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

by D'Antonio, Michael

  Despite the fear he felt in challenging the Church, O’Gorman described in detail the schemes Fr. Fortune used to get him away from his parents so that he could rape and molest him time and time again. In Beyond Belief, a book he wrote, O’Gorman described how, at age fourteen, he was awakened and anally raped by Fr. Fortune on a night when he had previously fought him off for the first time. He wrote:

  I don’t know how long I’d been asleep but I awoke to find myself forced over onto my stomach. I felt a searing pain as he forced himself inside me. His weight knocked the breath out of me and I couldn’t speak. I was terrified. He didn’t say a word to me. He treated me like an object. I wasn’t human.

  The brutal rape, which occurred when O’Gorman’s parents sent him on an overnight visit with Fr. Fortune, marked the end of the boy’s resistance. He became submissive with the priest and in every aspect of his life. Schoolyard bullies became his tormentors and, perversely, the abusive priest became a kind of refuge.

  The journalists who reported O’Gorman’s story also pursued the usual questions about who knew what about Sean Fortune and when they knew it. For O’Gorman, the publicity brought empathy and affirmation. For the Church, it led to revelations of cover-ups that mirrored the actions of bishops in America who had ignored reports of abuse and sought a geographical cure for problem priests by moving them to new posts. The bishop of the Diocese of Ferns, Brendan Comiskey, who was Fortune’s supervisor, left for America and inpatient treatment for alcoholism.

  Following the pattern set in America, one well-publicized case prompted additional victims to come forward. More Irish priests were arrested and charged with abuse as Colm O’Gorman contacted an attorney to explore filing a civil suit against the Church in Ireland and the Vatican. At the same time he worked with prosecutors preparing to try Sean Fortune. In early March 1999, Fr. Fortune offered to plead guilty to minor charges but not to the rapes he had committed. When consulted, O’Gorman said he objected to any plea deal. Having learned the power of taking a public stand he told the lead counsel for the State:

  I would be vehemently opposed to the dropping of any charge, and I would be very vocal in my opposition.

  The trial of Sean Fortune began with the forty-five-year-old priest hobbling into the courtroom in Wexford on crutches. Fortune was dressed in clerical black and wearing a white collar and dark glasses with perfectly circular lenses. He demanded to be addressed as “Father” and asked to sit down during the recitation of the sixty-six crimes he was charged with committing against eight minors. Before this task was completed, Fortune began wobbling in his seat and then talking gibberish. When the priest’s attorney asked for a delay so that doctors might judge whether he was fit to stand trial, the judge granted it. Days before he was to return to court, Fortune downed a lethal combination of drugs and alcohol. A housekeeper found him dead in his bed. At his funeral, Bishop Comiskey prayed that he would receive God’s mercy.

  Months after presiding at Sean Fortune’s funeral, Comiskey joined the rest of Ireland’s bishops in Rome where they met with Pope John Paul II. Prepared to discuss the state of the Church in Ireland, the Pope noted the wealth brought about by the roaring Celtic Tiger but left out any mention of the nuns who capitalized on the boom by selling off their cemetery. Instead he concluded that the “exaggerated materialism, which sometimes accompanies increased material prosperity, has brought in its wake a declining sense of God’s presence and of the transcendent meaning of human life.” Some had begun to believe, added the Pope, “that the Church no longer has anything of relevance to say to the men and women of our day.”

  Though well-briefed on the extent of the clergy sex abuse problem in Ireland, the Pope chose to touch on it lightly. He stressed that given the “suffering of priests due to the pressures of the surrounding culture and the terrible scandal given by some of their brother priests, it is essential to invite them to draw strength from a deeper insight into their priestly identity and mission.” John Paul II expressed solidarity with the bishops on this matter and asked they pray with him for the guilty. For their victims he recommended the “God of all comfort” and nothing else.

  * * *

  Denied a verdict in Fortune’s criminal trial, Colm O’Gorman did include the Pope in a lawsuit that also named the Diocese of Ferns. As the Church paid €300,000 and issued a formal apology to avoid a trial, O’Gorman’s suit provided an opening for the BBC to assemble a dramatic documentary that revealed that Church officials first learned of Fortune’s crimes in 1982. The papal ambassador in Dublin and Bishop Comiskey had both failed to act as they heard complaints throughout Fortune’s career. Besides his sexual crimes Fortune was known for embezzlement, manipulating elderly Catholics to give him their life savings, and concocting fake education and job schemes that cost donors millions of dollars.

  As a sexual offender, Fortune used group “retreats” to isolate boys, get them drunk, and conduct orgies augmented with graphic pornographic movies. Reporter Sarah MacDonald also uncovered what she called a “pedophile ring” involving two priests and the principal of a seminary in Wexford. To put the response, or lack of one, in perspective she travelled to Germany to interview Tom Doyle. Fr. Doyle wore a black sweater but no collar for the interview. It was conducted in a small parish church that happened to sit across the street from Doyle’s home. As a thank-you Doyle gave the accommodating pastor a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black whiskey.

  In the BBC film Suing the Pope, which was aired across Ireland, Doyle decried the “arrogant, you know, self-satisfied attitude” of Catholic bishops in the face of horrendous criminal behavior by priests. “… in many cases they’ve known. That’s why these lawsuits have happened … that’s why it has cost the Catholic Church in the United States alone over a billion dollars over a ten-year period. That’s a lot of dollars.” Fr. Doyle suggested that the Vatican, and perhaps the Pope, knew about Fortune all along and recommended the state prosecute “any leader or anyone who harbors a criminal.”

  While Doyle provided an insider’s perspective, Fortune’s surviving victims and the relatives of men who had committed suicide after he raped them offered heartrending testimony using terms such as “torture” and “anal rape.” Many echoed the anger of O’Gorman, who talked about “bastards like Brendan Comiskey, hiding in his nice palace in Summerhill, behind his alcoholism and his regret and his, you know, his inability to understand or to do anything about it. It’s not good enough; it’s not good enough. It’s not good enough anymore. People have died. People are dying. People are hurting.”

  Shocking as the abuse stories were, viewers may have been most startled by Sarah MacDonald’s pursuit of Bishop Comiskey. The film ends with MacDonald and her camera crew staking out a church like detectives waiting for a drug deal to take place. When Comiskey arrives to say Mass they run to confront him as he gets out of a car. It was the type of scene that American viewers of programs like 60 Minutes would have found familiar, but for an Irish public accustomed to seeing bishops treated with the utmost respect it was a television landmark. As she approaches, microphone in hand, MacDonald, who is a small woman with curly brown hair, calls out to the bishop who responds, at first, with as much charm as he can muster.

  “Bishop Comiskey!” shouts MacDonald.

  “We will survive, how are you?” answers Comiskey.

  “I’m fine, thanks. Sarah MacDonald, BBC television.”

  “Sarah, how are you?”

  “Very well, thank you. I’ve just come to ask you just a question about Sean Fortune…”

  “I’m going to have Mass at half past six.”

  “We just wanted to know why didn’t you stop Sean Fortune abusing young boys? Bishop Comiskey?”

  “I-I-I moved. When it was brought to my attention I moved him out of the parish and sent him on treatment for two years.”

  “Not for six years. Not for six years, you didn’t move him out of the parish. Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “Thank you very muc
h.”

  It was the kind of thank-you an overly polite hospital patient might offer after a spinal tap. Comiskey scuttled into the church. In the final minute of the film MacDonald reminds viewers that “Dr. Brendan Comiskey remains the Bishop of Ferns. Since Fr. Sean Fortune’s suicide, six of his victims have begun legal action. So far, the Church’s only response has been to deny liability and plead diplomatic immunity. Colm O’Gorman is suing the bishop, the Papal Nuncio, and the Pope.”

  In a nation of fewer than 4 million citizens, a documentary that presented so many victims in so many locales was felt quite personally by the people who saw it. If a viewer didn’t know one of the men or women presented directly, it would be safe to assume that just a few degrees of separation stood between them. Certainly every Irish man and woman recognized the places where the abuse occurred and the bishops in charge of the criminal priests. The Irish government responded to the broadcast, and subsequent citizen uproar, by establishing a commission to investigate the Ferns diocese and its handling of abuse cases. Bishop Comiskey promptly resigned. In the meantime, documentarian Mary Raftery completed a series on child sexual abuse by priests in the Archdiocese of Dublin. Cardinal Secrets was broadcast on the Irish national TV network RTE. Again the government promised an investigation.

  By the end of 2002, three separate commissions had embarked on investigations of child abuse in the small country of Ireland. Inspired, in every case, by outspoken citizens and widely viewed media accounts, these commissions worked with the authority of the government and the power to obtain documents and witness testimony. Never before had civilian officials challenged the Church in such a direct and sweeping way. Never before had Irish society confronted long-simmering suspicions about the Church and its regard of children.

  It was that status of children that concerned Colm O’Gorman most. As he would later note, Irish tradition held that “If you are a child, you do as you are told no matter what it is. Be good and everything will be okay. If things are not okay it’s because you are bad.” As O’Gorman saw it, abuse and neglect of children at the hands of families and the Church were endemic. “We are a brutalized society,” he said, “where twenty-seven percent of men and women report they were abused as children.”

  Old-fashioned Irish Catholicism—rigid, punishing, controlling—formed the foundation of beliefs about children and had enabled centuries of abuse and neglect. “What’s happened after States of Fear and Suing the Pope won’t fix five hundred years of casual brutality,” added O’Gorman. “But the films and the fact that the problem was no longer anonymous started people talking and thinking differently about the Church, families and children, and the casual level of brutality that had been acceptable for a long time.”

  Remarkably, the economic rise of Ireland also played a significant role in the nation’s sudden reconsideration of long-standing attitudes about authority and power. The money that built up the middle class allowed for greater access to higher education, more travel abroad, and an expansion of the mass media. These factors, as well as a spike in immigration, brought new ideas into the country and emboldened politicians such as Bertie Ahern to violate a long-standing taboo against criticizing the Church. Individuals including Andrew Madden and Colm O’Gorman were inspired to speak publicly about not just child abuse but also rights for homosexuals, lesbians, and women.

  Perhaps the most powerful agent of change where the Irish Catholic Church was concerned was the example of America. For centuries Ireland had sent clerics and nuns to the States, where they seeded Catholic communities with an especially pious and sexually repressive brand of Catholicism. But during the Tiger years, the Internet and greater direct contact with the international community had reversed the flow. As both Madden and O’Gorman would eventually reveal, their actions were guided in large part by the example of the Americans who challenged the Church in St. Paul, Boston, Dallas, and Stockton. And even in 2002, as they watched the Church in Ireland reel under the weight of scandal, they understood that a much bigger drama was unfolding simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic.

  19. PAPER CHASE

  Michael Rezendes was always a document guy. In early 2001 he had mined records at courthouses and government offices to help expose shoddy practices by a major national construction company. With this proof, Rezendes and others on the Spotlight Team of The Boston Globe showed how executives misled consumers, skirted environmental regulations, and strong-armed people who stood up to them. Of course the story started with people who had bad experiences with the builder and wanted to talk about it, but the paperwork was the proof the Globe needed to proceed.

  A decades-old institution, the Spotlight Team was one of the top investigative groups in American journalism and a plum assignment for Rezendes, who had worked for the San Jose Mercury News and The Washington Post before returning to his native city in 1989. Having grown up with the paper, he had always wanted a job in the Globe newsroom and even in his twelfth year there he felt real pride in his work. People all over New England depended on the paper to keep them informed and, occasionally, serve as a check on the powerful. It also functioned as a court of last resort for people with problems no one else would or could address.

  Since documents made Rezendes’s pulse race a little, he took notice when a confidential source visited the Globe in the summer of 2001 armed with a stack of files. The man, who said he had been the victim of a pedophile priest, spent three hours briefing the Spotlight Team on cases he knew firsthand, using the press clippings, affidavits, depositions, and court transcripts he brought to back up his recollections. As he told it, the Porter case of 1992 was just the tip of the iceberg. The Archdiocese of Boston had a much bigger problem involving dozens of priests, including some who were well-known public figures. The source then handed over records of the Rudy Kos trial. Study the way the Church behaved in Dallas, he said, and look for the same pattern here.

  In the years since the Porter case, the Globe had reported the problem of priests who abused minors on a case-by-case basis, noting occasional complaints and lawsuits. When an accused priest named John Geoghan was defrocked in 1998, the report ran on the front page. But almost all the other stories about the issue were tucked inside the paper, where they didn’t stir up readers. Then, in March 2001, the weekly Boston Phoenix ran a big article about Geoghan by writer Kristen Lombardi, who revealed him to be a true pedophile with many victims and complaints dating back to 1980. The priest stood accused of sexually assaulting hundreds of children of varying ages. His alleged crimes included many instances of oral rape of children as young as seven. The first complaints about him were made in 1973, and though they continued his superiors kept him in ministry until 1993.

  Lombardi quoted Tom Doyle saying, “Geoghan is what you’d call a predator.” Richard Sipe told the paper, “He is well known in the circles of those who treat priest pedophiles. He is notorious because he has been treated by so many people, at nearly every psychiatric hospital in the country.” Sipe meant that Geoghan was known at nearly every one of the facilities that treated sex-offender priests, and this was true. In fact, Sipe had seen Geoghan with his own eyes inside Seton hospital in Maryland.

  An alternative weekly in the muckraking tradition of New York’s Village Voice, the Phoenix was not, like the Globe, New England’s paper of record. Instead it was the place for edgier reporting that often broke new ground but without the authority of one of the country’s most respected dailies. It was a little mosquito boat of a paper that could ask, as it did, how Geoghan “managed to get away with it” and tweak Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law with the suggestion that the abuse problem might force his retirement. The Globe was more like a battleship that required time and care to steer in the proper direction, but once its guns were trained on a target it could do enormous damage. If the Globe ever sought Law’s retirement, it would likely happen.

  Michael Rezendes would recall that his editors were careful in their relationship with the Church. Th
e Globe and the archdiocese were among just a handful of leading institutions in the city. Founded by members of the Protestant elite, the paper was sometimes criticized for being anti-Catholic. Because of this record, editors would have to have very good reasons for picking a fight with the Church. The reasons multiplied as more complaints were lodged in the courts and the Phoenix published its story. Finally, in July 2001, a new top editor named Martin Baron arrived and he decided that the ship would change course.

  The four journalists assigned to the investigation—Rezendes, Walter Robinson, Matthew Carroll, and Sacha Pfeiffer—were born Catholics. Two had attended parochial schools. All four would need help understanding how the Church they thought they knew as a compassionate and moral institution could protect abusive priests.

  As he combed the Kos file Rezendes was captivated by Richard Sipe’s report, which was both generous to good priests and searing in its review of the secrecy, sexual shame, and power relationships that dominated the clerical culture. Rezendes called him for advice. Sipe returned the message the reporter left, catching him on his cell phone as he drove to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game.

  In the days before state law required hands-free cell phone use in cars, Rezendes habitually grabbed the phone when it chirped. Wedging it between his shoulder and ear he spoke to Sipe about his project and listened with rapt attention as this soft-spoken former priest and psychiatric expert recalled his encounter with John Geoghan the psychiatric patient and explained, in terms laypeople rarely hear, how clergy become paralyzed by their fear of sexual scandal. Rezendes had never heard someone give such a thorough review of priests, power, and Catholic dogma and concluded on the spot that Sipe would become one of the Spotlight Team’s guides through the history, culture, theology, and psychology of the abuse crisis. Without checking with his bosses Rezendes told Sipe the Globe would fly him to Boston and put him up in a good hotel for a few days if he would answer the team’s questions. Within days, Sipe was aboard a flight landing at Logan Airport.