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

by D'Antonio, Michael

  Instead of taking action, he would drink himself to sleep. When he woke up, he would be grateful to see another day.

  Doyle was finally forced to deal with his drinking problem one night when he went out to a nearby bar. As he headed home the state police saw his black Jeep Cherokee weaving down Indiana Highway 31 and gave chase. When the red lights of the cruiser flashed in Doyle’s rearview mirror he automatically took his foot off the gas, pressed the brake, and steered off the pavement.

  Doyle had been pulled over before, but this time was different. Instead of warning him and letting him go, the officers asked him to get out of the car. The alcohol on Doyle’s breath was enough to land him in the back of the patrol car. A tow truck was summoned to haul the Cherokee to an impound lot. Doyle was deposited at the Howard County Jail, where he spent the night locked up. In the morning he posted bail, called his office to report what had happened, and took a cab to get his Jeep. Unsure what to do, he went home. Moments after he arrived a car pulled up outside. It was Phil Fain, the senior chaplain at Grissom Air Force Base. Doyle was in the yard before Fain got out of his car.

  “Phil, I need help,” said Doyle.

  “We’re going to help,” answered Fain.

  The help came at a price. Doyle would be required to undergo a psychological evaluation and accept a formal letter of reprimand. That night he went to his first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in Kokomo. About fifty men and women attended the meeting, where a handful rose to talk about their struggles with sobriety and the conversation was filled with slogans—“Let go and let God”—and references to the Twelve Steps. At the end, the assembly stood, joined hands, and recited the Serenity Prayer. Doyle felt both inspired and completely alone. As he turned to leave, an elderly man offered his hand and said, “You’re in the right place.”

  The state of Indiana allowed Doyle to drive while his case was pending trial, but the Air Force required him to park outside the front gate at Grissom and walk onto the base. The shame he felt as his colleagues watched him walk to work was worse than the headaches, muscle aches, sweats, and sleeplessness that came as he suddenly stopped drinking. He went to AA meetings at lunchtime and after work and announced to Fain “for the first time in my life I think I’ve found God.”

  Doyle’s superior officers offered him a stint in residential rehabilitation. Doyle accepted and his base commander, Daniel Goddard, drove him the nine hours to a place called Guest House, in rural Minnesota, where Catholic clergy got sober with a combination of individual counseling, group therapy, diet, and exercise. Pushed to confront his own feelings, Doyle had to admit that he was furious with his superiors in the Church and deeply depressed by their response to the sexual abuse crisis. The rejected report to the bishops, Michael Peterson’s death, and the grief he encountered in victims of pedophile priests all flooded his mind.

  “I have to admit,” he finally told a counselor, “that I’m developing a real antipathy toward guys in miters.”

  Doyle felt divided, right down to his soul, by his work with lawyers for people suing the Church and his commitment to the priesthood and his Dominican order. Under canon law he was permitted to help Jeff Anderson and others. And Doyle was good at making himself look strong and certain as he defied bishops who insisted that he stop. But until he encountered this issue, he had been a man of the system, comfortable within a rigid, rule-based organization of rank and order. Now as the only active priest in the world willing to testify about the Church for sexual abuse victims, he felt isolated and insecure.

  Ironically enough, Doyle would find salvation in two places where rules and rank were of enormous importance. In the fellowship of AA, the rules required complete abstinence and a wholehearted commitment to the Twelve Steps. In the military, pay, privilege, and responsibility corresponded directly with rank. However, in both of these institutions the rules also guaranteed a certain equality and respect for conscience that allowed for a wide variation of opinion. This was especially true in the Air Force, where Doyle found that the rule of law and, ultimately, civilian oversight, prevented any general from acting like a pope.

  As an Air Force chaplain Doyle was paid by the government, not the Church, and with good performance he could climb in rank and pay grade. He also discovered among military officers a kind of open-mindedness that he never knew among fellow priests. A three-star general about to retire pulled Doyle aside and told him, “You need to know the Air Force is behind you.” He got similar encouragement, even after everyone found out about his time in rehab. Doyle’s only slip after his rehab visit occurred when he inadvertently drank wine from a chalice at communion. “I was distracted about something and wasn’t thinking,” he would recall. “Both times I called my sponsor, drank about a gallon of water, and headed right to the gym for a vigorous workout.”

  * * *

  Jeff Anderson had talked on the phone with Tom Doyle more than a dozen times, and Doyle always seemed alert and fully present. Meeting him in person for the first time at the VOCALink-up conference, Anderson had seen a relaxed and confident man. He seemed more like a friend from the old neighborhood in Edina than a priest or an Air Force officer. As they sat together in the hotel bar, Doyle cussed and swore and cracked jokes about bishops, and he seemed to hold his alcohol extremely well. Anderson had no idea that Doyle felt the hopelessness that would lead to dark nights of suicidal planning and roadside arrest.

  But then Anderson hadn’t faced his own drinking problem. Life had been too good for that. Thanks to Julie, Darrow was growing up nicely and renovations were progressing at the big house on the hill. The job was done floor by floor and took more than a year and half. With her husband traveling much of the time, the task of managing the work fell mostly on Julie, who welcomed the distraction from her growing worries about her husband. He couldn’t sleep at night unless he drank, and sometimes he didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out. Asleep, he would suffer from violent nightmares. In one recurring dream he drove his car at speeds in excess of a hundred miles per hour. Unable to see clearly as the car careened from side to side, he felt terrified that he might cause a fatal wreck, but was unable to stop.

  The dream was just a sleeping version of a waking fear that Anderson had set aside a hundred times or more as he left a bar or club and got in his car to drive home. When sober, he did worry about the possibility he might hurt someone or himself, and in truth an accident might have forced him to consider his drinking, but it never happened. Instead, he pressed his luck and somehow avoided disaster. The same dynamic governed his marriage. Anderson was so emotionally attached to his wife that the thought of losing her was almost impossible to consider. He couldn’t or wouldn’t stop partying, but he did make sure he came home when he said he would. When Julie was unable to contact him as he traveled, he would claim to have been with clients or say he was working overtime at hearings or depositions. On one morning Julie and Darrow sped to the airport before dawn to meet his overnight flight from Hawaii, only to discover he had never gotten on the plane.

  More than ten years younger than him, and plagued by her own insecurities, Julie Anderson tended to back down during conflicts and accepted her husband’s excuses rather than engage in a protracted debate with a man who could practically bend a jury to his will. Also, with the demands of motherhood she found a new focus for her attention. These responsibilities grew when Darrow was joined by twin brothers who arrived prematurely in February 1993. After weeks in the hospital Casey and Drew came home and absorbed much of their mother’s emotional energy. Doubts about her husband receded except when a new incident arose or she enjoyed a rare moment to herself. Then, while driving alone or wheeling a cart through the aisles of the local Cub Supermarket in the middle of the night, Julie found herself overwhelmed by doubts and fears.

  Few people outside the Andersons’ marriage had any reason to believe anything was wrong. In the early 1990s Jeff Anderson was one of the most famous attorneys in the Twin Cities. He appeared often in the nat
ional press, talking about clergy abuse, the reliability of memory, First Amendment issues, and the nuances of sexual abuse. He also published articles in legal journals and appeared as a panelist at national conferences on religion and the law. In 1992 Anderson faced off against the bishops’ lawyer Mark Chopko at a forum sponsored by the American Bar Association. With a hundred attorneys in the room Anderson all but issued a battle cry as he warned church officials who tried to hide abusive priests that, “We’re going to get you.”

  To keep up with the pace of travel, work, and play Anderson followed a demanding daily exercise regimen that included both running and muscle-building exercises. The workouts, combined with God-given hyperactivity, gave him an extraordinary capacity for work, but even an iron man has his limits. Anderson met his on a sunny summer day when he and Julie went to Bloomington to join a charity road race.

  The course covered ten kilometers, which was a distance the Andersons had run before quite comfortably. As he pinned on his number and moved toward the starting line with his wife, Jeff began to feel light-headed. Then, when the race officials called for the runners to get set, he suddenly dropped to the ground, convulsing in what seemed to be a seizure.

  Anderson blacked out for less than a minute, but his collapse caught everyone around him by surprise. Paramedics who were on duty for the race rushed to him. As he came to, they checked his pulse and blood pressure and then loaded him into an ambulance. At Fairview Southdale Hospital various tests, including brain imaging, found no cause. The physicians on duty talked about “anomalous seizures” that can occur when no underlying disease is present. In most cases patients return to their routines and never experience another attack.

  Watching the doctors struggle to find an explanation for her husband’s collapse, Julie Anderson had to wonder if she might know the answer. Jeff had consumed even more than his usual amount of alcohol the night before. When she got the chance, Julie pulled one of the doctors aside and quietly told him that her husband had drunk himself to sleep late the night before. She asked if that recent consumption, or perhaps his long-term habit, might have caused him to suddenly black out. “Wasn’t it possible?” she said in a near whisper. “Couldn’t drinking have something to do with it?”

  Faced with an alert, engaged patient who looked to be at the peak of health and who obviously functioned at a very high level, no one at the hospital seemed impressed by the fact that his wife thought he drank too much. Julie would try again, with a neurologist who handled her husband’s aftercare, but with the same result. None of the tests, including blood work that would have shown telltale liver problems, indicated Jeffrey Anderson was anything but healthy. Besides, all you had to do was look at the man—smiling, happy, and fit—and you could tell that he was in control of his life.

  * * *

  Jeff Anderson’s buoyant confidence reassured potential clients who came to him because his successes were widely publicized. Many appeared with complaints about priests who were known offenders and with a modest amount of work their accusations could be verified by documents or witnesses. A notable exception arose when two women who would be known as Jane Z. Doe and Jane G. Doe contacted Anderson in 1992. The women told stories of being abused by a priest named Gerald O’Keefe who had been the rector at the Cathedral of St. Paul. O’Keefe had since moved to Iowa where he was bishop of Davenport. The women, who said they were not acquainted, described events that were so similar that they seemed to corroborate each other. They each said the abuse occurred when they were between the ages of nine and twelve.

  Anderson didn’t think much about the fact that his two Jane Does saw the same psychiatrist. They both gave him permission to consult with her, and when he spoke to Diane Humenansky she said she believed both women. However, in a public statement Bishop O’Keefe denied the womens’ claims and said, “I will fight these accusations until a judge or jury publicly declares that I am innocent. I am not interested in settlement. I am interested in restoring my good name.”

  O’Keefe’s denial was firmly stated, but when he repeated it during his deposition Anderson wasn’t persuaded. With two victims offering similar stories he believed he was on solid ground. Then, in June 1993, local reporters rang the phone to say they had been called to a press conference by the archdiocese. There, O’Keefe’s attorney Patrick Schiltz, the same lawyer Anderson had surprised with a hot-off-the-press copy of the Minnesota delayed discovery bill, announced that one of Anderson’s clients had recanted her story.

  As Patrick Schiltz told reporters, one of the Jane Does had come to him and said she wanted to drop her claim. She blamed her psychiatrist for steering her to name O’Keefe as an abuser when she wasn’t truly certain of her memory. While the other Doe reaffirmed her claim, without a second victim her case would be difficult if not impossible to continue. At his press conference Schiltz was scathing in his criticism of Anderson, describing him as “the real villain” in the case. Weeks later he would back off this charge, describing Anderson as an important “pioneer” and shifted his ire to therapists and other lawyers who had created a “cottage industry of victimology who almost have an interest in seeing victims stay in that state.”

  The collapse of the case bewildered Anderson. He had believed both women and nothing that arose in the course of investigating the case led him to suspect a problem. However, in a matter of months several of Dr. Humenansky’s patients would file a lawsuit against her alleging she committed malpractice as she helped them remember episodes of sexual abuse. Years would pass before the resolution of the charges and Anderson would wind up advocating for one patient who said she had been mistreated by the psychiatrist. Before it was all over, insurers would pay millions of dollars in various lawsuits and Humenansky’s license would be suspended by state authorities. Anderson would become more intent in his review of the claims made by potential plaintiffs and more aggressive in probing for problems in their presentation and background. However, there was no way for him to ever guarantee the truthfulness of a client, and he ultimately had to accept that he had to believe them, and in that belief dwelled risk.

  Coming after years of humiliating scandal and costly settlements, the outcome of the O’Keefe cases came as a big relief to defenders of the Church. “We could give in to the temptation here and say, ‘Ha, ha, see there,’ but that’s a luxury we can’t afford,” confessed Archbishop John Roach. “We don’t want this to color in any way our responses to victims of abuse.” Roach could also find reason for restraint in the words of O’Keefe’s lawyer. Patrick Schiltz reminded the public that “we continue to see very few out-and-out false charges, where absolutely nothing happened.” He also worried, aloud, about the flood of abuse claims nationwide producing pushback on a grand scale.

  “As the pendulum swings, we are going from a time when victims weren’t believed to a time when they won’t be believed again,” said Schiltz. “Things are going so far there will be a backlash.”

  In fact, backlash sentiments had already been expressed. In February parents and alumni of the All-American Boys Chorus of Costa Mesa, California, rallied to support Fr. Richard T. Coughlin after he had been suspended in the wake of abuse allegations from five victims. Eventually Church leaders would find the charges credible enough to defrock him and pay more than $3 million in settlement. But at the time his defenders said, among other things, “He is a scapegoat for unhappy boys later in life.”

  In other cases around the country parishioners held vigils and mass meetings to show their support for priests who had been suspended after allegations they deemed incredible or malicious. In Palos Heights, Illinois, twelve hundred supporters of Fr. Patrick O’Leary protested in vain when he was removed from Incarnation Church because he was deemed by superiors to be “at risk of sexual misconduct.” In Boston, hundreds of letter writers accused the Globe newspaper of “anti-Catholicism” in its treatment of the James Porter case and Cardinal Law.

  In an appeal to the intellectual elite, Fr. Richard John Ne
uhaus spelled out a pro-Church defense in an article called “When Shepherds Go Astray.” A convert who became a priest, Neuhaus had founded First Things, a magazine that became a leading voice for conservative politics and religion. Published in the January 1993 issue of the journal, “When Shepherds Go Astray” included his description of the crisis as an expression of anti-Catholicism and feminism run amok. As Neuhaus saw it, the clergy abuse issue reflected a “mass hysteria” about sexual abuse evidenced in the McMartin day care case. It was also, he complained, the product of the “changing definition of sexual harassment and even rape promoted by some feminists.” Under these new definitions “the most innocent (as it used to be thought) erotic allusions … become a matter of criminal law.” The scandal was further inflated, he wrote, by a press that viewed Catholics as “threatening, if not as the declared enemy.”

  Neuhaus also took a swipe at Andrew Greeley, who had called the sex abuse issue the most serious crisis in the Church since the Reformation. Lumping Greeley in with Oprah and Geraldo, Neuhaus called his estimates of the abuse problem “hype [that] does not bear close examination.”

  While others might blame celibacy or sexual hypocrisy within the institution, Neuhaus found the roots of the abuse problem in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, “gay activism,” and in homosexuality in certain corners of the Church itself, which had taken on “a distinctly lavender hue.” The vast majority of clergy offenders were not committing crimes against little children, but against adolescents, he argued, as if this made the offenses a matter of sexual preference, not an abuse of trust. He applauded the Church for attempting to “put its house in order” by cracking down on homosexuality.