Klein had been raised in a devoutly Catholic family who lived on a farm outside town. Adrian was one of eight Minnesota communities settled in the nineteenth century by Archbishop John Ireland and his Irish Catholic Colonization Association. Ireland bought 400,000 acres of land, which he sold to people responding to advertisements in church newspapers in the East. Like almost everyone else in the area, the Kleins attended St. Adrian Church and sent their children to Catholic schools. They were friendly with the priests assigned to the region, including Thomas Adamson. And they were not altogether surprised when Jay’s younger brother Gene announced he was going to go to seminary.
After he was ordained in the spring of 1974, Gene Klein had trouble getting comfortable with being a priest. Drink helped him until it hurt him and he wound up in a residential rehabilitation program in Rochester. It was there, in late November, that he first spoke of years of sexual exploitation by Fr. Adamson. It had begun in Adrian when he was an eighth grader and Adamson was principal of St. Adrian’s school. Once the wall of secrecy was broken, Gene told everything to his parents and his brother Jay, who back then was a teacher and basketball coach at St. Francis of Assisi School in Rochester, where Adamson was the principal.
Jay Klein was disturbed by what Gene revealed but not shocked. He had worked with Adamson and as he told Anderson, “I noticed that he always checked the seventh and eighth graders for their jock sizes.” Klein was most upset by the reaction of his elderly parents, Jim and Rose. Quick to assume responsibility, they were heartsick over the memories of allowing Adamson to take their sons on overnight trips and encouraging them to be involved in activities at the church and school. They felt as if they had pushed Gene into the arms of a sexual predator and were saddened to know that their son had been unable to confide in them.
The truth was even worse than they knew. Within a week another younger brother named Robert would tearfully confess to Jay that he had been molested by Adamson when he was at the same school, but the first incident had been the last. According to Bob, Adamson had said that priests were “given the right by the Church as celibates to have contact with young boys and that’s what celibacy means.” A third brother named Jack then said that Adamson had attempted to molest him, too, but he had resisted and the priest never tried anything again. A fourth, who requested his name not be published, said he was never molested.
Five brothers; three victims. Jay Klein telephoned Bishop Watters to report what he had heard and demand that Thomas Adamson be removed from his post in Rochester. He also asked that the bishop move to defrock him, by whatever process was required. According to Klein, Watters had said something about confronting Adamson but insisted that any immediate action would require the priest to confess and cooperate, which was unlikely. Not satisfied, Klein went directly to Adamson and told him, “If you say one more Mass we are going to come up onto the altar and tell everyone what you have done.” Adamson left Rochester before the next Sunday. Jay Klein resigned his position at St. Francis School and began the long process of disengaging from the Catholic Church.
Having worked in probation since 1975, Jay Klein knew enough about the law to understand that he was giving Anderson information that would prove that Bishop Watters knew Adamson had had sex with two underage boys and had approached a third. Though the churchmen were never prosecuted due to the statute of limitations, Klein could testify that Watters knew about these crimes and failed in his duty to protect the public from Adamson. Watching Jeffrey Anderson struggle to contain his excitement over what he was hearing, Klein decided to give him a couple more gems.
After his complaint was registered with the bishop, said Klein, “We had a lot of priests call us and tell us to back off.” Klein also heard from the elderly priest who had founded St. Francis School. Father Raymond Jansen began their conversation sounding like someone who wanted to defend a fellow priest and scold a layman who had crossed the caste boundary. But as they continued to talk, the old priest said that Adamson had been confronted about his behavior and sent for treatment twice before, but never completed therapy. Jansen had since died, but Klein said the information that Adamson had gotten into trouble before 1974 suggested a new line of investigation for the plaintiffs.
Finally, Klein told Anderson about Sr. Tierney Trueman and Sr. Micon Welsch, two nuns who worked at St. Francis School. Welsch had told him that everyone at the school knew not to leave Adamson alone with boys and that she made a point of monitoring the gym when he was in there with children. Sr. Tierney had talked with Klein about Adamson, and was so upset she immediately made the fifty-mile drive to Winona to meet with Bishop Watters. She warned him to remove Adamson before Klein did something drastic. She came back to report to Klein that that the bishop didn’t react much at all to her visit. He didn’t seem surprised or angry, but he did seem “pained.”
Watching Anderson make notes on a legal pad, Klein knew which of his revelations struck a chord and took some pleasure in the attorney’s struggle to record every important lead. In the years since his run-in with Adamson, Klein’s work for the county had brought him into contact with many perpetrators and victims of sexual abuse. The more he learned about the tendencies of offenders—they rarely stopped of their own accord—and the damage they could do, the more he regretted letting go of his complaints about Adamson when he left Rochester. Anderson was giving him a chance to correct this mistake and he was glad for it.
When the attorney and the private investigator departed, Klein stood on the steps of the courthouse and watched them move down the sidewalk. He smiled as he heard Anderson, who was a foot shorter than Bosse and a hundred pounds lighter, chew him out over the tape recorder. He was also amused to see Anderson pump his fist and give Bosse a high five in celebration, no doubt for the breakthrough they had achieved because they had heeded the voice on the phone.
* * *
In Stillwater, Julie Aronson ran to the ringing phone and picked it up before the answering machine could seize the call.
“We got ’em!” shouted Jeff in a voice loud enough to overcome the sound of traffic whizzing past the pay phone.
In a hurried voice he told her about the Klein family and the offenses Adamson had committed long ago. Now that he knew the outlines of those incidents he could chase down additional documents and witnesses that would prove Bishops Watters and Roach had knowingly placed a habitual sex offender in parishes where he had access to more victims. The Church would either settle the case for a big sum, or face certain defeat and a higher price at trial.
Listening to all of this, Julie knew Jeff was correct about the case. She was happy for him, but she was also afraid. In victory as well as defeat Jeff had a tendency toward excess and overreaction. On this night he was likely to stop on the way home to celebrate, either at one of the bars downtown or at a friend’s house. If not, he might come home and drink even more brandy/sevens than usual. Either way, he would turn this success into an opportunity for oblivion.
Worse would be his response to the ultimate end of this case. Since agreeing to represent the Lymans, Anderson had built his pursuit of the two dioceses into a cause filled with drama and moral imperative. He was right, of course. The Lymans’ lawsuit revolved around some profound issues and it was Anderson’s ability to frame what was happening as a morality tale that enabled him to cut through all the strange language and arcane Catholic logic that might confuse someone else. But as he generated a sense of mission and urgency, Anderson also made the case so important in his own life that its resolution would be an emotional spectacle, no matter how it turned out.
Julie had seen this dynamic play out before. The decision of a judge or jury would be capped by a party or a night on the town that would transform Jeff into someone very different from the man who made her his partner and confidant over Reuben sandwiches. Raucous and funny, he would become the center of attention and say or do almost anything. Once, on a dare, he had stripped naked and walked down the hill where his house stood to si
t on a sidewalk bench. More than once he had flirted with other women so openly that Julie walked out and didn’t come back. And even when she stayed at these events she felt ever more uncomfortable as the night wore on and the Jeff she loved faded away, replaced by a character, a stranger who she didn’t like very much.
The fear of what came with the end of a big case wasn’t something Julie had ever discussed with anyone, and she hadn’t yet figured out her feelings in a way that would allow her to explain them. She needed Jeff’s approval almost as much as she had craved her father’s love and attention when she was a girl, and she was afraid to make him angry.
In time, Julie’s feelings would all come out, but for the moment she would hang on through the twists and turns. Within a few days Jeff would propose to her during dinner at the best place in Stillwater, the Matterhorn Room at the Lowell Inn. There, surrounded by cuckoo clocks and beer steins and couples dipping morsels of food into bubbling fondue pots, he offered a ring in a glass of champagne. She said “Yes” without considering the implausibility of her secret hope that he would stop drinking. She was so happy, she didn’t care when the restaurant manager wouldn’t let her take home the champagne glass as a souvenir.
8. THE ANGELS HAD TO CRY
Jay Klein was William Hull’s nightmare come to life and, as attorney for Fr. Thomas Adamson and the Winona Diocese, he began attacking him in the first minutes of his deposition. Hull objected to everything Klein might say about his dealings with his clients and announced that he would fight to keep most of his testimony from ever seeing the light of a courtroom.
“We are objecting continuously,” he declared, “to each question as it is being asked.”
With this opening shot, Hull set the mood for a daylong session inside Jeffrey Anderson’s conference room at the Conwed Tower. If Fr. Adamson’s deposition had been a model of civil confrontation, this one was going to be much uglier. After the first half hour of halting testimony Klein himself stopped the proceedings to complain.
“It really interrupts my train of thought to have you continually objecting,” said Klein.
“I guess, Mr. Witness, I am the attorney and I’ll make such objections as I see fit during your testimony,” answered Hull.
“It’s Mr. Klein.”
William Hull never would address the witness as “Mr. Klein.” However, as one of the half dozen lawyers sitting on the defendants’ side of the table he was forced to absorb the facts that Klein presented. His testimony proved that Bishop Watters had, at best, offered misleading testimony when he said unidentified callers had offered vague complaints about Thomas Adamson. At worst a court might say that the bishop had committed perjury.
In his work, Klein had served for years on a child protection task force. This experience, along with formal training in criminology and psychology, had led him to agree with experts who found wide evidence that sexual offenders rarely stopped seeking new victims and that therapy was rarely successful. “I became more and more aware of the inability to cure pedophiles and I felt very uncomfortable,” recalled Klein. Certain “there was a possibility of current or future victims” he had reported Adamson to a national abuse hotline.
* * *
Jeffrey Anderson didn’t know enough about the international Catholic Church, or care enough about its inner workings, to appreciate the controversies that occupied its leaders in the summer and fall of 1986. In America, where the bishops had just rejected the Mouton-Doyle-Peterson proposal for dealing with sexual abuse cases, their national conference issued a harsh critique of capitalism and its inequalities that provoked howls of complaint from political conservatives. In Rome, engineers turned up the power on radio transmitters beaming church programs to Eastern Bloc communist countries and the Vatican involved itself in politics from the Middle East to Central America and the Philippines. But the most important development of the year, according to a poll of American religion writers, was Cardinal Ratzinger’s campaign to discipline theologians and clergy who were tolerant, or even accepting, of birth control and homosexuality.
Homosexuality was such a preoccupation for Rome that in October 1986 Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued lengthy instructions “on the pastoral care of homosexual persons.” This guide for bishops defined a gay orientation as “an objective disorder” and in a not-so-veiled allusion to AIDS, criticized those who advocated for equal rights even though “homosexuality may seriously threaten the lives and well-being of a large number of people.”
Ratzinger’s document was, in tone and focus, a departure from the more liberal position expressed by the Vatican ten years earlier, which urged Catholics to oppose discrimination against homosexuals. What caused the shift? It was, undoubtedly, inspired in part by the fact that John Paul II and Ratzinger were more traditionalist than their predecessors. However, ample evidence also suggests they were addressing an issue that was not confronted directly in the document but concerned the Church nevertheless: homosexuality in the priesthood.
As the former priest Richard Sipe reported, between 1978 and 1985 widely cited estimates of the proportion of priests who were gay doubled from about 20 to roughly 40 percent. This shift was attributed to many factors, including changing social attitudes that made it easier for people to accept themselves and others as gay. Sipe suspected that this wide variation in estimates reflected the fact that many clergy really didn’t understand their own sexual identity. Over and over again he had met men who had engaged in homosexual relationships, some of which were situational and dependent on the fact that these men lived in a sex-segregated community similar to a prison or an isolated military unit. Some denied the sexual aspect of themselves. Others split off their sexual activity, to place it completely outside their stated values. This allowed them to preach the Church’s severe moral message to others while hypocritically violating the rules themselves.
In time, the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, would theorize that for many priests Vatican II had transformed sex “from something negative that leads you into sin, into something positive.” Priests loosened their commitment to celibacy. “Summer sessions at Catholic colleges became courtship camps,” recalled Weakland. In the same time period thousands of heterosexuals abandoned the priesthood to marry. Among the priests who remained in the Church, a long-standing gay subculture became more significant and slightly more open. Some gay priests sought to be assigned together so they could live as couples in the same rectory. Many vacationed together. However, even as gays came to represent a larger proportion of the priesthood, they were still pressured, under the threat of scandal and dismissal, to keep their orientation and relationships secret.
Ratzinger’s letter further isolated gay clergy from the outside world, where homosexuality was fast losing its stigma. Thirteen years had passed since the American Psychiatric Association had declassified homosexuality as a disorder. In a remarkable reversal, the fear and rejection of gay people—called homophobia—had become recognized as a genuine psychological problem. This shift, from the notion that homosexuality was disordered, to the idea that the fear of it was the real pathology, was matched by steady progress for the gay rights movement. By the middle of the 1980s homosexuality had been decriminalized in many states and countries. The Democratic Party had added a gay rights plank to its party platform, and both the state of Wisconsin and the City of Miami had made discrimination based on sexual orientation a crime.
In their devotion to attacking homosexuality, Ratzinger and other church officials stood isolated from many of the faithful who knew openly gay priests. In 1986 off-duty priests commonly sought companionship and acceptance in the gay community and they were generally welcome. Richard Sipe, who was conducting a long-term study of celibacy and the priesthood, saw psychological defensiveness and denial at work in the Vatican’s effort to criticize and control homosexuality. He also knew from personal experience that celibacy and the sins of sex had created a vast system of mutual blackmail th
at served, in a perverse way, to strengthen the clerical culture. Under these conditions, priests who had sex of any kind, even alone, routinely confessed and sought absolution from each other. The sanctity of the confessional and the guarantee of forgiveness meant that priests were united in their secrecy. Without the culture of secrecy the entire caste of ordained, special-status men would be revealed to be just like everyone else. With it, they could claim to be holier than everyone else and enjoy the care and comfort of the institutional Church.
Whether it was a matter of theology, homophobia, or even self-hatred, the Church’s aggressive approach to homosexuality brought into focus John Paul II’s stringent definition of Catholicism. In general, the Vatican under his reign made very specific demands on those who would declare themselves true believers. It was also consistent with what experts would prescribe for religious leaders who might be worried about the fervor of the faithful. Stricter rules may scare away some people who value self-determination, but they also inspire greater loyalty in those who embrace the faith fully. This is why fundamentalist Protestants are generally more vocal about their beliefs and consistent in their church attendance than so-called mainline Protestants. Having given up more to achieve an identity that is both separate from and superior to the population at large, they express their faith with much greater energy. Exceptions, like liberal Catholics who devote themselves to the poor, abound. But as a general rule, conservative faiths that are rigidly rules-based, tend to inspire more loyalty.
For the most ardent traditionalists, fealty to the Vatican was on par with belief in the holy trinity when it came to defining who was, and who was not, a real Catholic. Ordained clergy added this obligation to the many requirements that, if fulfilled, gave them a sense of identity. In Minnesota, the bishops of St. Paul and Winona recognized immediately that with Jay Klein’s testimony the potential for scandal increased significantly.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 11
