Days before Blaine’s appointment in Toledo, the kids at the Worker House used blunt scissors and big waxy crayons to turn construction paper into grinning pumpkins and arched black cats, which they taped to the windows and walls. When the holiday arrived Blaine helped get the kids off to school and then set out for Ohio in a car she had borrowed from a friend. The five-hour drive gave her time to consider what she would say. No longer ashamed, she was determined that the truth be told and she hoped that the provincial of the Oblates would do all the right things.
At their meeting Blaine recalled for the provincial her family’s life in the Church and then described what had happened with Chet Warren. She then asked him to immediately bar Warren from working with children.
“At first they acted like they believed me,” recalled Blaine, years later. “It was almost like they were expecting it.”
While the Oblates didn’t challenge Blaine’s claim of abuse, they quietly pressed her on the details. Perhaps it didn’t begin when she was thirteen, he said. Maybe she was fifteen, or even sixteen. She resisted this suggestion. They then asked her to attend a series of six psychotherapy meetings with Warren and a psychotherapist named Mary Morgillo. These sessions would somehow contribute to her “healing,” he said.
Still a good Catholic, Blaine dutifully went to two of these sessions. At the first of these meetings, Warren admitted he had sexually violated her beginning when she in grade school. However he insisted on challenging the details of what had happened and when, in order to make it seem like she had been older. He also sifted and reinterpreted events in ways that made her partly responsible and identified him as not just a perpetrator but also a victim. She stopped attending when, before the third session, she was informed that Warren had been excused because he told his superiors the sessions made him uncomfortable.
Chet Warren continued working as a priest. Blaine involved herself in group therapy with other victims of sexual abuse and continued individual sessions with a counselor. She also telephoned Jason Berry to ask about the broader issue of sexual abuse in the Church and to ask if he knew of any self-help groups that might offer support to victims. He said no such groups existed. The call prompted her to eventually start her own.
Self-help and organizing came naturally to Blaine, but progress in this instance was exceedingly slow. Victims of sexual abuse by priests tended to keep quiet about it and the few who filed lawsuits usually did so as “John” or “Jane Doe.” With the Internet still years away, Blaine painstakingly scoured the press for reports on clergy abuse and telephoned every reporter who published a story and every lawyer who filed a claim. Most refused to even pass her name along to other victims. A few, including Berry, were happy to tell victims about a woman in Chicago who wanted to talk with them. In this way Blaine heard from a few dozen people—she imagined they represented a large proportion of all the victims in America—and added their names to the rolls of a group she called, for lack of a better name, The Victims Network, then later SNAP—Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
On St. Patrick’s Day 1988 Jason Berry appeared on the Donahue show with reporter Carl Cannon of Knight Ridder newspapers. When the program’s producers told Berry they expected viewers to contact the show for more information, he suggested they refer them to Blaine. They went a step further, flashing a notice at the end of the show that directed viewers to call The Victims Network at a Chicago number. The number rang one of two lines at the Catholic Worker House in Chicago.
Blaine answered the first call just minutes after Donahue aired in the Eastern time zone. The man on the other end of the line told her a bit about how he had been molested by a priest and asked about what help she could offer. She explained that she was just beginning to gather names and telephone numbers so that victims could find each other. The man agreed to have his name on the list and as he said good-bye gave Blaine permission to share his contact information with other victims from his state. As soon as Blaine put down the receiver the phone rang again. Before the night was over she would fill several sheets of paper with names and phone numbers. The phone would continue ringing for the next couple of days. Blaine began to imagine a true network of local chapters, something like the organization of Alcoholics Anonymous, serving perhaps a few hundred people with similar experiences and needs to support each other.
As she connected survivors around the country who provided each other with support, some told Blaine about another Chicago-area woman who was working on the issue of clergy abuse. Jeanne Miller was crisscrossing the country promoting a book, written under the pen name Hilary Stiles. Her son and other boys had been propositioned by a priest. When she complained, she was stonewalled by the Archdiocese of Chicago. The book was nothing less than an indictment of the Church on charges of criminal conspiracy for covering up the sexual crimes committed by clergy. When Stiles first began to speak out in her parish she was met by hostility and criticism, but every time she appeared on TV she heard from dozens of people with similar experiences. Several people, including Berry, urged Blaine to call her.
* * *
Jeanne Miller’s alter ego Hilary Stiles wore a dark wig, blue contact lenses, and heavy makeup that made her look like the glamorous novelist Jackie Collins. Though based on Miller’s experiences with the Chicago archdiocese, Assault on Innocence was offered as fiction. In TV appearances Stiles claimed that a real-life Chicago priest named Robert Mayer had tried to molest her son during a weekend outing at a lake house. Miller telephoned the mothers of three other boys who had been at the house. Two refused to consider what she had to say. The third believed that her son was actually molested by Mayer. Together the two mothers investigated and heard that the priest was giving drugs and alcohol to boys in the parish and inviting them to his quarters in the rectory. When the women complained to church authorities they were met with denial and resistance. Miller filed a lawsuit. The chancellor of the archdiocese called the women to an evening meeting in the basement of a church. There, seated at a folding table setup beneath a harsh overhead light, he threatened them with excommunication.
Miller was not deterred. She started attending church in another town and mortgaged her home to pay her lawyer. Her husband begged her to stop. He wanted to return to their parish and the life they had known before. She refused. Cardinal Bernardin moved Mayer to another Chicago suburb, Des Plaines. Soon the Des Plaines police were at her door with questions about Fr. Mayer. Bernardin’s prescription for a geographical cure had failed. As her husband protested, Miller renewed her campaign to have Mayer disciplined. The Church resisted and at their parish the Miller family was shunned as troublemakers.
Compared with Barbara Blaine, Jeanne Miller was an unlikely crusader. She was not an activist. She had never worked as an advocate of any sort, nor had she tried to follow the social gospel of the Catholic Workers. For the most part she had lived as a traditional believer who loved the Church and was devout in her attendance at Mass, confession, and holiday services. In fact, the firm structure of the institution had always appealed to her as an antidote to the chaos she had known during her peculiar childhood.
Jeanne Miller was the grandchild of a brilliant but domineering woman who founded Moreland Realty, a development company that built thousands of homes in Chicago’s western suburbs in the years after World War II. Her parents, so good-looking that they could have worked the fashion runways in New York, were employed as sales agents at Moreland subdivisions. However, they were more than salespeople. Required to live in Moreland model homes, they were on-duty all the time, welcoming serious shoppers and the merely curious, at all hours of the day or night. With their children they posed as the model family in Moreland’s newspaper ads. When all the houses in a particular development were sold, they moved on to the next one.
Behind the veneer of perfection that the Millers presented to people shopping for homes, Jeanne’s family struggled with the stress that came with their dependency on her grandmother and moving a doz
en times in as many years. Both of her parents were alcoholics, and her mother became addicted to prescription drugs. As a teenager Jeanne pleaded for her grandmother to help, but she was ignored until the day her mother put on her best clothes, leaned over the muzzle of a shotgun, and stretched out her hand to push the trigger. The suicide attempt failed. Jeanne discovered her mother was in the hospital, and why, when she got home from school. As she started to cry, the local parish priest told her, “Don’t be so selfish.” Two weeks after she returned home, Miller’s mother succeeded in killing herself by drinking drain cleaner.
Jeanne Miller never forgot how her pleas for help with her mother were ignored. As a mother herself she couldn’t tolerate having her concerns about Robert Mayer ignored by the archdiocese. As the proceeds from her second mortgage ran out she sold her jewelry in order to continue to press her claim against the Church. When she finally reached the limit of her resources, Miller agreed to negotiate a settlement. The archdiocese paid her $15,000, which was about half the debt she owed her attorney, and Bernardin agreed to meet with her. In the spring of 1985 she went to his office in the Loop district of Chicago. As she would recall it a few years later, “Bernardin pointed to a stack of papers on his desk, and told us they were sexual complaints against priests and that they took time to investigate. We said the whole issue of pedophilia needed to be addressed. He said our case had forced them to do that. He told us, ‘It’s still a mystery how your case got so out of hand.’”
In her book Assault on Innocence, Miller/Stiles confronted the problem of priest predators and cover-up more directly and personally than any previous author. When the small press that issued the book failed to give it a publicity campaign Miller assumed the job herself, mailing out hundreds of copies accompanied by a letter packaged in a mailing tube that looked like a stick of dynamite. More than a dozen producers invited her to appear on television. Whenever “Hilary Stiles” was interviewed on local TV, viewers responded by the hundreds. She referred victims looking for legal help to Jeff Anderson. To others she offered a sympathetic ear. After a few months of this, Miller began to feel like one of the blind men in an ancient Indian proverb. Each one feels part of an elephant—trunk, tail, ear, mouth—and fails to identify the animal’s true size and mass.
When Barbara Blaine called, Miller listened attentively to her description of how Chet Warren had abused her and to Blaine’s report on how the Oblates of St. Francis had done nothing concrete in response to her complaint. Miller had already learned that people who “come out” as abuse victims and meet resistance in the Church feel traumatized all over again. Disillusioned and isolated, many needed to talk and talk about their experience. She heard this need in Blaine, and allowed her to vent as long as she wanted. She also detected in her a certain energy—outrage mixed with the need to “do something”—that might make her an ally.
At the Catholic Worker house, Barbara Blaine kept the phone lines tied up for more than an hour as she soaked in the kind of affirmation she had never felt from anyone else who had heard her story. Here at last was someone who was just as committed to Catholicism as she was; who also knew the disillusioning truth about priests and bishops and sexual abuse. But as Blaine found understanding and empathy with Jeanne Miller she was interrupted, several times, by staff and house residents insisting she get off the phone. “When they said ‘It’s really important,’” recalled Blaine, “I said, ‘So is this.’”
As Blaine finally finished her conversation with Miller she made an effort to control the irritation she felt about all the interruptions. To her surprise, the people who had been pestering her were, at first, hesitant to explain themselves. Then, in a rush, they told her there had been an accident. A tractor trailer had smashed into the car Gary Olivero had driven to Catholic Charities to pick up food. Before the day was done, the city’s Catholic activists would be mourning his death.
* * *
Like Jeanne Miller, Richard Sipe had touched part of the elephant—perhaps more of it than anyone—but he still wanted help to understand all of its dimensions. He felt this way despite his decades-long study of the clergy and sexuality and a lifetime spent inside the Church. The fourth of ten children from an intensely Catholic family in small-town Minnesota, Sipe was thirteen years old in 1946 when he enrolled at a Catholic seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota, where the Benedictine order also maintained an abbey and a college. When he was a novice monk the book Client-Centered Therapy by the renowned psychologist Carl Rogers began what would become Sipe’s lifelong interest in the nexus of spirituality and psychology.
In the 1950s, St. John’s Abbey became the site of early collaborations between clergy and mental health professionals, two groups that rarely came together. The sessions were directed by a priest named Alexius Portz, who believed the two disciplines had common concerns. To encourage openness, he restricted the meetings to the participants and barred the press and college community. Sipe got the job of running the equipment that recorded the lectures. To minimize the distraction, he was posted behind a closed door, with cords running under it to microphones. What he heard confirmed much of what he had begun to think about human nature.
When he was later ordained as a priest, Sipe first served as a teacher at a Catholic high school in Cold Spring, Minnesota. He continued his own academic work in counseling at the University of Minnesota, St. Cloud and St. Thomas University in St. Paul. As he worked as a counselor and as a priest hearing the confessions of both clergy and laypeople he noticed that individuals were practically tormented in their efforts to live according to Catholic teachings on sex. This was especially true for clergymen like himself, who were supposed to maintain absolute celibacy.
In 1964 Sipe spent a year in training at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, and he then went to the Seton Psychiatric Institute in Baltimore, where he eventually settled into work as a therapist and professor at St. Mary’s Pontifical Seminary, which served more than five hundred students from all over America. It was in Baltimore that the anthropologist Margaret Mead, visiting to give a lecture, pushed him to consider the Catholic clergy to be members of a discrete culture and to write about what he was observing in ethnographic, rather than psychoanalytic, terms. The proposal implied that just as Mead had famously revealed universal ideas about sexual liberation in her popular books on isolated societies in the South Pacific, Sipe might teach the wider world something through an exploration of the clergy subculture.
At the moment when he met Mead, Sipe was beginning to come to terms with his own status as a priest. Though firmly Christian, and Catholic, he had never been comfortable with the kind of obedience required by the hierarchy. Throughout his life as a monk Sipe had talked often with superiors and peers about how the all-but-blind obedience required by the Church grated against his internal (perhaps very American) resistance to authority. Try as he might, Sipe could not submit with a happy heart. Indeed, the more he succeeded at being obedient, the more depressed he became. Psychotherapy led him to conclude that he would have to leave the priesthood to resolve this conflict. By 1970 he was a layman married to a psychiatrist and former nun named Marianne Benkert, M.D., but he continued to serve Catholic institutions as a therapist who treated clergy.
By 1988, Sipe’s long experience with ordained men who suffered from alcoholism, drug addiction, and psychological and sexual problems was probably unmatched in the world. But as often as he heard about priests who had secret children, or bishops who paid for abortions, Sipe continued to be surprised by what he learned in both therapy sessions and contacts with colleagues and church officials. As a social scientist he approached every case fully open to the idea that a priest or a bishop was the man he claimed to be. He also looked for confirmation, or contradictions to his findings from every available source. When he learned that Jeanne Miller had files full of letters from people who had been victimized by clergy he contacted her and flew to Chicago read them. His wife Marianne, who had seen the same kinds of patients an
d was his partner in the exploration of sexuality in the Catholic world, accompanied him on the trip.
In Miller’s papers were letters from men and women of all walks of life, detailing everything from violent rapes committed by priests to longtime “marriages” to Catholic clergymen complete with children and grandchildren. “Those files provided validation of all that we had been learning in our practice,” recalled Sipe, many years later. “Hundreds of people had written to tell her about their experiences with priests, and what they said was remarkably consistent with what priests and bishops had been describing from their point of view.”
In fact, Catholic clergy tended to share complex and sometimes contradictory views of sex and celibacy that would have surprised laypeople, especially non-Catholics. While priests were supposed to abstain from all types of sex, a so-called “housekeeper syndrome” was widely discussed among bishops and priests who winked at ordained men who were obviously involved with women who worked in their parishes. Church leaders also made distinctions about age that varied from the civil law. While most states regarded anyone under sixteen or eighteen as a legal minor, the Church considered seven to be the “age of reason” and determined that a girl or boy could grant sexual consent somewhere between age twelve and fifteen. This kind of thinking provided the context for Milwaukee archbishop Weakland’s mixed statement on the sex abuse crisis, which he offered in an article published in 1988.
After explaining that abusive behavior is “rarely containable” and noting that offending priests should be removed from pastoral duties, Weakland spread the blame a little further. He warned that “we could easily give a false impression that any adolescent who becomes sexually involved with an older person does so without any degree of personal responsibility. Sometimes not all adolescent victims are so innocent; some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often quite streetwise.”
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 15
