impose dogma upon them. He never denied or hid his vocation, and he discussed the topic of religion if it was raised by a client, but he never introduced it. More than one of the clergymen and lay professionals Father Frank supervised told Tavis that Father Frank approached his work with the belief that “We can invest our work with Our Lord’s compassion and grace without shoving our religion down our clients’ throats.”
The more Tavis interviewed those who knew and worked with Father Frank, the more farfetched the allegations against him seemed. Tavis was used to interviewing Catholics who spoke of priests with a respect and reverence that extended more to the office than to the man who held it. When these folks understood the context of Tavis’s questions, they often became hostile to what they thought were efforts to ruin the reputation of the Church.
Again, it was different with Father Frank. Many of the people Tavis interviewed admired Father Frank in spite of his priestly vocation rather than because of it. With the secular media coverage of abusive priests and the Church’s complicity, Father Frank had to work harder at building rapport with his clients. Like a used car salesman or a personal injury lawyer, Father Frank began each new client relationship with non-Catholics, and sometimes even with disenchanted Catholics, at a disadvantage, but his therapeutic gifts almost always overcame doubts. Even those who distrusted priests in general ended up liking and respecting him.
Many former patients of Father Frank were happy to meet with Tavis, and Father Frank’s success stories were often so grateful for his impact on their lives that they had begun volunteering at the diocesan center. They were not shy about crediting Father Frank with their recoveries.
Father Frank was successful because he seem
ed to have an endless supply of the trait that most often causes burnout in mental health providers: empathy. Interview after interview built a picture of a man who never developed the thick skin that allows so many mental health professionals to maintain a separation between their patients’ crises and their own lives. The outsized portion of empathy that initially motivates many mental health providers to pursue their work also makes new therapists agonize with their clients. Thoughts of their clients’ struggles follow them home. Because it’s impossible to live, long-term, in crisis mode, over time therapists’ empathetic impulses evolve like the hands of a gym rat. The chafing of the empathic bar generates painful blisters and tears, which heal and tear and heal again with ever-thicker layers of skin until, eventually, strong calluses protect the hands from all but the most balls-out workouts.
The hardened empathy of mental health providers usually makes them more objective and perceptive, and it often helps them deliver difficult but important advice. The downside of calloused empathy, though, especially for inexperienced mental health clients, is that their provider does not fully appreciate the panic and crisis that led to finally showing up for help.
Father Frank’s empathy never calloused. He lived in the blisters-and-tears state. He appreciated that almost every new patient was in a state of crisis: because their simmering anxieties had finally boiled over into full-blown panic; because their depression had reached such a deep valley that they could not seek the help they knew they needed, and so a loved one made an appointment for them; or because their substance abuse had reached a level that crossed paths with the criminal justice system.
In this kind of crisis, rigidly ending the first session at the scheduled sixty or ninety minutes, and hustling the new client out the door to greet the next patient on time, made many clients doubt whether the therapist truly appreciated their feelings of crisis, panic, and helplessness. Father Frank began demonstrating his empathy to new clients in dire straits, which felt life-threatening to them, by scheduling intake appointments in the last time slot of his workday. Rather than forcing an end to the session at a pre-ordained time, Father Frank explained that, while their future work together would need to be on schedule, their goal for the first session was just to get through the crisis, even if it required more time than a regular session.