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

by D'Antonio, Michael

  MacLeish, who had once praised the Boston archdiocese for its handling of abuse cases, spoke with disdain and anger. At one moment he shouted, “We were lied to! We were deceived!” At another he looked at a photo on the screen that showed the cardinal shaking hands with Fr. Shanley, and said, “We believe that photograph was taken shortly after Cardinal Law had received [a letter] indicating that Paul Shanley was engaging in deviant behavior.”

  By the time MacLeish was finished, he had shown that for decades high Church officials, including Law, knew of complaints against Shanley—twenty-six in all—and continued to promote him, and recommend him for postings in California and New York. Noting that the first warning about Shanley was raised in 1967, MacLeish concluded, “All of the suffering that has taken place at the hands of Paul Shanley—a serial child molester for four decades, three of them in Boston—none of it had to happen.”

  A highly visible priest who often claimed runaways and other street kids as part of his ministry, Shanley had exploited these same youngsters, engaging them in sex at a secluded cabin he kept in a wooded area close to the city. One of MacLeish’s clients, Arthur Austin, appeared at the press conference to talk about his case. Calling out to Cardinal Law, Austin said:

  You are a liar; your own documents condemn you. You are a criminal, a murderer of children; you degrade the office you hold in the Church; you are an affront to Jesus Christ; and I call on Almighty God to bear witness to the foulness and treachery of your behavior, the evil you have nurtured and condoned, and the minds, hearts, and souls you have destroyed.

  Austin’s words echoed Bernard Law calling down “God’s power” on the Boston press during the 1992 scandal involving Fr. Porter. They also reflected the growing assertiveness of victims and their supporters. In the Boston area, old classmates and friends began talking to each other and discovering they had similar experiences with abusive priests. In his book Our Fathers the writer David France would document how many communities were divided by the abuse issue and neighbors sometimes argued bitterly. One victim, Olan Horne, told France how he dealt with coworkers who suggested he had engaged in consensual sex with Fr. Joseph Birmingham. After recalling he was eleven years old when he was raped, Horne explained how the priest beat him, seized him by the back of the head, and forced his penis into his mouth. Horne then said:

  … and then this guy puts me on the floor with his knee on my back, you know, the guy’s ejaculating all over my back, he’s beating the shit out of me because I’m trying to get away but I’m still like, “Fuck you!”

  That’s a blow job? Hell no, that ain’t no blow job. That’s rape. You need me to fill you in on any other sexual points? You want to hear some more? You tough enough, because I can go places you’ve never been.

  While victims coped with challenges from coworkers and even family members, several different groups formed to support them and to press the hierarchy to share power. The leaders of these organizations were earnest Catholics who believed in the Christian message but doubted the ability of men like Law to deliver it to the world. Terence McKiernan, for example, was a forty-nine-year-old parishioner at Our Lady of Help who had returned to the Church when his children were born. Early in the scandal he began wearing a homemade button that said “Law Must Go” and he became an activist after meeting the parents of a child who had been abused by a priest when he was six. McKiernan’s daughter was six.

  As one of the earliest members of a lay organization called Voice of the Faithful, McKiernan attended meetings that grew from twenty-five to one thousand people in early 2002. On his own he began collecting and cataloging reports on accused priests in Boston and across the nation. An editor by profession, McKiernan soon became the unofficial archivist of the movement to confront clergy abuse. He obtained data from other groups around the country and established a Web site called BishopAccountability.org where anyone in the world could search for information.

  As time passed, Boston-based groups like Voice of the Faithful, which pressed for structural reforms in the management of the Church, would never gain the visibility of SNAP. The power in the Church would remain in the hands of the ordained and they would not share it simply because thousands of people in one diocese or another demanded they do so. McKiernan’s project, however, would grow to become an international resource offering hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that could be searched by lawyers, academics, lawmakers, prosecutors, journalists and victims looking for connections, patterns, and evidence.

  On a national level, the Church documents published by the Globe gave reporters around the country hints on how to investigate local dioceses and these efforts produced a stream of scandals similar to Boston’s. In Milwaukee, for example, the press reported that Archbishop Rembert Weakland kept a priest named William Effinger in ministry for more than a decade after he confessed to being a sex offender. In Philadelphia, fifty sexual abuse claims against priests were reported, and in Los Angeles the press reported that during one two-week period half a dozen priests had been dismissed. In 2001 the diocese had promised in a court proceeding to get rid of all priests who confessed or were found to have committed sexual abuse. The pledge was part of a $5.2 million settlement of a complaint against Fr. Michael Harris by a young man named Ryan DiMaria. Harris, a charismatic Catholic high school principal known as “Father Hollywood” denied the claim. The first complaints about Harris had been lodged in the 1970s. In the weeks after the settlement, DiMaria’s lawyers Kathy Freberg and John Manly signed up more than one hundred new clients who said they were abused by priests in Southern California.

  Southern California also became the site of one of the few truly entertaining moments of the sex abuse crisis. On the afternoon of Thursday April 4 a talk radio duo on KFI-AM began reading from confidential e-mails sent to and from Cardinal Mahony. John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou had recently embarrassed a judge accused of child abuse by reading his diary aloud. This time they held in their hands more than sixty messages discussing everything from public relations to how the diocese might respond to inquiries from local law enforcement investigators looking into possible criminal activity by priests and their superiors.

  Altogether, the e-mails showed Mahony was deeply involved in planning responses to official inquiries and still hoped to protect his priests while controlling the flow of information released to the public. This attitude stood in contrast to his declaration, a year before, that “We want every single thing to be out, open and dealt with, period.”

  In one of the leaked e-mails Mahony wrote that the diocese might warn those who may be subject to criminal investigation. “They should probably have some heads-up lest the PD comes knocking at their doors without notice,” he explained. In another Mahony suggested his aides delay releasing the names of suspected abusers in the hopes that public interest would wane. In a third he expressed concern about facing “charges of cover-up, concealing criminals, etc., etc.” A fourth revealed that he was relieved that he would be traveling and unable to conduct the funeral of an accused priest who was dying. “It may be best if someone else were to handle his funeral anyway,” wrote the cardinal, “given his past difficulties.”

  As the hosts of the John and Ken Show gleefully announced they possessed these e-mails and began reading them over the air, an attorney for the archdiocese called the radio station and insisted they stop because a court had issued a cease-and-desist order. Although their ratings were at stake, Ken and John suspended the narration until their attorneys got a judge to rule that the e-mails could be broadcast. The following day they set up their microphones in front of the almost-complete new Los Angeles cathedral and worked through all the e-mails. The decision to broadcast from the cathedral site further tweaked the cardinal, since its construction, at a cost of $180 million, was a point of conflict between him and critics who thought the cost was more than excessive and called it the “Rog Mahal.”

  The e-mail spectacle was embarrassing for the cardinal but also illustrated
the effects of the scandal on the standing of the institutional Church. The person who leaked the confidential messages was most likely a Church insider. This meant that someone close to the cardinal had lost confidence in him and felt that the John and Ken Show could play a necessary role in policing the Roman Catholic Church. A leak like this one also showed that the respect and even fear that traditionally shielded the Church from criticism was evaporating. This change had already occurred in the media as investigative reporters, columnists, and editorial writers swarmed around chanceries, courthouses, parishes, and law offices to exploit every morsel of scandal. Gone was the discretion and cozy cooperation that had marked relations between the press and the pulpit. It had been replaced by mutual suspicion and outrage.

  In Los Angeles the adversarial dynamic was led by columnist Steven Lopez of the Los Angeles Times, who used his opinion pieces to repeatedly point out the contradictions between the cardinal’s promises of openness and his many refusals to release the names of suspect priests and documents related to cases. With jokes and rhymes Lopez mocked the cardinal even as he called on him to be more forthcoming. Writers in other cities around the country made similar demands of local bishops, making a sport out of holding prelates to the standard of honesty and compassion for the suffering set by Christ himself.

  With so many local and national press outlets pursuing the abuse story, and victims feeling inspired to seek help, the leaders of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests responded to hundreds of inquiries per day. The SNAP activists were not employed by their movement. They each worked full-time jobs and because of this they gave up mealtimes and sleep to respond to the calls. Barbara Blaine, who then worked in the Cook County courts as an advocate for children, found that the voice mail on her SNAP phone filled to capacity every fifteen minutes. By her estimate hundreds, if not thousands of callers could not reach her because of the limited capacity of the phone system.

  Blaine, David Clohessy, Peter Isely, and other SNAP leaders became national media figures as journalists sought them out to provide perspective on the long-running scandal. Clohessy told the Los Angeles Times, “I never thought I’d see this day. We’ve been crying from the rooftops for someone to notice what’s going on for so long.”

  In fact, seventeen years had passed since Barbara Blaine organized the group at the Catholic Worker House in Chicago. SNAP now had more than three thousand members and had active leaders in every corner of the country. Like the others, the Milwaukee-based Isely made SNAP the equivalent of a full-time job. Unlike the others, he was a psychotherapist with a graduate degree from Harvard Divinity School. Along with his expertise in theology and psychology, Isley was informed by his profoundly devout upbringing and the education he received at the seminary where he was abused. In the ten years he had devoted to activism he had become deeply involved with bishops and priests in Wisconsin, pressing them to find a constructive way to deal with sexual abuse.

  In Isely’s own case, and others he observed, the Church had defended its treasury and reputation by spending “tens of millions of dollars on the highest-priced lawyers from across the country and hiring the best public relations firm to fight us.” In Wisconsin this struggle had produced a stalemate, with courts barring most lawsuits and legislators deadlocked over proposals to revamp the laws so that claims could proceed. For years Isely had met with Church officials, including Archbishop Rembert Weakland, hoping to establish a voluntary system that would help victims and restore public confidence in the Church. By 2002 he had come to believe that the structure of the institution required insiders to act. “Where are the good priests?” he said. “When they turn in one of their own, they’ll start to make me a believer.”

  Not one priest in Milwaukee came forward to report an abusive colleague, but something even more startling occurred in the month of May 2002: Archbishop Rembert Weakland suddenly resigned and revealed that he had carried on a long affair with a male lover who had received a $450,000 payment. Paul Marcoux was an adult when the relationship began in 1979, but had complained that he had been the victim of date rape. In exchange for the money he had agreed to stay silent, and keep confidential the letters Weakland had written him over the years. However, in the wake of the Boston scandal, Marcoux broke this promise and told the story to ABC news. Working with Jason Berry as a consultant, ABC reporter Brian Ross broke the story, in which he pointed out that the archbishop had “urged the Catholic Church to open up about its growing sex abuse crisis” even as he conducted a secret affair. The point was clear: A prelate who had called for less sexual secrecy had, in fact, been hiding a sexual relationship. Weakland didn’t respond to ABC’s request for an interview but after the piece aired he said, “I never abused anyone” and then resigned. On the same day, a priest in New York and another in Maryland were arrested for sexually abusing children under the age of thirteen.

  As the Church reeled, bishops prepared for one of their regular twice-yearly conferences. It would be held in Dallas and the main topic—perhaps the only topic—would be the abuse crisis. Institutional insiders and their supporters were deeply divided over how to respond. The president of the bishops’ organization, Wilton Gregory of Illinois, struck a humble tone as he accepted criticism of the Church and wrote, in a February 2002 op-ed piece in the newspaper USA Today, “The law rightly makes it clear that sexual abuse of minors is a crime. We have all been enlightened. We continue to learn from our experiences and, hopefully, even more from our mistakes.” While Gregory reminded the public that Church institutions provided social services to 11 million people and health care to more than 77 million patients, he dwelled mainly on the crisis at hand. He wrote, “The United States’ 350 bishops and 47,000 priests share in the shame and humiliation felt by our laity.”

  Bishop Gregory focused on the responsibilities of the Church. Others began to parse the scandals. Historian Philip Jenkins wrote in the March 3, 2002, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that “the ‘pedophile priest’ scandal is nothing like as sinister as it has been painted.” Having missed on his declaration that the abuse crisis was ending, Jenkins opted to cast it as something other than a criminal sexual scandal involving children. He noted that most victims were teenagers and therefore most priest offenders were behaving more like irresponsible gay men than true pedophiles. He also argued that all denominations had their “share” of abuse cases and “The fact that Cardinal Law’s regime in Boston seems to have blundered time and again does not mean that this is standard practice for all Catholic dioceses, still less that the Church is engaged in some kind of conspiracy of silence to hide dangerous perverts.”

  Professor Jenkins was correct about victims and their age, but he didn’t seem to realize that this was a difference without a distinction for most people. Sex between adults and minors of any age was illegal and men who committed these crimes time after time with multiple adolescents abused them and the trust of the community. No matter the age of their victims, they came across as out-of-control predators. As for other religions suffering their share of scandal, the best informed experts on clergy abuse saw no parallels in other faiths. Sociologist Anson Shupe told the Globe:

  There are absolutely no Protestant equivalents [to the Catholic crisis]. If I could find some spectacular cases, that would help my career, but I can’t. You don’t have rapacious serial predators, and the Protestant establishment doesn’t tolerate it the way the Catholic establishment has.

  When he was asked to comment, Richard Sipe, who had begun to work as an expert witness for plaintiffs in abuse cases, seconded Shupe. “All the researchers I know say there is nothing comparable in the other churches,” he said. “And we have no evidence that it is as prevalent in other professional populations, such as doctors and lawyers.” Sipe was correct, however—very little work has been done on the rates of abuse in different professions or faiths. Incidents of sexual abuse have been noted among Protestants, Jews, and Buddhist clergy but no widespread scandal had emerged in any faith other than Ca
tholicism.

  Jenkins was further off base with his claims about the practices of Catholic dioceses. In every major case where lawyers forced the Church to divulge documents, they showed that bishops followed roughly the same practices to avoid scandal. Priest offenders were sent to new postings, laypeople were discouraged from speaking publicly about their offenses, and settlement payments came with demands for confidentiality agreements. Sometimes bishops sent problem priests to different states and foreign countries, without informing locals of their history. Similar practices had been seen in Ireland and would emerge around the world.

  The global nature of the scandal was apparent to anyone who cared to look. In the midst of the American meltdown, the Church in Ireland signed an agreement with the state establishing a $110 million fund to compensate victims of abuse in Irish institutions like the Magdelene laundries. (Inquiries into the problem of sexually abusive parish priests were continuing.) In the meantime, scandals were brewing in Australia, France, Belgium, Italy, and Chile. Just before Easter Pope John Paul II accepted the resignation of his friend, Polish archbishop Julius Paetz, who had been accused of using a secret tunnel exiting his palace at Poznan to access young seminarians for sexual purposes. Paetz consistently denied the accusations and there were no official findings.

  Against this background the Pope summoned America’s cardinals, and Archbishop Gregory, to Rome for a conference on the scandal. Having reached the age of eighty-one, Karol Józef Wojtyła had been pontiff for more than two decades and a priest for more than fifty. His shaking body and rigid-looking face betrayed that he suffered from Parkinson’s disease and the side effects associated with common treatments. He was increasingly dependent on other Church officials and at least one of his greatest admirers in America, writer Peggy Noonan, feared they were serving him poorly. Writing in The Wall Street Journal as the American cardinals arrived in Rome, she noted that the crisis was not a media creation but the fault of cardinals and bishops who were “excusers or enablers of sex abusers.” If the Pope wanted to make a start on getting control of the “calamity,” added Noonan, he should consider plucking the red cap off Cardinal Law’s head when he knelt to kiss his ring.