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

by D'Antonio, Michael

  Barred from working as a priest, Adamson had fled Minnesota for a small town in Wisconsin where he worked as a hotel clerk. When Lyman learned where he was, he told Annette that one day he would travel to Wisconsin and kill him. She didn’t take him seriously until he went out one morning and didn’t come back.

  Adamson’s new home was close to the city of Eau Claire. Lyman went there, got a room in a motel, and started drinking. After writing a note that that included the lines “he has to die” and “unfortunately, with his death will come mine,” Greg went to a K-mart store where a clerk refused to sell him a shotgun and a box of shells. His next stop was a downtown tavern called The Wig Wam, which occupied a two-story, redbrick building three blocks east of the river that cuts the city in two. He was thoroughly drunk when local police arrived to question him. Customers in the tavern said he had been talking about Adamson and what he planned to do. When they searched Lyman’s Camaro the police found an eight-inch hunting knife and a baseball bat. In his motel room they discovered the note. It was at that moment that they arrested him.

  The Eau Claire officers had been alerted by a call from the police in St. Paul, who relayed a warning they had received from Lyman’s girlfriend Annette. When Greg went missing she told them about his threats. She didn’t think he was capable of hurting anyone but she was worried that he might find some other sort of trouble. “He never really recovered,” she said about the abuse he had experienced. “There’s been a lot of pain.”

  Local lawyers helped Greg Lyman persuade a judge that he never would have followed through on his threats. The original charge, attempted homicide, was reduced to attempted battery. Lyman was permitted to plead guilty, sentenced to three years’ probation, and barred from returning to the state during this period. At the time Lyman thought he had manipulated his attorneys, the prosecutor, and the judge into giving him what he wanted. Many years would pass before he would realize that in this moment of crisis he had talked himself out of what he really needed: placement in a psychiatric facility.

  12. AN ATTITUDE OF RESISTANCE

  After the complaints brought by John Doe and Frank Fitzpatrick, the threat that the Catholic Church faced in the problem of clergy who abused children was clear. In the Doe case Judge Phyllis Jones, with the backing of the Minnesota Supreme Court, had established that abusive priests were like exploding hatchback cars and their bishops bore some responsibility for the damage they did if they let them loose on an unsuspecting public. Fitzpatrick, with his knack for investigation, organization, and public relations, had shown how the exposure of a single sexual predator could create a truly national scandal.

  First told in New England and Minnesota, the James Porter story become the subject of a July 1992 exposé on the ABC network television program Prime Time Live and the focus of intense national press coverage. Landmarks in the case, including Porter’s September 1992 arrest and incarceration in Minnesota and later prosecution in Massachusetts, brought opportunities for newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters to review the entire tortured history of the case. Days after the report aired, the victims support group SNAP held one of its weekend sessions in Boston. Organizers Barbara Blaine and Helen O’Neil found themselves surrounded by reporters as they arrived at the local Catholic Worker house in the South End neighborhood. In the summer of 1992 the local media’s appetite for the story was so intense that Blaine and O’Neil awoke at the house the next morning to find TV crews camped in the front hallway. After crawling out of her sleeping bag, Blaine trundled to the bathroom in her pajamas where she showered and dressed before being interviewed under bright TV lights.

  At the conference, which was held at Boston University, Blaine, O’Neil, and a SNAP leader named David Clohessy met victims from across New England. Many had decided to speak about being abused by priests after they read or watched news accounts featuring Frank Fitzpatrick and James Porter. As the number of his named victims had passed fifty, Porter made things even worse for the Church by answering questions from journalists and even admitting, before TV cameras, that he had lost track of the number of children he had raped or molested.

  In Massachusetts, lawyers representing Porter’s victims were boxed in by an unusual law that protected charitable institutions like Churches from suits that might ruin them financially. This so-called “charitable immunity” capped the amount an individual could receive in a lawsuit at $20,000. Noting this limit, editorial writers at The Boston Globe called on the Church to do more to police its priests and care for victims. A good start, added the Globe, could be found in the Peterson-Doyle-Mouton report of 1985. Specifically, the paper called for creation of a national crisis team, as that report recommended, which would intervene whenever abuse cases arose.

  At the height of the outcry over the Porter case, several polling organizations tested Catholic opinion and confirmed a growing separation between the views of laypeople and church leaders. Time magazine found that more than 60 percent of everyday Catholics believed priests should be allowed to marry and that women should be eligible for ordination. The Gallup poll found even greater support for women priests and that more than 70 percent wanted priests and laypeople to get involved in the selection of bishops. Gallup also found that Catholics were not much different from their fellow Americans on the matter of abortion, with 45 percent supporting general access to the procedure during the first trimester of pregnancy, compared with 47 percent for all respondents. Only 17 percent said adults should follow all the dictates of the Church when it came to sex and reproduction.

  Of course, Churches are not ruled by public opinion polls. Indeed, they often stand as defenders of eternal truths and bulwarks against moral fads. And in every era the hierarchs of the Catholic Church had faced the challenge of separating ideas that offered valid new understanding and passing trends. Historically this sorting-out required years, decades, and even centuries. Almost three hundred years would pass before Galileo, declared a heretic after he said the Earth was not the center of the universe, would be fully exonerated by the Church. During that period, all of civilization moved toward Galileo’s science and Rome’s credibility suffered.

  In the modern age of instant worldwide communication and a global hunger for democracy and individual rights, the Church faced continuing pressure from science and an overall resistance to centralized authority, whether it was wielded in Moscow, Washington, or Rome. An ordinary American of the late twentieth century could know more about what was happening in the wider world than the most informed experts in previous generations. And as the polls indicated, they considered themselves rather autonomous when it came to moral issues, great and small.

  This attitude of independence was not confined to the United States. In the early 1990s it arose in Ireland, which was the most important bastion of Catholicism outside of the Vatican itself. (This was Pope Paul VI’s description of the country in 1978.) The flashpoint of Irish skepticism came in 1992 when a court, following laws supported by the Church, prevented a fourteen-year-old rape victim from having an abortion in Great Britain. The Irish Supreme Court overturned the decision in early 1992.

  Months later the press revealed that a prominent bishop named Eamon Casey had fathered a child with an American woman and used Church funds to support them in the United States. The episode energized a national movement to separate Church and state in Ireland, where the two were more intertwined than in any place in Europe. It also focused attention on the sexual ethics of Church leaders. As one Irish sociologist noted at the time, the Irish public wasn’t concerned as much about Casey’s sexual behavior as it was about “hypocrisy about parenthood, about the way a man treats a woman and a child.”

  After Casey resigned, America’s bishops put the status of women and sexual abuse committed by priests at the top of their agenda when they met at Notre Dame University in South Bend. The bishops had spent nine years working on a statement—called a pastoral letter—outlining their views on women in the Church. According to one Jes
uit scholar, who was expelled from the Church for publishing his data, 40 percent of the bishops had come to support the ordination of women as deacons and 14 percent thought they should be allowed to become priests. These figures represented an increase of more than 40 percent since 1985, and a significant divergence from the Pope’s position. At Notre Dame this divergence helped to stall progress on the document.

  The bishops used a closed-door session to consider the sex abuse crisis and afterward the president of the conference called for a prompt response to complaints, compliance with civil law, removal of an accused priest—“if evidence is sufficient”—and help for victims and their families. As individuals, bishops had been asking the Vatican to streamline the canon law process for dealing with abuse cases and give them more tools with which to act. However, as a group they had not been assertive. In 1989 an executive committee had recommended immediate treatment for those involved in abuse cases but did not address the criminal aspects of abuse. The committee also attempted to deflect attention by noting that parents and stepparents were more likely to abuse children than priests. The truth of this claim was subject to debate, and the impulse to state it made the bishops seem insensitive.

  After the bishops’ private discussion, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati struck a more pastoral tone as he spoke of the “pain and the hurt” caused by priests who broke their vows with minors, and promised to “break this cycle of abuse.” But he also modified his apology by noting, “Until recently, few in society and the Church understood the problem [of sexual abuse] well.”

  If by “until recently” the bishop meant until the late 1970s, he was mostly correct. Until then, few experts understood the scope of the incidence of sexual abuse or the persistence and power of the compulsions that drove most sex offenders. However, it was also fair to say that since Doyle, Mouton, and Peterson distributed their report in 1985, no bishop or diocese could claim to be unaware of the breadth and depth of the problem among Catholic priests.

  The bishops approached the acts committed by priests and the scandal control practiced by higher officials within a framework of sin rather than crime. Instead of punishment for pedophile priests, Pilarczyk spoke of “healing and reconciliation” as if the Church could serve both the victims and perpetrators equally. This thought was consistent with Catholic theology, which emphasized the commonality of sin and forgiveness for all, and considered the salvation of the soul the Church’s main purpose. It also reflected past practices in many jurisdictions where police and prosecutors had allowed the Church to handle complaints against priests internally. If victims didn’t insist on charges being brought, cases would be dropped as offenders were transferred and bishops counseled forgiveness.

  But just as the bishops considered the sex abuse crisis through the lens of their theology, victims of abuse weighed the Church’s response against their own experience. Barbara Blaine heard in Pilarczyk’s statement an echo of the bishop in Toledo who asked her to attend counseling sessions with the man who stole her adolescence. In her eyes, statements like these meant the hierarchy was equivocating, manipulating, and evading. For Jeanne Miller, however, Pilarczyk’s apologetic commitment to act was cause for real optimism. Miller still believed in the Church and expected some top officials to become her allies. She was already building bridges to them, and with the first national gathering of VOCALink-up set for the fall of 1992 she hoped true reform was in reach.

  The list of speakers Miller recruited for the conference amounted to a Who’s Who in the world of clergy sex abuse. Besides Jeff Anderson, who would address the legal issues, Miller lined up Thomas Doyle, Richard Sipe, Andrew Greeley, and Jason Berry. Berry had continued to write about the Church and sexual abuse for newspapers across America, investigating cases from coast to coast. Along the way he wrote a book that was rejected by thirty publishers until Greeley sent it to a friend at Doubleday. In late summer of 1992, Doubleday’s publication of Lead Us Not Into Temptation provided readers the first comprehensive account of the crisis to date. The book established Berry as an independent authority and a truly authoritative source for journalists and TV talk show hosts.

  Berry was an appealing expert because he operated outside the institutional Church and had no personal links to the problem of sexual abuse. However, he was hardly a disinterested observer. Catholicism was a foundational part of his identity. His first daughter Simonette had been baptized in the Church shortly after her birth in 1984 and when his second child Ariel arrived in 1991 she was baptized too. Born with Down’s syndrome, Ariel brought some special challenges for her parents, including a sobering diagnosis of a pulmonary defect that was certain to shorten her life. As Berry absorbed the realities of Ariel’s condition he found himself drawn closer to God, praying for her survival when he attended Mass at his neighborhood parish.

  Both a Catholic and an investigative reporter, Berry dealt with many of the most painful aspects of the abuse crisis every day. Lawyers sent depositions that were filled with the awful sexual secrets of the priesthood and victims telephoned with even more disturbing accounts of their victimization as children and the aftereffects of the trauma. “I felt a lot of anger over the hypocrisy,” he would later recall. But at the same time he knew many priests and nuns who lived out the higher aspiration of the Church and offered their prayers and support to him and Ariel. Their example of Christianity, as well as supportive friends and psychotherapy, helped him carry on. Believing the Church belonged to him as much as it belonged to anyone, he refused to give up on it.

  Because they held out hope for change in the Church, Berry and the others didn’t blanch when Jeanne Miller told them she hoped that Chicago’s Cardinal Bernardin would also speak at the conference. Miller had been meeting Bernardin in private, at his mansion, over the course of a couple of years. In that time she had explained how she had felt more betrayed by the diocese’s defensive response to her complaint than she was by Fr. Mayer’s behavior with her son. While diocesan officials had deflected Miller’s complaints, Mayer had gone on to molest other children. He was removed from his post as a pastor in 1991 only after a thirteen-year-old girl complained about him touching her.

  On the day after the girl’s complaint became public, Cardinal Bernardin appointed a three-person panel, which included a retired judge and a social services expert, to review personnel files and the way complaints about priests in Chicago were handled. This panel found fifty-nine priests had been accused to sexual crimes. In the summer of 1992 Bernardin announced that six of these priests had been removed from parish duties and eight more were in the process of being removed. He set up a telephone hotline for abuse complaints and finally, in the summer of 1992, agreed to address the first VOCALink-up conference at a hotel in the suburb of Arlington.

  Despite the archdiocese’s stumbles on Mayer and other cases, no top-ranking member of the hierarchy had done more to address the abuse issue than Bernardin. Unlike Boston’s Cardinal Law, who had flushed with anger at The Boston Globe, Bernadin spoke in humble terms, noting “mistakes for which I am truly sorry.” Then, two months before the VOCALink-Up conference, Bernardin established a permanent panel of five laypeople and three priests who would review complaints and report to him alone. He also volunteered to name a board of overseers who would be required to report complaints to child welfare authorities, and agreed that any priest found to have abused a child would be barred for the rest of his life from any work that might bring him into contact with children.

  Bernardin’s plan was in part a response to criticism from Cook County state’s attorney Jack O’Malley. In the midst of a reelection campaign, O’Malley had attacked the Church for using constitutional arguments (freedom of religion) to resist cooperating with authorities on criminal matters. When it was announced, O’Malley welcomed Bernardin’s review board as a step in the right direction. However, Jeanne Miller believed Bernardin was trying to construct a system that he could control in the way that bishops had historically control
led the resolutions of complaints. “There’s still a real duplicity there,” she told the Chicago press. “I think it’s a prettier version of the same thing.”

  In politics they would say Jeanne Miller’s tough talk “played well” with her “base” of support in VOCALink-Up. It did not play well with Bernardin, who immediately broke his commitment to attend the conference. When Miller called his home to ask if he would discuss the matter, the nuns who answered were as friendly as ever, but after they checked to see if he would take Miller’s call they came back with an apology. The cardinal wasn’t available and they didn’t know when he would be.

  * * *

  Among the three hundred people who filled the ballroom at the Arlington Hilton for the VOCALink-Up convention were some who worried about good priests who would suffer by association with the abuse crisis. Others believed that Bernardin’s change of heart was a sign that the hierarchy would never give up its elevated status. Thomas Doyle had concluded as much because of the tough tactics lawyers for the archdiocese had employed when he was deposed as an expert witness for a thirteen-year-old boy who said he was abused by a priest at age seven. The deposition was adversarial from the start. Years later Doyle recalled:

  The lawyer for the archdiocese asked me the same question for about the eighth time and I said to her, “No matter how many times you ask me that I’m going to give you the same answer. Don’t you understand English?”