Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal

by D'Antonio, Michael

  Although Rep. D. J. Bettencourt’s words were extreme, they highlighted a decline in the hierarchy’s status that has been so broad and complete that one could almost imagine that it was caused by a highly organized, well-funded, and intentional campaign. Certainly many inside the institution saw things this way. At one time or another layman activists, bishops, cardinals, and even the popes have blamed the crisis on greedy lawyers, vindictive clergy abuse victims, power-mad advocate groups, and ego-driven journalists working in concert and motivated by hatred.

  In fact the siege of the Church had been mainly an organic phenomenon, with individuals taking action when crimes were discovered and continuing to act as Church leaders failed to resolve their problems. This activity had been encouraged by attorneys and leaders of organizations that serve victims of pedophile priests. They acknowledged as much by referring to their efforts as a “movement,” by sharing strategy and tactics, and by occasionally pooling their resources. To this extent, victims of pedophile priests and their supporters did create an organized and concerted attack on Rome. However, the emotion that energized the fighters was not hatred. They were, rather, inspired by anger over the crimes that had been committed, by empathy for victims, and by a fierce commitment to exposing the truth.

  Truth-telling was the main tool employed by victims who feared their physical and psychological suffering were obscured by Church secrecy, confidentiality agreements, and euphemisms. Typical was a twenty-one-year-old rape victim named Megan Peterson, who demanded that the Church begin a sexual abuse safety campaign before she would settle her legal claim. She then spent much of 2011 and 2012 telling anyone who would listen about the priest who had raped her and how his repeated assaults had ruined her faith, burdened her with shame, and driven her to attempt suicide, all before she graduated high school.

  In 2004 Peterson was a fourteen-year-old ninth-grader who was so devout she thought she might become a nun. She spent more time in church activities than any kid in her home town and made the parish the main focus of her life. She often stopped at Blessed Sacrament church to pray alone, in the quiet light that came through the stained glass windows. She counted the people she met there, especially the priests, as family. When the pastor offered to lend her a religious book she thought nothing of stopping at his office before going home from school. She trusted him so thoroughly that she didn’t even flinch when he locked the door and joined her on a sofa. Then he began grabbing at her body and mumbling about how God wanted him and Megan to be together. This was okay, he said. It was alright.

  Pressing his weight on her, Father forced Megan onto the floor, and began to pull off her clothes. Megan struggled against him, too shocked to speak. She thought about Father’s pledge of celibacy and how wrong he was to push himself on her. She wondered if she had done something to provoke this. Then he had his pants open and was on top of her. His smell made her feel sick to her stomach and she found it hard to breathe. The speed and force he used to rape her shocked Megan into a dissociated state of mind. Now her body was there, but she wasn’t truly present. Her consciousness drifted away from that room, floating into a state of detachment until he was finished. Then she scrambled away from him, pulled her clothes on, and fled.

  Highly religious and socially isolated, Megan couldn’t trust any adult with the truth of what happened to her. She was orally and vaginally raped several more times by the same pastor, who insisted he was acting out God’s will. Although Megan surely felt anger, it was buried by shame and the childlike belief that somehow, she was responsible for the sin and violence Father had committed. Terrified that she would be blamed, she was afraid to tell anyone what had happened. To add to her fear, he threatened to kill members of her family if she reported his crimes.

  Brutalized by a man she had once trusted, Megan Peterson fell into periods of deep depression that others interpreted as teenage moods. She tried to kill herself with pills and almost succeeded. She was admitted several times to a psychiatric clinic. Shamed, humiliated, and frightened, she struggled to attend school and barely received a high school diploma. When she finally revealed what had happened to her, many of her friends and members of her family abandoned her. She moved away from her rural home to a small city where she lived alone and tried to create an adult existence. The psychological injury she suffered continued to cause her anxiety, loneliness, and terror. Sometimes the pain was so intense that she could feel it, physically, as a hollow ache that filled her body and made it difficult for her to think, or act, or feel anything else. Days and weeks were lost to immobilizing depression.

  “It cost me everything,” she said of the violence she suffered as a child. “It has even put me in the position where I feel like I have to put parts of my life on hold so I can participate in this movement to get the truth out. I don’t really have a choice about this. In all the time this has been going on, the Church has been unable to deal with it honestly. That means it’s up to me to do the right thing. I don’t like it, but that’s what it is.”

  As a victim/survivor, Peterson joined thousands who made their suffering public and used the courts and the power of shame to confront the Church. Almost thirty years had passed since the first abuse case gained widespread attention. In that time, Catholicism’s all-male leadership caste responded erratically and inconsistently. At times priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes showed compassion for victims, but throughout the crisis they also resisted telling the whole truth about the crimes priests had committed against children and adolescents. Their failure caused the widespread decline of public respect for the Church, especially in developed industrial countries where popes have visited with great pomp and ceremony but did not act decisively. Those who support benevolent Catholic institutions such as hospitals, schools, and social programs, where the good works are done mainly by laypeople and nuns, fear that their practice of Christian faith through service to others is threatened by the legalism and defensiveness of a hierarchy more concerned with power and authority than morality and justice.

  This book is the story of the tragedy caused by the sexual crimes of priests, the movement that coalesced around the pursuit of justice for victims, and the scandal of denial, cover-up, and indifference that continues to afflict Church leaders. As one priest observed during a public appearance of Pope Benedict in Austria, he is like a man who comes upon a burning house and focuses his attention on the pretty flowers in the front garden. The moral structure of the institutional Church has been burning for almost three decades. The question now is whether anything of value can still be saved.

  1. CLERICAL CULTURE

  On a hot summer morning in 1984, the Vatican’s ambassador to Washington arrived at his daily staff meeting—he called it “la congressa”—with an armful of files and letters. A trim, broad-shouldered sixty-two-year-old who played tennis several times a week, Cardinal Pio Laghi understood the importance of La Bella Figura (the beautiful figure). His tanned face practically glowed against his black jacket and white Roman collar, and he rarely showed signs of wilting in the Potomac swelter. His aides, who also dressed in priestly black, sometimes joked that the man had been born without sweat glands.

  As Laghi took his place at the conference table he deftly separated the items he had brought and began distributing them like a card dealer working through a deck. With each envelope or folder the ambassador, who was born in Emiglia-Romagna, offered a bit of direction in slightly accented English. Letters from American bishops, archbishops, and cardinals were to be given immediate attention. The same priority applied to communiqués from Rome, which came each day via sealed, diplomatic pouch. But staffers were free to handle other matters, like requests from laypeople and ordinary priests, as they saw fit.

  Pope John Paul II’s envoy, or nuncio, in America leaned on his aides to help him with a heavy portfolio. Besides minding the Holy See’s relations with the most powerful nation in the world, Laghi had to keep an eye on Catholics in America, who were by far Rome’s greates
t source of both donations and headaches. On this morning the workload included a letter from Monsignor Henri Larroque of Lafayette, Louisiana, which noted a multimillion-dollar payment he had approved to settle lawsuits filed by the parents of several boys who had been sexually assaulted by a local priest named Gilbert Gauthe.

  At la congressa, Laghi held the letter from Lafayette and fixed his gaze on his church law specialist, a thirty-nine-year-old American named Fr. Thomas Doyle. Laghi said that he had a sensitive problem that needed special attention. He explained the issue in brief and handed Doyle the letter from Frey with instructions to draft a reply and start a file on the case. No one said much about the crimes, the priest, or his victims. Everyone, including Doyle, just assumed he would handle the matter with efficiency and discretion. They then turned their attention to the next item on Laghi’s agenda.

  The calm and deliberate way that Laghi dealt with something as disturbing as the case of a pedophile priest reflected the self-confidence of a man who had risen to the top of a profession that required equanimity above all else. Tapped to be the Vatican’s first full-fledged ambassador to America in 1984, when Washington normalized relations with the Holy See, Laghi had previously served in the Middle East and in Argentina at a time when the military terrorized civilians with kidnappings and murders. As thousands were “disappeared,” to use the local term, the Pope’s man in Buenos Aires played tennis with the generals. He didn’t speak against them publicly until he was about to leave for America. Critics would see cowardice in Laghi’s silence. Supporters would say he had kept open important channels of communication.

  When Laghi arrived in Washington, the Reagan administration greeted him as a wise practitioner of realpolitik and a reliable ally, even if the Church occasionally edged toward Marx in its critique of capitalism and its concern for the world’s poor. Among diplomats, his dual role as a religious figure and emissary of a foreign state made Laghi a unique presence. Officials who saw his clerical collar automatically gave him the benefit of the doubt. Everyday Catholics considered his status as the Pope’s man in America and assumed, correctly, he had a direct line to the Holy Father.

  Insiders at the nunciature, which occupied an imposing and austere building on Washington’s Embassy Row, marveled at how Laghi used his special status to advance Pope John Paul II’s conservative agenda for the Church and to give the Vatican an outsized role in world affairs. This was especially true when William Casey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, visited to sip cappuccino and exchange secret information. Special access to Casey and other top officials helped the tiny Vatican state punch well above its weight class in world affairs. In Latin America, for example, the institutional Church was widely viewed as a conduit to American power even where individual priests and bishops opposed U.S. policies.

  With America as an ally, John Paul II—the skiing, hiking survivor of war and state repression—would become the most powerful political force in the history of the modern papacy. His popularity increased after he was nearly killed in an attempted assassination in 1981. (The gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, was a Turk who may have been backed by the Soviet Union.) The Pope’s popularity could be seen in the huge throngs that turned out for his many public appearances around the world. Wherever he went, he attracted record crowds.

  Global politics, conducted by secret cable and during visits from the director of the CIA, made the Vatican embassy a plum posting for American priests with designs on power. When he was chosen to serve at the embassy Thomas Doyle moved onto the career fast track. Just thirty-seven at the time, Doyle held a bushel full of advanced degrees in everything from political science to administration. Doyle’s appointment to the embassy staff signaled that he had both the right background and the proper conservative religious views (at least as far as he stated any) to eventually be named a bishop, archbishop, or even a cardinal.

  Athletically built with dark hair and blue eyes, Doyle was also the kind of masculine and energetic fellow who represented the ideal priest as traditionalists imagined him. An amateur pilot, he thought nothing of renting a plane for an afternoon so he could track migrating whales in the Atlantic. His other hobbies revolved around firearms. A lifelong member of the National Rifle Association, Doyle collected all sorts of guns and enjoyed keeping them in proper condition with regular cleaning and oiling. Whenever he got the chance, he went out and shot targets for fun and relaxation.

  Of course the aggressive streak that made Doyle a fan of the right to bear arms also made him skeptical in ways that could have given the hierarchy pause. Though a company man, he sometimes cringed at the royalist fervor shown by Catholics who treated the Pope as a kind of god-king and he was put off by the hypocrisy he saw in bishops who called on others for charity but lived in mansions and rode in limousines. Inside the nunciature, Doyle liked to joke about the dreary “Soviet-style furnishings” and the matching mood of lockstep obedience. However, he had made his peace with the institution because it was committed to saving individual souls from hell and the world from communism and he couldn’t think of two more worthy missions.

  The elements of service that came with a priest’s life felt natural to Doyle and so far he had fit into it fairly well. After he was ordained in 1970 he worked in a parish in a Chicago suburb where he spent a lot of time trying to calm the anxieties of people who feared they “were going to get zapped by God” because they used birth control or harbored “impure” thoughts. Doyle quietly counseled them to follow their own consciences. This impulse to privately encourage people to think for themselves clashed with Doyle’s respect of papal power and authority, but he didn’t give this contradiction much thought. He believed—no, he knew—that almost every priest harbored inconsistent and even irreconcilable beliefs and they all just lived with the discomfort.

  After his posting in Chicago and further education, Doyle landed at the embassy where he shared the serious sense of purpose everyone brought to work that seemed vastly more important than the duties of mere parish priests. His main job was vetting men who were being considered for promotion to bishop or archbishop. The Pope controlled this process and, like a president who can extend his influence by packing the Supreme Court, John Paul II was packing the American church with conservatives. In the process, he bypassed the favorites of the national bishops’ conference and relied instead on references from personal allies, including archbishops Bernard Law of Boston and John O’Connor of New York, and Bishop Anthony Bevilacqua of Pittsburgh. To the frustration of the more diverse conference of bishops, these bulldog traditionalists told Doyle whom to advance and whom to hold back.

  The politicking that accompanied promotions made Doyle’s everyday job a bit of a strain. He welcomed the occasional break from routine, like the letter from the bishop of Lafayette. Doyle wasn’t entirely shocked by the case. In his years as a priest Doyle had learned that ordination didn’t make anyone perfect. Clergy still got into all sorts of trouble. Alcoholism was common among priests, and many fell short of their vows to remain celibate. He had even heard rumors about priests and bishops with girlfriends, boyfriends, and children. In trusting him to handle such a sensitive matter, Laghi acknowledged that Doyle was a team player who would protect the Church. Doyle promptly wrote a reply to Frey confirming that the embassy had received his report. He then created a file for the case and waited to see what would happen next.

  * * *

  The world might never have heard much about Bishop Frey, Gilbert Gauthe, or Tom Doyle if all of the parents who complained about the priest’s crimes had accepted payment and agreed to stay silent. But one couple did not go along. Glenn and Faye Gastal wanted the world to know that Fr. Gauthe had sexually assaulted their son and used threats to keep him quiet about it. The attacks, which took place in a church, a parish house, and other settings, included rape and began when the boy was just seven. He was so frightened and confused that he kept it secret.

  The truth came out when Gauthe suddenly left town and par
ents of other victims began to talk about how the priest had manipulated dozens of boys into close relationships that quickly became violently abusive. (As one attorney would later describe it, Gauthe had engaged boys in “every sexual act you can imagine two males doing.”) With his parents’ reassurances and encouragement, Glenn and Faye Gastal’s then nine-year-old son Scott spoke in detail about what had been done to him. A small boy with a soft voice, Scott described how Gauthe befriended him and made him feel appreciated as an altar boy. Like others, Scott often stayed overnight in the priest’s house on weekends. It was there that Gauthe engaged him in play and then manipulated and coerced him into oral and anal sex. More rapes occurred in the ensuring year. Scott was most affected by the memory of Gauthe ejaculating in his mouth and forcing his erect penis into his rectum. Once he was injured so severely that he reported the bleeding to his parents, hours after the assault, and had to be treated at a hospital.

  Scott was seven when he was first raped by Gauthe and the assaults continued for about a year as he remained one of the priest’s altar boys. In this time he became a withdrawn and depressed boy who no longer liked to be hugged or kissed by his parents. Indeed, with every crime committed against his body, he suffered the profound psychological trauma that comes with being painfully and violently sexualized by a grown man who was supposed to take care of him. The humiliation, terror, and confusion Scott suffered wounded him much more deeply than the physical assaults. They would also have more lasting effects, influencing how he felt about himself and others. Sex, relationships, faith, and family would all become layered with pain for many years to come.