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

by D'Antonio, Michael

  For the media, the broad argument over memory offered an opportunity to speculate about the frightening prospects of innocent caretakers railroaded into prison by false testimony produced by unreliable, if sincere, witnesses. For people who claimed to have been abused by priests, the controversy made the pursuit of corroborating evidence even more essential. Here, the nature of sexual abuse actually favored victims. As many studies had shown, most offenders abuse a number of victims—Gilbert Gauthe admitted to more than a hundred—as they compulsively seek to replace those who grow older and cease to be attractive to them. This practice produces large numbers of potential witnesses who might come forward once an initial complaint is made and reported in the press. Jeff Anderson saw this dynamic play out in his first case of clergy abuse and in almost every one that followed. The American public got a sense of this process when Frank Fitzpatrick served the role of first reporter against James R. Porter, a priest who had molested him when he was a ten- or eleven-year-old boy in Massachusetts.

  A private investigator, Fitzpatrick had put what happened to him out of his mind until 1989 when, at age thirty-nine, he was flooded with memories. Using his professional skills, he tracked down Porter, who had left the priesthood, married, and settled in Minnesota. In telephone conversations that Fitzpatrick recorded, Porter confessed that he had molested many children. When Fitzpatrick asked if Porter recalled “me in particular” the former priest answered, “No, I don’t remember names.” Fitzpatrick noted that Porter had traumatized the children he molested. Porter replied:

  I don’t take it lightly. God Almighty, it can make you sick. If I keep dwelling on it, I’d go crazy. So what I have done, is I have just invented my life as best I can, and tried to live in a Christian, Catholic way. It’s been marvelous, how I’ve had no difficulty whatsoever.

  After he obtained Porter’s confession, Fitzpatrick placed an advertisement in Massachusetts newspapers—the headline read “Remember Father Porter?”—asking for other victims to contact him. He heard from eight others who said that Porter had raped or molested them when they were children. With some more digging Fitzpatrick discovered that Church officials had known that Porter was molesting children in the 1960s. After parents complained he was sent to a Servants of the Paraclete psychiatric center in New Mexico, where he was treated for this problem. Even during his treatment, Porter acted as a priest in New Mexico. Upon his release Porter returned to ministry in Bemidji, Minnesota. No parish where he worked was ever informed of his past.

  In late 1990 Fitzpatrick went public with what he discovered, speaking first at a forum in Rhode Island and then to the press. Soon he was represented by Boston-based attorney Roderick MacLeish Jr. Within a year, nearly fifty people would join a lawsuit MacLeish filed against the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, where Porter had been posted. MacLeish’s filing was followed by a similar one Jeffrey Anderson filed with a co-counsel in New Mexico, where Porter had molested children while being treated by the Servants of the Paraclete. Anderson also sued in Minnesota where seven men, most former altar boys, claimed Porter had molested them when he worked in Bemidji.

  In Porter, Anderson and the other lawyers were dealing with the first priest in the brief history of the scandal who actually admitted from the start that he was a serial pedophile. For victims who tracked the issue, Porter affirmed what they had been saying about the way the Church mishandled complaints. In Chicago, SNAP founder Barbara Blaine heard about a press conference Anderson planned and got it in her mind that she wanted to attend to support the victims who had decided to speak out. After dinner was served and residents of the Worker House began to settle in for the night, she asked a woman on the staff if she would drive with her to St. Paul. Helen O’Neil, who had come from Great Britain to work at the Chicago house, agreed and the two women set off on the seven-hour drive.

  As they drove and looked out over the darkened rural landscape, O’Neil and Blaine talked about the problem of sexual abuse and how it could erode a victim’s self-confidence, and ability to trust others. O’Neil had had some troubling experience with abuse that she intended to leave behind when she moved to the States. However, when Blaine told her about SNAP she felt called to help. So much for escaping the issue. As the sky began to lighten, Blaine and O’Neil pulled into a highway rest area to park the car and nap. When they awoke they found a hotel where they used a lobby restroom to wash up and change clothes. Then they got back on the road.

  In St. Paul the two women found the site for the press conference, followed the crowd of reporters inside, and stood in the back to listen. Watching Anderson, Blaine thought his expensive suits and well-styled hair made him look a little too slick. But he seemed to understand the way the Church handled abuse cases, emphasizing damage control over care for victims, and she could tell by the way Anderson’s voice wavered as he discussed his clients that his concern for victims was heartfelt. The men who spoke at the event recalled how Porter had won their confidence and then exploited it.

  After the press conference Blaine spoke to the victims, some of whom had cried before the television cameras. She told them she thought they were brave and she was grateful that they were speaking publicly, because few did. She told them about SNAP and offered her support. She then fell into a conversation with a television producer. As they talked about James Porter and the fact that he lived nearby, the producer and Blaine decided to drive to his home to see if he would talk on camera.

  Oakdale, Minnesota, was a fifteen-minute drive from downtown St. Paul. Porter lived in an ordinary subdivision of neat houses with carefully trimmed lawns. Blaine and the television crew found his home, circled the block, and then stopped in front of it. With a cameraman recording them, they knocked on the door. When it opened a boy, Porter’s son, stood shyly and explained that his father wasn’t home. Looking over his shoulder, Blaine could see James Porter’s reflection in a mirror. He was standing behind the door. She chose not to say anything about what she saw. Instead, she said, “If your dad touches you it’s wrong, and it’s okay to tell.”

  When the door closed, Blaine and the TV crew walked back to their vehicles and she told them what she saw. She and Helen decided to walk up and down the street to knock on doors and explain to Porter’s neighbors, “You have a child molester living here.” Before they departed they drove past Porter’s home again and caught sight of him in the backyard. He may have been hanging laundry. He may have been pretending to hang laundry while looking out for trespassers. Either way, Blaine thought she might have caught his eye.

  In a matter of months James Porter would become the public face of the national clergy abuse crisis. As roughly two hundred victims came forward he would be featured on an ABC television network news program and vilified in the print media. The Boston Globe would reveal how Church officials, including Pope Paul VI, knew of Porter’s criminal tendencies, if not his specific crimes, in the 1960s and 1970s. Porter even confessed to his offenses in documents he sent to the Pope as part of his request to leave the priesthood. “I used my collar as a sword and a shield,” he wrote.

  When Boston’s Cardinal Law first spoke of the scandal he acknowledged the betrayal Porter had practiced, but added that the Church should “respond both to victim and betrayer in truth, in love and reconciliation.” Ten days later Law would announce, “I’m absolutely fed up with the media coverage of this case of twenty-five years ago.” Insisting that the press overplayed the story while ignoring the positive work of the Church he added, “By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.” If God responded to Law’s call, it wasn’t apparent to anyone in New England, where the Porter case filled the airwaves and dominated the front pages of local newspapers.

  * * *

  With Frank Fitzpatrick’s investigation of James Porter, a victim had managed to turn the tables on a perpetrator by capturing his confession. But while Fitzpatrick’s dramatic actions brought a surge of publicity to the cause of abuse victims, a le
ss noted development would have a much greater effect on the larger confrontation between the Catholic Church and the law. In this case, Jeffrey Anderson had gone back to court with a new complaint against Fr. Thomas Adamson and included claims for punitive damages on the grounds that the dioceses of St. Paul and Winona had committed both fraud and reckless negligence. Coming in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Smith decision, the trial would be the first in which the First Amendment offered scant protection to bishops who might claim that all of their activities were religious in nature.

  The plaintiff in this landmark trial was the John Doe who had come to Anderson about Fr. Adamson after Greg Lyman settled his case. Doe had recounted years of abuse, beginning at age thirteen. On some days, he said, Fr. Adamson had violated him as many as six different times. In the suit Anderson would argue that this victimization had contributed substantially to addictions and other mental health problems that had plagued Doe into adulthood and made his outlook for the future terribly bleak. To date he had been unable to secure a job or a home for more than a few months at a time.

  Doe’s personal problems made him a difficult client, but he was also one of the most determined young men Anderson had ever met. From the start he wanted to make Church officials disclose everything they did, and failed to do, about Adamson in the years leading up to his abuse. Toward that end, he authorized Anderson to reject every settlement offer that came along and force the bishops of St. Paul and Winona into an actual trial. In the months leading up to trial, Church lawyers offered various amounts of cash, hoping to settle the case. By the fall of 1990 the offer reached the $1 million mark. Anderson agreed with Doe’s decision to reject it.

  The hard negotiating stance, which began as a matter of principle, gradually became something more. As Anderson mined documents for leads and deposed witnesses he found facts that were never discovered in the Lyman case. The most important new evidence showed that a lower-ranking bishop in St. Paul named Robert Carlson had repeatedly warned Archbishop John Roach about Adamson’s relationships with boys. Bishop Carlson had clearly wanted Adamson barred from any work that might bring him into contact with young people, and had been frustrated by Roach’s reluctance to act more decisively.

  Other documents noted the names of nuns who worked with Adamson and suspected he was sexually abusing children, and made their concerns known to higher-ups who did little in response. In her deposition Sr. Patrice Neuberger testified that she was not the first to warn bishops about Adamson and she had been assured that “something will be done.” Nothing was done, and John Doe was subsequently violated by Fr. Adamson.

  Finally Anderson discovered that a psychiatrist chosen to treat Adamson had concluded that he didn’t have to report Adamson’s sexual contact with adolescents to criminal authorities because higher Church authorities were already “aware of it.” A devout Catholic, Joseph Gendron, M.D., was one of two experts Archbishop Roach relied upon to manage Adamson, even though he had no special training in sexual abuse or pedophilia. The other was a priest who was also a psychologist. Both men seemed to place their loyalty to the Church above their responsibility to safeguard the community.

  Altogether, the evidence showed that officials in two dioceses had received repeated warnings about Adamson over more than two decades and yet failed to keep him away from children. For Anderson the pattern met the standard to claim that Church officials were guilty of “reckless disregard” and “willful indifference” negligence in the supervision of Adamson and fraud in their relationship with parishioners who trusted that the Church was a safe place for children. These claims raised the stakes in the case to the point where the jury could award punitive damages, well in excess of the amount that would compensate Doe for his losses.

  No Church officials had ever paid punitive damages for negligence. If Anderson succeeded in winning them in this case, it would establish that bishops were direct supervisors, responsible for their priests, and liable for how they managed them. This precedent would open the door to multimillion-dollar verdicts across the country. As the trial date approached and their offers of a settlement were rejected time and again, the legal team for the Church added a new member to manage the trial itself.

  Theodore “Ted” Collins was a committed Catholic who had attended seminary as a teenager but gave up his dream of becoming a priest because he couldn’t accept celibacy—he referred to it as “putting on the tin underpants”—and the regimentation of clerical life. In adulthood he attended Mass more than once a week, and was certain, in his soul, that despite its problems the Roman Catholic Church was perhaps the greatest source of goodness in the world. It deserved a vigorous defense.

  As a lawyer, Collins owned the respect of his peers. Gifted at argument and examining witnesses, he loved appearing before judges and juries and he had extensive experience as both a defense lawyer and a prosecutor. In the 1970s he was frequently tapped to help the government with key cases, including the prosecution of cop killers and the teenager who bombed a Dayton’s department store in 1970 as an act of political protest.

  Coming late to the case, Collins was struck by the naive way the bishops had responded to Thomas Adamson’s crimes. Threatened by scandal, they had thought they could quietly manage the case and preserve the image of the Church. Then, in depositions, they were trapped by their own words as they struggled to reconcile their duties as moral leaders and shepherds with their actions. Looking ahead to the trial, he knew how Jeffrey Anderson could cite the Church’s own documents to suggest negligence and turn Carlson, Roach, and Watters into his star witnesses to prove the claim. That was the way he would try the case, if he were on the other side.

  * * *

  John Doe’s case, John Doe 76C v. Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and Diocese of Winona was heard in a small, redbrick county courthouse in the small town of Anoka. In the pretrial jury selection process both sides tried to exclude men and women who may have leaned against their positions. In the process they wound up asking potential jurors about their religious backgrounds, educations, and whether they watched Oprah or Donahue and how those programs may have influenced their thinking about sexual abuse. The cultural significance of talk shows was revealed when a lawyer, unable to recall a host’s name, asked, “What’s the lady’s name that lost the weight?” and prospective juror number one hundred and fifteen immediately replied, “Oprah Winfrey.” The same juror noted she had seen Jeffrey Anderson on a television news program. “I remember his smile,” she explained.

  The trial, which ran from November 3 to December 8, 1990, marked only the third time a civil complaint against a Catholic priest had gone before a judge and jury. As the local media descended upon the courthouse, TV vans lined the street outside and telescoping masts were raised to transmit reports. Inside, the first row of the public gallery filled up with reporters who sat with notebooks and pens.

  The facts of the crimes were not much in dispute. From the start Adamson admitted he had molested Doe and the two dioceses accepted some responsibility. The battle would be fought over how to measure the harm done, apportion the blame, and determine whether punitive damages would be paid. Anderson would press the point that the bishops were guilty of willful indifference because their cover-up had endangered the children whom Adamson attacked. Why hadn’t they acted to stop Adamson when they first heard a complaint? Why hadn’t they ministered to the victim and his family as if they were pastors?

  In pretrial hearings, Judge Phyllis Jones ruled in favor of the defense on the majority of the motions, including its request to tell the jury about abortions obtained by more than one of John Doe’s adult sexual partners. As one defense lawyer explained, the point he wanted to make was that the priest’s victim had problems with “sexual compulsivity” and problems with “responsibility” that might mitigate his client’s responsibility. Anderson, while noting that the issue of abortion “is explosive,” failed to have the record kept out of evidence. In the same pretrial process the jud
ge barred many of Anderson’s more powerful exhibits, including testimony from a witness who said a bishop had refused to confront Adamson after complaints by saying “little boys heal.”

  Twenty years later, Anderson’s frustration with Judge Jones remained fresh. He recalled that at one point when the judge ruled against him and then announced a recess for lunch, Anderson rose to challenge the lunch break. “I said, ‘Judge, the decision you just made is so erroneous, we have to have everything on the record.’” When she brushed him off, Anderson then spoke directly to the court reporter telling her “You’re staying.” Jones reminded Anderson that the reporter worked for her and the argument ended as both women departed.

  When the evidence issues were finally settled, Anderson used his opening statement to explain to the jury that “this is not a case against Fr. Thomas Adamson. This is a case against those in the Church who had the power, who had the ability to prevent this from ever happening. For it was they who placed Fr. Adamson at that location, in that position of power and of trust, with knowledge that he had abused boys in the past.”