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

by D'Antonio, Michael

  Drivon and Anderson suffered a setback when O’Grady, handcuffed and dressed in a prison jumpsuit, came to court from nearby Mule Creek State Prison, where he was serving time for his criminal convictions. In the judge’s chambers he listened as he was ordered to take the stand but then announced that he would not answer any questions. He invited the court to hold him in contempt and confine him, a penalty that would be meaningless since he was already in prison. Anderson and Drivon had expected O’Grady to implicate Cardinal Mahony in covering up his career as a child molester. Instead, he went back to Mule Creek without offering a word of testimony. Later, Anderson would find out that O’Grady had been promised compensation from the Church upon his release from prison, and further severance payments in retirement. Church officials denied that this money was intended to buy his silence.

  Despite losing O’Grady as a witness Drivon and Anderson believed they had made their points well before they called the highest-ranking witness in the trial, Roger Mahony. As far as anyone on either side of the case knew, no cardinal had ever been sworn to testify in an American courtroom. In decades past, Mahony might have been excused on the basis of some First Amendment argument or out of respect for his position. However, the legal system had moved so far away from this kind of privilege that the defense didn’t even ask for it. Instead, Mahony’s attorneys claimed he was too busy to attend and that the court should rely on his pretrial depositions. When the archdiocese said he was in Texas and couldn’t travel to Stockton in time, Anderson hired a private jet for him to use. The defense then agreed to get him to the court on time.

  Mahony appeared dressed in a deep black suit, black shirt, and stiff white collar. Well over six feet tall, with hair turning silvery gray, he towered over Anderson as he moved to the witness stand. Trained in social work and gifted in both communication and organization, Mahony had begun his life as a priest in farm fields and on street corners advocating for the poor. He became a bishop before he was forty. By 1998, as cardinal in Los Angeles, he was chief manager of a huge and ethnically diverse archdiocese. He moved in elite circles and counted the rich and famous as friends. A recent book had described him as the only American with a chance to become the Pope upon John Paul II’s death.

  With thirty-five years of public speaking experience Mahony had the skill to address the court in any number of ways. He chose to speak in a soft, low voice that was barely audible. “I was not informed that this priest had admitted to molesting a child,” he said, referring to the police investigation of 1984. “That was not the information I was given. I was operating under the assumption that an allegation had been made, been thoroughly investigated, and dismissed.”

  Drivon and Anderson struggled against Mahony’s explanation, noting that he had been bishop in one of the smallest dioceses in the country and supervised fewer than one hundred priests. Mahony himself had asked for the psychiatric evaluation that found O’Grady was seriously troubled. But he had reassigned O’Grady to San Andreas before it was completed. Why couldn’t he have waited until after O’Grady was evaluated? And why didn’t he take him out of ministry when the doctor issued his warning?

  The way Mahony recalled it, the psychiatrist hadn’t been alarmed. He had merely “found some difficulties that were all treatable.” He trusted that O’Grady could continue in his work while he received some counseling.

  Persistent questioning failed to move Mahony off his position and by lunchtime he had made a thorough and consistent claim that he had never been fully informed that O’Grady was a threat to children. Moreover, he insisted that his ignorance was easy to understand. He had been a busy man and left problems like O’Grady to others. The judge called a recess for lunch and a confident Mahony left the witness chair and strode into the hallway outside the courtroom. There he was surrounded by reporters. In this moment he broke one of the basic rules for witnesses in trials: he answered questions. Worse yet, he answered questions with lawyers for the other side standing nearby.

  With microphones pushed in his face Mahony quietly repeated the points he had made on the stand and added that “when we placed [O’Grady] in the parish we did everything we humanly could have done to make sure there was no problem there.”

  It wouldn’t take legal training for someone to consider Mahony’s claim and ask whether it was wise to send a suspect priest out to a distant parish if he knew extraordinary efforts were required to prevent him from molesting children. This was precisely the question Anderson asked when the judge reconvened the case and Mahony resumed his testimony.

  “At the time, Cardinal, did you talk to the police?”

  “No.”

  “You could have.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I could have.”

  “What was restraining you?”

  With the cardinal on the defensive, Anderson pressed him for several minutes, forcing him to admit that during the time when he did “everything we could humanly do” he failed to speak to those who complained about O’Grady and didn’t send him for treatment with the Paracletes or some other specialist. He failed, even, to open O’Grady’s personnel file and review it.

  Jeff Anderson delivered the plaintiffs’ closing argument, which included a reference to O’Grady as a “wolf in shepherd’s clothing.” He asked the jury to award his clients a total of $60 million, including $52 million in punitive damages. It was a home-run swing, but Anderson believed the Church had given him a fat pitch to hit. This kind of penalty was required, he said, because the diocese had neglected to control O’Grady, and allowed him to molest untold numbers of child victims. He asked the jurors to consider those children in their deliberations.

  “A child feels some kind of special pain,” he said. “A child has no past and has no future, he just lives in the present and lives it wholeheartedly. When he suffers, he suffers with his whole being.”

  The final argument for the diocese came from John Cotter, a defense specialist who practiced mainly in the state capitol of Sacramento. Cotter couldn’t argue that O’Grady was innocent or that his client, the diocese, was blameless. A criminal trial had already established O’Grady was a sexual predator and the sum total of the evidence presented at the trial showed that Church officials failed, repeatedly, to determine what O’Grady was up to and protect the public. With no other option, Cotter told the jury that the diocese of Stockton “has gotten the message, and it’s not going to happen again,” Cotter said. A big penalty would only harm everyday Catholics and an institution that served the community well. “I’m asking you,” said Cotter, “not to interfere with that.”

  A week later, the jury finished work and ordered the defendant to pay the Howard brothers $29 million, which was almost half the amount their attorneys recommended. The jury award, which called for more per person than the Kos case, proved that that outcome was not a fluke. Lawyers who brought timely abuse cases with solid evidence of serious crimes could get into court and win enormous sums. This was a defining moment in the clergy abuse crisis.

  While his clients embraced, Jeff Anderson stood for a moment in shocked silence. (He was alone at the moment when the verdict was issued because, to Anderson’s amazement, Drivon was travelling to attend an annual art sale he never missed.) Then the two young men hugged him, as well. Afterward they discussed the appeal that would inevitably come and how they might handle negotiations over a final settlement. Ultimately the brothers would accept a total of $7.5 million.

  In the past, win or lose, Jeffrey Anderson would have started drinking before sunset and reach oblivion sometime after midnight. In Stockton he decided it would be best for him to get home as soon as possible. A red-eye flight from San Francisco would put him into Minneapolis before 8 A.M., but it wouldn’t depart San Francisco until about eleven o’clock. Anderson decided to just drive to the airport and wait. The main problem was there would be the many bars available in the concourse. His AA friend Robert volunteered a solution.

  “Just call me when you get there,” he
said. “We’ll talk for as long as it takes.”

  It took more than five hours, as Anderson sat at a pay phone in an airport waiting area and kept the receiver pressed to his ear. In that time the two men discussed everything from the law, to family, to their childhoods, and their hopes for the future. Both men dwelled on regrets. Anyone with a shred of self-awareness has them. Drunks carry them like masons hauling bricks up a ladder. Talking lightens the load, and in the end the conversation was so reassuring and cathartic that when he was called to board, Anderson knew he could fly without ordering a drink. He made it home sober.

  * * *

  The size of the O’Grady verdict and a cardinal’s appearance as a witness made the Stockton case national news. All the publicity inspired other victims of O’Grady to contact attorneys and soon more claims were filed. The wildfire dynamic was the same wherever a major case was tried in the courts or revealed in the press. It happened in the Gauthe case in Louisiana, in the Adamson case in Minnesota, and with Porter and Kos. Typically the original plaintiffs’ attorneys would hear from victims of the same priest abuser, or their families. But almost as often, the publicity would prompt complaints about other priests.

  And then there were the charges that arose in other dioceses as men, women, and children were motivated by press accounts datelined from some distant city to bring allegations against a priest in their local diocese. In San Antonio, the Catholic archdiocese was forced to arrange bank financing to obtain $4 million that would be paid to the families of seven boys who had been molested by a local priest. In Boston the archdiocese quietly paid millions of dollars—one report said the figure was as high as $10 million—to settle a dozen lawsuits filed by victims of a priest named John Geoghan. Other settlements were made by the Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Portland, Maine, and dozens of new claims were filed around the country. However, the most startling development in the period after O’Grady arose in Palm Beach, Florida, where a sudden scandal drove a bishop from office.

  Joseph Keith Symons was little known outside of the Palm Beach area. His one previous brush with notoriety came in 1991 when he allowed the ABC television network to film an exorcism conducted in his diocese. The broadcast stirred controversy. When contacted by the press Symons confirmed that he had authorized the filming. “The Devil really exists,” said Symons. “He is powerful and actively at work in the world.” The bishop said the broadcast would “counteract diabolical activities around us.”

  When he suddenly retired in the middle of 1998, Bishop Symons issued a single-page public statement to the press confessing that he had molested five boys and noting that he had submitted his resignation to Pope John Paul II, who had accepted it. The head of the St. Petersburg diocese who took over Symons’ administrative responsibilities offered a most concise version of the institutional church response to such cases when he observed, “The old theory was ‘Make a good confession and sin no more,’” said Bishop Robert N. Lynch. “We never realized it was a disease.”

  By using words such “sin” and “disease,” the bishop avoided expressing any feelings or mentioning that whenever a grown man had sex with minors he committed a serious crime. It was left to Symons’s brother to vent emotions about the scandal. James Symons, who lived in a tiny house along the railroad tracks that cut through the town of Largo, Florida, told a reporter, “I’m glad our mother is dead.” Reflecting on the brother he thought he knew well he described him as “damn sick” and asked, “How does he sit in a confessional, sit there and listen to others, with this on his mind?”

  18. BY OTHER MEANS

  Arthur Budzinski, Robert Bolger, and Gary Smith had each been sexually assaulted by Father Lawrence Murphy when they were boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf, near Milwaukee. For nearly two decades they had tried to use the convoluted system of Church justice to hold him responsible. Finally fed up with delays and diversions, they decide to drive to Murphy’s summer home on a lake in the small town of Boulder Junction. It’s the first day of the summer of 1997. The trip takes more than four hours. Arthur films the expedition, creating a record that will later be presented in court.

  In tiny Boulder Junction the men look for a spot on the road where two Texas license plates—both read 1IRISH—have been nailed up to mark a dirt road that leads off the pavement. As the car makes the turn they also see a cluster of white-painted wooden arrows on a post. The arrows bear family names. MURPHY is written on one in black letters.

  Father Murphy had been a fixture at the St. John’s school for almost thirty-five years, serving first as assistant director and then director. As the three men knew, in that time he had used his authority and his status to access, abuse, and silence as many as two hundred boys. He approached some in the beds at night and others when they came to him for confession. When reported to a bishop by a fellow priest, he talked his way out of trouble by insisting that his efforts at sex education had been misunderstood.

  When they were young adults, the Church and court system had offered Smith, Bolger, and Budzinski no real hearing for their complaints. Exasperated, the men had distributed homemade “wanted” posters showing Murphy’s face, outside the cathedral in Milwaukee. Smith had gotten a lawyer and threatened to sue Murphy and the archdiocese. A nun summoned Smith to a meeting where he was paid $2,000 in exchange for his signature on a document recanting the claims, apologizing for “false” allegations, and promising to never make such accusations again. Not understanding the contents of the letter, he had signed.

  The letter had prevented Smith from confronting Murphy in court, but it didn’t bar him from doing so man-to-man. When the car stops at Murphy’s small, white-painted cottage, the video shows an older woman standing outside holding a lawn chair. The men know her. She is known to them as “Sister Grace.” As Bolger signs to her, she replies, also in sign, telling him to wait while she goes inside. Bolger gestures with quick and powerful movements. “He’s been molesting boys for twenty-five years. How dare you live here with him?”

  Sister Grace returns with an older man who is balding and a bit stooped. Father Murphy greets Bolger in sign and the two immediately begin to argue.

  “We came here for sex,” signs Bolger, “… you are a molester!”

  Murphy, looking old and tired, tries to argue with him.

  The confrontation lasts less than five minutes, but it’s long enough for the men to force an apology out of their abuser. They also get an opportunity to shout, in sign, “You go to prison now!”

  As Murphy escapes inside, Sister Grace stays behind to persuade Bolger that he’s wrong about Murphy. “Bullshit!” he responds. She wants to talk to him about being a Catholic. He dismisses her, signing out the words, “I’m not talking about religion! I’m talking about child molestation!”

  Before the video ends, the men remind Sister Grace that Murphy had molested boys at the cottage where she is living. As the elderly nun continues to defend Murphy, an exasperated Bolger cuts her off. “Oh forget it!” he signs, “I’m out of here!”

  * * *

  Just like their “wanted” poster, the homemade video about Lawrence Murphy and the sexual abuse of deaf boys would eventually become known around the world. But in the late 1990s, the video was nothing more than a cathartic inspiration for Smith, Bolger, and Budzinski because they had been assaulted by a priest in the state of Wisconsin. There, the state supreme court had decided that higher Church officials and organizations could not be sued for negligent supervision of personnel, even one who had assaulted scores of disabled boys who were entrusted to his care and would have great difficulty reporting the crimes to anyone who didn’t know sign language.

  At about the time when the filmmaking trio made their trip, a fourth victim, Terrance Kohut, wrote Murphy a long letter that recalled how he had enrolled at St. John’s school after his father’s suicide only to be abused countless times. He wrote:

  I was numb with grief and fear and looked to you for some kind of comfort and se
curity. You were all I had. No one at home signed. I could not communicate with them. I turned to you and what did you do? You molested me, that’s what. You took advantage of a lost little boy … Do you know that you really ruined my life? I could never trust men because I thought maybe they would molest me as you did. Do you remember that first time? I came to confession and you asked if I had been masturbating. Then you told me to pull down my pants. I will always feel the horror of that moment.

  Often, while he was being abused, Kohut gazed at a crucifix on the wall, hoping for a divine intervention that never came. He wrote:

  Can you imagine that? Can you? Jesus on the cross on the wall saw you coming every night to molest us. He must have been shocked and grieved every time. I hope he cried like we did, because we were innocent children, pure Christians, good altar boys, and cute lambs. I hope Jesus is very furious at you and will send you to hell very soon.

  An elementary school teacher with a master’s degree, Kohut had devoted much of his life to recovering from the abuse, which burdened him with shame, anxiety, and fear that grew worse as he kept the past secret out of feelings of guilt. Like many victims who are abused by trusted adults over long periods of times, he needed years to sort out his feelings and conclude that his assailant was wholly responsible for what had happened to him. In the meantime, Kohut struggled in relationships and, due to anxiety attacks, lost jobs and almost lost his marriage. In his letter, which he also sent to Archbishop Weakland and Pope John Paul II, he recalled the day when another boy walked to a local police station to report that Murphy had abused him and the priest persuaded officers that the child was mentally retarded and could not be believed. Kohut noted that Murphy had arranged for other priests, even one at another school, to molest St. John students. He described one young man who was so tormented by abuse that he spent years in a psychiatric hospital. Another of Murphy’s victims had killed himself, he wrote. None of this suffering was ever considered by civil authorities thanks to a series of judicial rulings that barred them from filing suits.