At Collegeville, the bishops heard a presentation on sexual abuse offered by a psychologist who worked with the archdiocese of Chicago, a canon lawyer, and the counsel to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. These three men occupied positions similar to Doyle, Mouton, and Peterson, but they were not equally versed in the nature and scope of the problem. After this private session the bishops focused on a “pastoral letter” that would call on American Catholics to support the poor and work against poverty. Two years before, a letter supporting nuclear disarmament had succeeded in provoking a national debate and caused many Catholics to reconsider their views. This achievement had made the bishops more visible in the public square and they liked the attention.
The group drafting the letter on poverty was led by Archbishop Weakland. In the complex political landscape of the Catholic Church, Weakland was a liberal who, since the ascension of John Paul II, stood on the losing side of every argument about celibacy, marriage for priests, the status of women, and papal authority. However, he was useful to his more conservative brother bishops when it came to social issues like poverty. Weakland and his letter gave his traditionalist peers a way to appear compassionate and even radical in the pursuit of justice for the poor. For this reason New York’s archbishop John O’Connor, one of the Pope’s favorites, seemed to enjoy rebuking pro-business laymen as he claimed for the conference the role of “worrying” the consciences of Catholics. Of course he played this role while living in a mansion, and being attended by paid helpers whenever he needed them.
Although they considered the issue in private, the bishops chose to stay silent on the Gauthe case and the general problem of sexual abuse by priests. When Laghi returned to Washington he bumped into Doyle in the hallway at the embassy and asked, “Why weren’t you there, Tom? They needed you.” Doyle, who understood that the bishops set their own agenda, agreed.
* * *
Two weeks after the bishops finished their work in Collegeville, Time magazine suddenly made Gilbert Gauthe and the “painful secrets” revealed by Jason Berry national news. Time’s article signaled to the rest of the media that the story was fair game. The year to come would see an uptick in the number of articles published on priest offenders from coast to coast.
In Lafayette, district attorney Nathan Stanbury intended to put Gilbert Gauthe in prison for the rest of his life. He found support among local Catholics as he rebuffed Ray Mouton’s efforts to achieve a plea bargain based on the idea that Fr. Gauthe was mentally ill and therefore less than fully responsible for his actions. Mouton couldn’t be sure that an expert witness would testify that his client was insane at the time when he abused his victims. Michael Peterson, who had evaluated Fr. Gauthe, considered the man’s utter lack of empathy for his victims and concluded he was a sociopath. By definition sociopaths are profoundly disordered, and often dangerous, but not insane.
A week before the trial was to start, Mouton changed his approach. He asked Stanbury if he wouldn’t want to spare the victims and their parents the pain of testifying in public. One of the boys was just six years old. “I’ll put ’em all on the witness stand,” promised Mouton. “It won’t be pretty.”
Nathan Stanbury could not be sure that a jury would turn away the insanity argument and he had taken note of how one particular boy had trembled as he told his story in a private setting. If he could spare this child and the others from public testimony, and assure them that their tormentor would be locked up for an exceedingly long time, a deal might be the best option. The two lawyers eventually agreed on a twenty-year sentence in a prison, not some comfortable psychiatric center. The victims and their parents assented to the deal and Gilbert Gauthe was locked away in a medium security state penitentiary.
The civil case filed by the Gastal family would not be resolved so readily. Minos Simon and his clients did not seek a settlement with the Church. They wanted a trial, so that Simon could impress upon a jury the damage done to his clients. Gilbert Gauthe had robbed Faye and Glenn Gastal of their faith. He had taken much more from their son, whose psychological suffering could last a lifetime. The jury seemed to agree. They awarded the family $1.2 million. To avoid a long appeals process, the Gastals accepted a bit over $1 million.
Meanwhile, the Lafayette diocese faced new allegations against a former priest who had transferred to Washington State, and against a local pastor who faced accusations by five sisters who said he had molested them. The reported incidents occurred when the victims were between the ages of four and fourteen. Three of them had been photographed in the nude. The priest, John Engbers, fled to his native Holland before he could be confronted.
As Jason Berry investigated and reported on the new cases, he watched church officials in Lafayette act like corporate officers instead of pastors, complaining about insurers who resisted settling claims and litigants who threatened the solvency of the diocese. He came to accept that deceptions and transgressions he never imagined possible occurred with regularity inside the Church.
Although he continued to believe in the message of Christ and attended Mass, the assumptions he once held about the goodness of ordained men disappeared. When police called because they were investigating complaints of abuse filed against his source code-named Chalice, Berry was not entirely surprised. (He had sensed something “creepy” about the man.) Chalice would deny the charges even after he was sent to prison. He would eventually die of AIDS.
* * *
After they were brushed aside by the American bishops, the three experts who thought they might save the Church from a long nightmare related to sexual abuse continued to try to get their message across. Michael Peterson made hundreds of copies of the report and sent them to bishops across America. Doyle spoke to anyone in the Church who would listen, reminding them of their duty to laypeople, especially children. He received some private encouragement, but no public support. At the Vatican embassy where he once joked with colleagues about how American bishops were “sexual intellectuals”—translation, “fucking idiots”—he was now met with silence and cold stares. After he discovered that his desk and file cabinets had been searched when he was away from his office, Doyle began taking sensitive papers home at the end of every day. For the first time in his life, he worried about how much he depended on a couple of glasses of wine to relax in the evening.
As Raymond Mouton followed up on new cases of clergy abuse reported in the press, he became particularly upset about the suffering of victims and their families. Mouton had never been so frustrated by a problem. Nor had he felt so pained. After long days focused on sexual abuse and cover-ups, he would drink until he passed out. His wife and children began to feel neglected. Michael Peterson, who was a psychiatrist, began to talk to him about a condition called manic depression.
Peterson had his own problems. Months of constant travel and consultations with troubled priests seemed to have aged him. As his friend Doyle would recall, Peterson grew weak and exhausted but pushed himself to work harder. In March 1986 he flew to Rome to alert higher officials to the looming sex abuse scandal, but he returned to report he had little impact. At that time the Vatican was focused not on controlling abusive priests, but on disciplining theological liberals. The Pope had summoned the bishops of Brazil to discuss their support of liberation theology and its main proponent, Brazilian friar Leonardo Boff, who had been officially forbidden to speak publicly.
Given his own personality, the monarchical structure of the Church, and its tradition of discipline, John Paul II’s crackdown on liberation theology was an inevitability. Boff and his allies offered a searing critique of all hierarchical power systems. The Church was the ultimate hierarchy, and had been equipped with a punishing impulse when Pope Gregory IX established the Inquisition in 1231. From the start, the officers of the Inquisition built a network of informants who identified those who deviated from the codified rules of the Church and alerted higher authorities so they could move against the offenders. Filled with absolute certainty, th
e early Inquisitors tortured and killed supposed apostates. They also built an enduring bureaucracy that maintained meticulous records and worked slowly, but relentlessly, to enforce the will of the hierarchy that they, of course, called God’s will.
In the modern age, the Inquisition was called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Torture and killing were out, but moral certainty still ruled the game and in 1986 investigators were finishing reports that would lead then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to strip an American professor of his right to teach Catholic theology. Charles Curran would be cast out for condoning dissent and teaching ideas that were, Ratzinger wrote, “in open contrast with the teaching of the Magisterium.” Except for the topic of euthanasia, every item Ratzinger addressed in his criticism of Curran was related to sex, and in every case, from masturbation to homosexuality, he and the Church were against it.
In this period Ratzinger would earn his reputation as the enforcer of papal authority, exponent for traditional theology, and defender of the clerical culture. Ratzinger was in the middle of investigating Seattle archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, who had worked in an open and positive way with a group of gay Catholics. In the fall, Hunthausen would be subjected to a humiliating censure from the Vatican and the assignment of a watchdog who would share the administration of his territory. After Hunthausen pleaded for their support, his American colleagues would instead vote to publicly affirm their loyalty to the Pope.
After he returned to America, Peterson was hospitalized in Washington. He told Mouton and Doyle that he had lymphoma and was dying. Heartbroken, the two men promised to carry on their effort. They flew to New Jersey in a rented plane, piloted by Doyle, for a conference of canon lawyers.
Technically speaking, the canon law system offered ways for Church leaders to investigate abuse allegations and remove priests from ministry. However, church law offered nothing to address real-world crimes. Canon law courts could not put anyone in prison or levy fines. And in practice, the ample rights accorded to ordained priests protected many of them from ever facing a tribunal. A five-year statute of limitations meant most complaints could never be brought to a tribunal because child victims are usually so traumatized that they are unable to disclose what happened to them until they are well into adulthood. Also, offenders who claimed they were drunk or psychologically impaired—and almost all abusers are by definition impaired—were almost automatically immunized from prosecution. Under these conditions, most experts advised bishops against using the system to try to cast out a priest and, as far as Doyle could tell, none tried.
At the meeting, Fr. Doyle stood and argued that “extreme judgmentalism in matters of sex” combined with the fear of scandal threatened to create “the most serious problem the Church has faced in centuries.” He advised the Church to inform parishioners when a complaint against a priest has been confirmed and to respond compassionately to victims and their families. “Don’t send some imperious cleric out there to show them how bad they should feel about dragging the Church’s name through the mud.”
As Doyle spoke, Mouton noted that he was sounding more and more liberal and less like a traditionalist. In fact, Doyle had become convinced that his old loyalty to the hierarchy had been misplaced. Although he hadn’t found a new basis for his faith, and this made him uneasy, he was certain that the clerics who claimed to be so much closer to God couldn’t have been more wrong about themselves, or the deity.
When it was Mouton’s turn to address the canon lawyers he offered a few observations as a loyal layperson, including a warning that the Church “cannot credibly exert moral authority in any area where the public perceives it as incapable of maintaining moral authority internally.” But Mouton’s main focus was on what he could say as an attorney. He told them that liability insurers were cancelling policies held by dioceses around the country and that almost every day new charges were being made somewhere. When he said that the prior Monday had brought two new allegations Doyle held up three fingers and Mouton corrected himself.
The meeting of the canon lawyers turned out to be the high point for Mouton and Doyle’s campaign. The two men had become close friends and drinking buddies who enjoyed going to Cajun dancehalls around Lafayette and lolling in Mouton’s swimming pool. Doyle had become so close to Mouton’s family and friends that he performed the marriage ceremony for the lawyer’s secretary.
Friendship and alcohol helped the men cope with their feelings of failure, which grew more intense as the country’s Catholic bishops ignored their work. By the summer of 1986 Mouton was convinced that almost every ordained man in America bore some responsibility for the sexual abuse of children because the problem was an open secret. Having concluded that the mission he had undertaken to save his church had failed, he became depressed and even more dependent on alcohol. Michael Peterson, who had recovered enough to leave the hospital, found a doctor in Louisiana who would treat Mouton for bipolar disorder.
Of course the “cure” for Mouton wouldn’t come immediately. He would resist treatment for three years, denying his diagnosis and throwing himself into his work. Mouton, Peterson, and Doyle were confident in their assessment of the Church’s problems and pushed Catholic leaders to confront them. However, no amount of effort, even by a ferociously assertive and maniacally energetic Mouton, was going to make the Church move quickly enough in the right direction. Increasingly frustrated, Mouton’s personal troubles worsened. He lost his marriage, his home, and daily contact with his children. Eventually, Mouton would realize that “from the time I met Fr. Gilbert Gauthe” until he had walked away from the issue of priests and sexual abuse, “I was in a sustained manic episode.” His preoccupation with all the issues that arose in the wake of his work for Gilbert Gauthe led to his divorce, and early retirement from the law. In the years to come he would find sobriety and get mental health treatment.
Michael Peterson died on April 9, 1987, after telling friends that he was gay and that he had AIDS. His funeral would mark the first time the Church acknowledged the loss of a priest with AIDS. Thomas Doyle was one of one hundred white-robed priests—white to symbolize the soul’s victory over death—who participated in the Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
By the time of Peterson’s death, Fr. Doyle had begun to feel a bit paranoid. All the things about the Church that rubbed him the wrong way—the spiritual class system, the authoritarian structure, the vestments and incense—seemed more irritating than ever. At the same time, he felt like he was the subject of gossip and scrutiny by his colleagues. A two-glasses-per-night white wine habit became four, and he realized that he couldn’t stand working at the embassy. He had to quit immediately.
Pio Laghi didn’t seem surprised when Doyle appeared in his office to resign. Although they conducted a face-saving exchange of good wishes, both men knew that Doyle had spoiled his own chance to become a bishop, or perhaps a cardinal, and would be lucky to land any job at all. Doyle didn’t mention it, but he planned to enlist in the Air Force and become a chaplain. The service, which might require him to accept postings abroad, would take him out of the mainstream of American Catholic life, but this change appealed to him.
Soon after Doyle enlisted, but before he reported for training at Andrews Air Force Base, he took a phone call from a television producer in Los Angeles. The producer had read about his work on the issue of priests and sexual abuse and wanted him to appear on a talk show called Hour Magazine. After hearing the producer’s request, Doyle’s only concern was travel expenses. When he learned that the program would cover the cost, he flew to Los Angeles for the broadcast. Although Doyle preferred civilian clothes, he made the choice to show up at the studio wearing clerical black and a Roman collar. The look was not just slimming—they say TV cameras add ten pounds—but it also signaled that he was an authority in good standing with the Church.
In the interview Doyle spoke plainly about priests and criminal sexual behavior and the subculture of privilege that made it difficult for
bishops to respond decisively. He was delighted after the program to meet Dr. Ruth Westheimer in the reception area for guests. A psychoanalyst trained at the Sorbonne, Dr. Ruth was at the height of her fame as a sex educator and advocate for sexual pleasure of all types. “When it came to sex,” Doyle would recall, “she made more sense in five minutes than a hundred bishops talking for an hour.”
Though not the most-watched TV program in America, Hour Magazine was seen by enough viewers that word of Doyle’s appearance spread quickly among the American bishops. Bishop Quinn, who had once encouraged Doyle’s work, wrote Laghi to complain that, “The continuing comments attributed to Father Doyle and Mr. Mouton are not serving the image of the Church and the priesthood.” He reminded Laghi that “Doyle and Mouton want the Church in the United States to purchase their expensive and controversial leadership” and concluded that “the Church has weathered worse attacks, thanks to the strength and guidance of the Holy Spirit. So, too, will the pedophile annoyance eventually abate.” Laghi didn’t agree with Quinn’s criticism of Doyle, but after he received the letter he called Doyle and asked him to come to the embassy.
On the day Laghi called Doyle, the clerical rumor mill was churning with talk of a bishop from Spokane who had been interrogated by police in Chicago, where he was attending a Knights of Columbus convention. The officers had confronted Bishop Lawrence Welsh with a complaint from a male prostitute who said the bishop had picked him up, engaged him in sex, and then beat him. Though the complaint was dropped, Welsh eventually confirmed much of the prostitute’s story for police. Doyle had heard about all of this and was certain Laghi wanted his counsel. He was surprised when, instead, Laghi brought up his TV appearance.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 6
