In the Bernardin case, the Vatican indulged in immediate hyperbole, with the Holy See’s official radio station declaring Cook’s suit “Filthy, worthy only of disdain.” The station also observed that “accusations of this kind” are, at times, aimed at American priests “in order to receive compensation money.” In Minneapolis, Archbishop John Roach, who had dealt with dozens of verified claims against priests, observed that “There is something rotten about all of this.” In Baltimore, Archbishop William Keeler criticized members of the press, whom he claimed valued being first with a scoop above “accurate reporting.”
The case also renewed the battle over memory. By sheer coincidence, about a hundred and thirty members of the Midwest chapter of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation met in the Chicago area on the day after Steven Cook’s complaint was lodged. Outside the Des Plaines community center where they had gathered, a handful of picketers protested that the FMSF was “an advocacy group for perpetrators.” Inside, people who had been accused of committing sexual abuse heard a psychologist from Tucson compare the ongoing wave of abuse cases to a witch hunt.
“We did this same thing four hundred and five hundred years ago,” said Dr. Paul Simpson. “It’s the same, in as much as the accused only have one of two options. It’s either you’re guilty or you’re in denial.” Simpson insisted “there is no solid, scientific, qualitative evidence” to support the idea that traumatic memories may be repressed, and criticized hypnosis and other therapeutic techniques used by some psychotherapists whose patients claimed to have suddenly remembered incidents in the past.
Hypnosis was a factor in Steven Cook’s claim. A longtime drug abuser, Cook had gotten sober after being arrested and had relied on counseling to steady his life. In sessions with a therapist who used hypnosis he talked about his high school years and experiences with Fr. Ellis Harsham. He described using drugs and alcohol with the priest, who showed him pornography and, according to the complaint, “repeatedly and continually sexually abused” him “at St. Gregory’s Seminary and in other locations.” Cook also claimed to recall being brought to the archbishop’s quarters by Harsham, where he was then sexually abused by Bernardin.
Coincidentally, Cook’s suit had been filed as the CNN news network prepared to air a special report on the clergy abuse scandal and he gave correspondent Bonnie Anderson an exclusive interview. In bits of this interview broadcast on the day the case became public, he described how Bernardin had allegedly raped him when he was a high school student and he recounted the effects of the trauma inflicted by Harsham and Bernardin. “It shatters your world,” he said. “It shatters your soul. It shatters your life.” Cook followed these comments by answering a few of the questions posed by reporters who tracked him down in Philadelphia. Although he then stopped talking, the press continued to call and staked out his home.
As often happened when charges are made public, others contacted attorneys and reporters to say they had been abused. Several men made claims against Harsham, and within a year Church officials would find the evidence sufficient to place him on administrative leave. In the case of Bernardin, no further public claims emerged. Instead, reporters found court records showing that in 1984 Cook had spoken about being abused by “priests,” which gave the cardinal’s supporters an opening to challenge the idea that his recollections of Bernardin were recent. As the press dug deeper into Cook’s claim, the nature of memory became a pressing issue. Ten days after the news broke a piece in the Chicago Tribune compared Cook’s testimony to the “spectral evidence” of the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century.
The witch trial comparison was amplified by Time magazine, which featured a long cover story reassessing Freudian psychology accompanied by a sidebar titled “Repressed Memory Therapy: Lies of the Mind.” The piece presented instances where people felt that therapists had led them to make false accusations and made a forceful case against the existence of ritual abuse. However, it also included unsubstantiated claims that accusations of incest had reached “epidemic proportions.” If such an epidemic existed, it had not been identified by lawyers, therapists, or public health experts.
Time made no mention of any falsely accused priests and attorneys on all sides of the Catholic scandal said that false claims were almost nonexistent in clergy cases. (“The vast majority of those accused of this stuff are guilty,” said Patrick J. Schiltz.) However, all the publicity devoted to the issue of memory inevitably affected perceptions of the Bernardin and Cook case. As skeptical reporters dug into Steven Cook’s past to reveal him as a troubled man, Cardinal Bernardin took the high road, saying “my heart goes out to” Cook and announcing, “I have a great desire to meet him. I want to pray with him and comfort him.” An editorial in The Wall Street Journal titled “Trial By Accusation” leveraged the Bernardin case to complain that rape and sexual abuse “have been politically anointed and given special weight” and to argue that legal “mills” were turning out abuse claims because they were “financially rewarding.”
With deft construction, the Journal and others used Cook and Bernardin to propel a broader argument about gender politics. Greed was cited as a motivator for many of the complainants and their lawyers came in for their share of criticism for clogging the courts with suits that lacked real merit. The individuals who alleged crimes were painted as maladapted whiners.
These arguments were fueled by the same energy that motivated a larger conservative response to decades of social change. Spelled out most clearly by writer Charles Krauthammer in a 1993 essay called “Defining Deviancy Up,” this thesis revolved around the central complaint that normal behavior had been erroneously transformed into something objectionable if not illegal. The terrible result, in Krauthammer’s mind, was that people became “exquisitely oversensitized” to child abuse and sexual “behavior that had long been viewed as normal” had been redefined as abusive. To Krauthammer and his allies, all the concern for people (mainly women and children) who were being exploited was overblown and unreasonable standards were being applied to the behavior of bosses, authorities, and men in general. The resulting decline in respect for powerful institutions like the Church, and their leaders, was something to grieve and, if possible, repair.
* * *
Two months after the claim was made against Bernardin, the press in Chicago reported that Cook’s own lawyer, Stephen Rubino, had doubts about his memories. In a letter Rubino sent to Church officials, which was subsequently filed with the court, he wrote, “I am gravely concerned with his inability to remember some of the specifics of his visit when he was a junior in high school to the private quarters of Cardinal Bernadin.”
Three months after the claim, Bernardin’s lawyers uncovered problems with the therapist Cook was seeing when he recalled the alleged abuse. It turned out that Michele Moul was not licensed and had graduated from an unaccredited psychology program. The cardinal’s lawyers said they would challenge her methods, arguing they did not meet the standards required by the courts. If they prevailed, which was likely, Cook’s claim would be dismissed.
The reports on Cook’s case, and mounting editorial support for the cardinal, would have made many observers doubt the conflict would ever get before a judge. Watching from afar, other victims of abusive priests shuddered at the prospect of the most high-profile claim falling apart and damaging their effort to be recognized and change the way the Church responded to claims. And then, it did.
On February 28, 1994, one hundred and eight days after news of his claim against Bernardin echoed around the world, Steven Cook withdrew his suit explaining to the court that he could “no longer be sure that his memories of abuse by the cardinal are true or accurate.” In interviews Cook said, “If I knew at the time I filed the lawsuit what I know now, I would never have sued Cardinal Bernardin.”
Cook’s announcement took the pressure off Bernardin. However, he did not withdraw the charges he had leveled against Ellis Harsham. And contrary to press reports on his decision, Cook
did not actually “recant” his claim. Rather, he said that he was no longer certain of his memory.
“I filed the lawsuit against Cardinal Bernardin because I had vivid memories of abuse which I believed to be true,” Cook said. Before deciding to sue, added Cook, he had taken two polygraph exams to test his memory. However, the confidence he felt after passing those tests faded as the weeks passed. “I now realize,” he explained, “that the memories which arose during and after hypnosis are unreliable.”
An hour after Cook spoke, Bernardin walked into a hastily called press conference in the same room where he first talked publicly about the case. Those who attended would be forgiven if they thought that Cook had fully recanted as the cardinal beamed and declared, “Our justice system has publicly affirmed my innocence. Truth has prevailed.” Sounding a bit like a prosecutor he added that “no deal” was offered to Cook and he had acted “voluntarily, without pressure of any kind.”
In this moment Bernardin’s transformation from “accused” to “vindicated” was completed. “The travesty was that I, a man of sixty-five years, who has been a priest for forty-two years and a bishop for twenty-eight years, was publicly humiliated before the world,” he said. “An innocent man. That’s a travesty.”
Bernardin spoke about the pain he had experienced during the uproar over the accusation, and then denied that he was angry at the man who had called him a rapist. “I harbor no ill feelings toward Steven Cook,” he declared. “I have compassion for him. I have prayed for him every day, and I will continue to do so.”
After Cook and Bernardin had delivered the news, editorial writers around the country praised the cardinal, criticized Cook’s therapist, and called on the press to treat abuse claims with more skepticism. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis covered this ground in a piece titled “Savaging the Great.” The Las Vegas Review Journal decried an “epidemic of amnesia” and the Chicago Tribune trumpeted the headline, “The Cross Is Lifted.”
In May 1994, Northwestern University hosted a symposium titled “Guilt by Allegation: Lessons from the Cardinal Bernardin Case.” It was attended by journalists and lawyers, including Jeffrey Anderson, who considered the Bernardin affair a setback for the great majority of claimants who lodged legitimate complaints. At the end of the day, a poll of the three hundred participants found them evenly divided on whether the press had handled the case well. Bernardin’s popularity rebounded and in December 1994 he arranged to meet his accuser. Bernardin flew to Philadelphia and went by car to the local Catholic seminary, where he sat down with Cook and his partner. Cook, who was obviously very ill, apologized. Bernardin forgave him.
The record of this encounter between the cardinal and Cook comes from Bernardin himself and appears in The Gift of Peace, a book he published after Cook died in September 1995. In it Bernardin writes that Cook still seemed confused about whether the cardinal had in fact abused him. He then reports:
I looked directly at Steven, seated a few inches away from me. “You know,” I said, “that I never abused you.”
“I know,” he answered. “Can you tell me that again?”
I looked directly into his eyes. “I have never abused you. You know that, don’t you?”
Steven nodded. “Yes,” he replied.
Cook died in September 1995, before Bernardin’s book was published and the world received the cardinal’s full account of their conversation. Stricken with pancreatic cancer, Bernardin died in November 1996, leaving behind his version of events, which depicted Cook as a psychologically wounded and confused man who was influenced by an incompetent therapist and a vindictive priest to file false charges he eventually disavowed. In Chicago, the Tribune responded to the cardinal’s death with a recounting of the reconciliation of accused and accuser and declared Bernardin “a hero for all time.”
Bernardin’s friends and admirers, including church critics such as Andrew Greeley and Eugene Kennedy, would continue to promote him as a heroic figure, but many victims of clergy abuse and their supporters would never shake their doubts about him. They focused on the fact that Cook was paid by the Diocese of Cincinnati to settle his suit against Ellis Harsham and saw in this an arrangement that also covered Cardinal Bernardin.
In time journalist Jason Berry would reveal additional elements of the Bernardin case, and note that Archbishop Pilarczyk’s initial rejection of Cook’s complaints led to the explosive charges he then leveled against Bernardin. In a book titled Vows of Silence, coauthored with Gerald Renner, Berry revealed that Jeffrey Anderson had refused to take up the cause of a young man who said Cardinal Bernardin had abused him at a seminary in Minnesota. Eventually this man found a lawyer and accepted $120,000 to drop his complaint. As part of those arrangements, he retracted his charges, but later he told a reporter for The Boston Globe that the retraction was “false.”
While Bernardin’s most ardent supporters considered him practically a martyred saint, skeptics would never let go of the idea that the truth was buried with him. Some archconservative Catholics placed him at the center of a community of sexually active gay clergy and published their views in books and Internet postings that were largely ignored outside of their circle. On the other end of the spiritual spectrum, Richard Sipe conducted extensive interviews with many clergy who knew Bernardin well and some who claimed to be his sexual partners. At a 2003 conference of clergy abuse survivors he noted, bluntly, “Bernardin was sexually active. He had homosexual activity with some priests. There is a homosexual cabal within the Catholic priesthood. A great deal of power and money is involved in this group.”
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After the Bernardin affair, the bishops of the Catholic Church in America seemed to stop dealing directly with the overall problem of clergy abuse. Although a paper published by their conference at the end of 1994 recommended prevention strategies and ways to respond to accusations, it was never approved by the group as a whole. Studies recommended by this committee were never undertaken and the bishops even rejected the group’s request for information on the number of active cases in U.S. dioceses and the amount of money paid to settle claims to date. These ideas “just didn’t fly” because “the climate was different,” one bishop explained at the time.
Across the country, bishops mounted a disciplined and well-funded campaign to lobby against efforts to give more victims access to the courts by easing statutes of limitation. They also opposed legislative and legal efforts to recognize repressed memory or delayed discovery of harm related to abuse. In most locales bishops encouraged victims to seek a Church-based resolution that typically included counseling at Church expense and, in some instances, a payment of a few thousand dollars.
When claimants declined settlement and pressed forward in civil suits the Church often responded with aggressive tactics, including counterclaims that parents failed to protect their children from abusive priests. In some cases private detectives were dispatched to investigate the sexual behavior of people who said they had been abused, and families who filed suits found that their garbage had been picked over. Depositions conducted by Church lawyers became battlegrounds as they pressed people who said they were abused as minors with questions that suggested that they had encouraged, invited, and enjoyed sexual activity with priests. In a case in Pennsylvania, Church officials actually filed a lawsuit against a victim’s parents alleging they neglected their child by allowing him to interact with an abusive priest. This claim was thrown out of court, but not before the family had to retain counsel and fight it.
For people who had, in fact, been abused as children or adolescents, these questions could revive feelings of guilt and self-hatred that they had worked hard to overcome. In truth, children and adolescents often respond physically and emotionally when they are drawn into sex by adults. The ensuing confusion adds to the trauma they experience and victims may require psychotherapy to sort out their feelings and assign proper blame to their perpetrators. Intense questioning by a skilled attorney could and sometimes did r
eopen old wounds.
Hardball techniques were employed by the Church even as top-ranking clergymen expressed public sorrow and regret for the crimes of guilty priests. In New York, where Cardinal O’Connor said “it’s long since time to get on our knees, beat our breast, to ask God’s forgiveness,” lawyers for the archdiocese mounted a fierce defense of a priest named Daniel Calabrese, who was previously convicted of abusing a minor. The Church said the boy who was the plaintiff in the civil suit “willingly consented” to sex with the priest and claimed that its personnel records enjoyed First Amendment protection from discovery. In another case the New York archdiocese refused to settle claims against a priest who had already pleaded guilty to a variety of sodomy and sexual abuse charges.
Lawyers for the Church could feel supported in their tough tactics by the outcome in the Bernardin case and by a spate of legal rulings that went their way. In Minnesota, the state supreme court overruled the court of appeals to bar a sex abuse claim against Richard Kemp, a junior high school guidance counselor. In this case a man named Mark Blackowiak said that he didn’t realize the effect of the abuse, which took place in the 1970–71 school year, until twenty years had passed. The case was complicated by the fact the Blackowiak had confronted the counselor when he ran into him in the company of a young boy. In the claimant’s own words he had “freaked out” about the boy’s safety. This encounter had occurred in 1981.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 24
