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

by D'Antonio, Michael

  Anyone watching the deposition video could see that O’Grady enjoyed the attention and wanted to explain himself. Fifty-nine years old at the time, he looked physically fit and very much at ease. His wispy gray hair was combed across the top of his head to cover some of his baldness and he smiled frequently as he discussed his attraction to men, women, and children as young as six. O’Grady confessed to cross-dressing while he was a priest in California, and noted that he poured enormous amounts of time into reading about his sexual urges and even formed a self-help group for sex addicts who met in the basement of his church in San Andreas.

  As they listened, both Wall and Manly felt a strange combination of disgust and fascination. O’Grady was obviously intelligent enough to carry on a spirited conversation about complex topics and he was quite charming. At the same time, he talked about his seduction of adults and assaults upon children without showing any signs of true remorse. He said words like “sorry” and “regret,” but his eyes shone with delight.

  During breaks in the deposition, which occurred over two full days, Manly and Wall went outside to walk by a stream that ran through the grounds of the hotel. As he stood watching the water flow, as it had for all of time, Manly tried to detach from what he heard from O’Grady, but he couldn’t. He tried black humor—“This guy’s the Lucky Charms leprechaun from hell”—but Wall could see that his partner and friend was struggling to contain his anger. Wall considered O’Grady to be more like the character Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs and he believed the deposition was a once-in-history opportunity for study.

  “Let’s find out what makes these guys tick,” he told Manly. “Let’s get him to tell us how he feels, how he thinks, what he does.”

  Back in the wood-paneled hotel meeting room, Manly pushed O’Grady to explain his methods. The former priest talked about how he slowly established relationships with child victims, whom he called “friends,” and disguised his intentions. Sometimes he slipped his hand up a dress in a way that seemed accidental. In other cases he began with rubbing a child’s shoulder and progressed to undressing him. O’Grady clearly enjoyed discussing his seduction of children, but he was careful to avoid describing incidents in Ireland, where no statute of limitations could protect him, or those that he might still be prosecuted for in California.

  Knowing that they might never get another chance to debrief a sexual predator at such length, Wall flashed on a question that might animate O’Grady. Leaning in to whisper into Manly’s ear he said, “Give him a name. A hypothetical. Call her Sally.”

  Manly tuned to O’Grady and asked, “How you would greet that little girl you were grooming? Just use the name Sally.”

  A change came over O’Grady as his face warmed into a smile and he pretended to look down at a child. “Hi, Sally, how you doing?” he said. “Come here. I want to give you a hug. You’re a sweetheart, you know that? You’re very special to me. I like you a lot.”

  It was a persuasive rendering, one that evoked O’Grady’s seminary days when he performed on stage in drag and his superiors noted he was “a natural for the part” of a woman. When he finished he looked up at Manly as if he expected applause.

  O’Grady clearly wanted to be understood, and he wanted to shift blame, wherever possible. “I would have liked somebody in the diocese or somebody to have intervened as early as possible in helping me confront this situation as a very, very serious one,” he told the interviewers. “And help to educate me to the very serious nature of the problem that I had and was causing.”

  For two full days, O’Grady answered every question. Fifteen hours of videotape were produced and this record was the key factor in the $3 million settlement the diocese decided to pay to Manly’s client. It also provided a guide to lawyers pursuing many other cases and an essential element for the documentary film produced by Amy Berg. Armed with the deposition, and interviews with many of O’Grady’s victims and their families, Berg went to Ireland where detective Withers had again located O’Grady. He was staying in a hostel in Dublin called the Avalon, where a bed cost less than $20 per night. Publicity had chased him out of the village where he had been living and his real name did not appear on the hostel’s register. Nevertheless, O’Grady was accommodating. Confident that he could make himself understood, he cooperated fully, submitting to interviews and allowing Berg to film him walking the streets of Dublin and peering over a fence to see children at play.

  A prize-winner at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival, Berg’s film Deliver Us from Evil featured clips from video depositions of American Church leaders, including Cardinal Mahony, to deliver a wrenching portrait of a voracious sexual predator loosed on society by supervisors who should have known better. The film was nominated for an Academy Award and stirred controversy around the world. In Ireland, O’Grady agreed to be interviewed by the local press and announced that he would voluntarily place his own name on a sex offender register, since officials had failed to do so. “I take precautions to make sure I do not come in contact with children,” he told one Irish newspaper. “I often see children on buses and then it dawns on me, ‘Cripes, I’m on a bus with kids,’ but I’m not a threat.”

  Irish public opinion about Berg’s film ranged from gratitude among advocates for abused children to alarm among those who considered O’Grady a danger. At the time when the film was released, the country was reeling from the details of widespread abuse in the report of the government commission established to investigate cases in the diocese of Ferns, which counted just 100,000 in its population. (There Bishop Brendan Comiskey had failed to protect children from Fr. Sean Fortune.) In Ferns the government found more than one hundred claims of abuse against more than twenty priests. The incidents reported by victims ranged from forced oral sex to molestation carried out in the confessional and on an altar. According to The Ferns Report, the local bishop who preceded Comiskey had ordained men who were clearly unfit to serve because of their sexual problems and he had ignored the criminal aspects of complaints for decades.

  In response to The Ferns Report, several Irish parliamentarians called for the government to severe its relationship with the Church. This impulse was tempered by the fact that the Ferns bishop, Brendan Comiskey, had already resigned in disgrace and so had the archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell. The Vatican had sent the diplomat Diarmuid Martin to replace him while the Irish government appointed another commission to find out what had gone on in Dublin.

  The government’s shift, from reflexive deference to aggressive investigations and public reports, was a sign that the nation’s leaders were catching up with ordinary citizens. For several years Ireland’s traditionally devout Catholics had been withdrawing their support for the Church. Attendance at Masses that once overflowed with believers had declined precipitously. Traditionally, 90 percent of Irish went to church every Sunday. By 2005 this number had declined to 62 percent. In a couple of years attendance would drop to 42 percent. Some of this phenomenon was credited to the cultural change brought about by Ireland’s sudden wealth, but the scandal was also a key factor, as it gave people a kind of permission to challenge Church authority.

  The decline of the Irish Catholic Church coincided with the rise of state interest in child welfare—a child protection amendment was proposed for the constitution—and the development of new agencies devoted to preventing abuse and caring for victims. One in Four, which was founded by Colm O’Gorman, grew quickly to offer a range of services including psychotherapy and education. In the same period the government’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was created in response to Mary Raftery’s film States of Fear. The commission had become a fixture in Irish politics, conducting hearings on child abuse in religious and state institutions. Fifteen hundred men and women who said they were abused in these institutions came forward to testify, and a job that was intended to last a year stretched on indefinitely.

  Painful as it was, the commission’s work contributed to a national reconsideration of chil
dren. Beginning in 2006, a group led by Trinity College professor Sheila Greene designed and conducted massive surveys as well as field research to determine the physical and emotional condition of kids and their families. Greene had been studying related issues for twenty-five years and knew that in Ireland more than 80 percent of children older than eighteen months were disciplined physically and that old ideas about children as the property of parents exerted a continuing influence on family life. In the clergy abuse scandal Greene saw the effects of an Irish preference for privacy and a reluctance to question institutions. “The Church got away with it because it was ours,” she believed. “It was knitted into our lives and looking at it was like looking at ourselves. It wasn’t until the suppression and repression of the truth was lifted that it lost its grip.”

  22. A RECKONING

  On the evening April 2, 2005, five clerics—one young, four old—knelt around John Paul II’s bed in a small room lit by a single candle. Long suffering from Parkinson’s disease and apparent cognitive impairment, Karol Wotyla had withdrawn from public view a month earlier. He was being treated for a urinary infection that his body couldn’t seem to overcome.

  In the Pope’s absence, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had celebrated the Easter vigil mass at St. Peter’s. The Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Angelo Sodano officiated at Easter services on the big public square outside the basilica. On that day John Paul II, whose infection now raged as sepsis throughout his body, stood in a ceremonial window of the apostolic palace. He was unable to speak.

  In the Pope’s bedroom, his longtime secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz said a Mass at 8 P.M. When he finished he knelt with the others. At 9:38 John Paul II stopped breathing. Rising to stand, Dziwisz switched on a light and began to sing the early Christian hymn known as the Te Deum. The other men who had been kneeling in the shadowy room stood and sang along.

  Te Deum laudamus

  te Dominum confitemur

  Te aeternum Patrem

  omnis terra venerator

  Translated, Te Deum begins with “Thee of God we praise” and in its entirety it is a cry of praise and a plea for mercy. In the Pope’s apartment, the words were sung by men who had long anticipated the death of their friend and leader. Some cried. All surely reflected on the task that lay ahead for the Church—the selection of a successor.

  As the third-longest reigning the Pope in history, John Paul II had led the Roman Catholic Church for twenty-six of his eighty-five years. His loyal biographer George Weigel, who never mentioned the abuse scandal in a thousand pages about the Pope’s life, called him “not the man of the Catholic 20th century,” but “the man of the century, period.” Jason Berry offered a different assessment. Noting John Paul II’s papacy was “riddled with paradoxes,” Berry described him as “one of history’s great Popes” but also noted, “His response to the worst crisis of the modern Church was passive to a fault.”

  The problem of sexually abusive priests was known to the hierarchy long before John Paul II became the pope and it raged as a true scandal through two decades of his reign. In all that time, he addressed it publicly fewer than a dozen times. In many of these statements he seemed most concerned about the welfare of the Church and said little about the victims of abusive clergy.

  Near the end of his life John Paul II did acknowledge the betrayals of priests who raped and molested minors as crimes. But to the very last he described the crisis as a product of the larger society and not the culture of clerics. And he said that Christian witness and hope juxtaposed with the secular “culture of the material and the ephemeral” was the best way to deal with the scandal.

  If not for the clergy abuse scandal, Bernard Law or perhaps Roger Mahony would have been considered candidates to succeed John Paul II. But in the wake of all the controversy, no American would be trusted with such a position. Instead the College of Cardinals quickly affirmed the candidate most Vatican watchers had considered the inevitable heir since the mid-1980s, when he was known as the “Pope’s pit bull.” Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI after his rapid election, had been involved in abuse cases for twenty years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As of 2001, management of these cases had been consolidated in Ratzinger’s office. Before and after this consolidation the Vatican acted hesitatingly and indecisively, showing more concern for the institution of the Church than it did for victims of abusive priests.

  Considering Ratzinger’s response to the sexual abuse crisis, Jason Berry went so far as to declare, in a commentary published by the Los Angeles Times, that Benedict “cannot credibly lecture us on moral law.” As Exhibit A he pointed to Ratzinger’s handling of the more than twenty allegations of abuse against the infamous leader of the Legionaries of Christ, Marciel Maciel. As Berry wrote, when he was not yet the Pope, Ratzinger had stopped an investigation of Maciel under pressure from secretary of state Sodano. The probe was resumed just prior to John Paul II’s death because, Berry suggested, Ratzinger didn’t want to look soft on crime as the College of Cardinals considered him to be the next pontiff. Berry warned that the Church “cannot presume to remain above the law if it persists in shielding child molesters.”

  Ratzinger’s supporters would argue that his shift on the issue of abuse, from defensiveness to assertive policing of his fellow clergy, was already under way before he became the Pope. On Good Friday 2005, before John Paul II’s death, then Cardinal Ratzinger had performed the Stations of the Cross, which recall the day of Christ’s crucifixion, at the Roman Colosseum. At station IX, where the celebrant quotes Christ saying, “Do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves,” Ratzinger reportedly added some commentary. “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the Priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! How much pride, how much self-complacency!”

  According to the newspaper La Stampa Ratzinger subsequently encountered a monsignor on the streets of Rome who criticized him for being so outspoken. As the paper reported, Ratzinger replied, “You weren’t born yesterday, you understand what I’m talking about, you know what it means. We priests. We priests!”

  * * *

  Six weeks after Joseph Ratzinger became Benedict XVI, the running total for payments made to abuse victims in America exceeded $1 billion. This line was crossed when the diocese of Covington, Kentucky, created a $120 million fund to settle claims against its priests. Reporters who knew about the 1985 report written by Thomas Doyle, Michael Peterson, and Ray Mouton called Doyle for comment. He said, “Nobody believed us. I remember one archbishop telling me, ‘My feeling about this, Tom, is no one’s ever going to sue the Catholic Church.’”

  By 2005, Doyle had come to make a decent living by conducting research and testifying in court on behalf of people who sued the Church. He hadn’t leaped into this job, he had been pushed. The process began in 2003 as the U.S. military invaded Iraq and Doyle began to shuttle between duties in the Middle East and his post at Ramstein Air Base. In Germany his superiors asked if he could streamline his normal ministry to make more time available for counseling soldiers who passed through on their way to and from the war. Doyle cut back on saying daily Masses, which gave him more time to spend with fighting men. He also moved his office from the chapel compound to a space in squadron headquarters, so he would be more visible and accessible to combat soldiers and airmen.

  Besides his ministry to the fighters, Doyle was known, even at Ramstein, for his work on the clergy abuse issue back in the United States. During one flare-up in the scandal he conducted a forum at the base where he presented his views and asked for questions. The meeting was held in a chapel that was filled to overflowing. As Doyle recalled it, he tried to give an even-handed account but was challenged by a civilian teacher at a base school who said she believed victims who claimed they were unable to speak up for many years were involved in “a scam.” She was followed immediately by another civilian woman who, Doyle recalled, “said that she had been abused at her family’s ranch in rural
Idaho and when she said something, her mother rejected it all, and rejected her. She didn’t talk to anyone about it but the horses on that ranch, until she was an adult.”

  Overall, Doyle felt supported at the forum but he also detected an undercurrent of disapproval among more conservative Catholics on the base. He heard grumbling about his informal style and rumors of gossip about his priorities. Committed to the service people who needed his counsel, Doyle was giving them more time and energy than he gave to performing ordinary duties like providing sacraments on a daily basis. Finally, a woman who considered herself to be a volunteer watchdog for the faith faxed a complaint to Doyle’s boss. She said that by conducting fewer Masses Doyle was neglecting his most important duty.

  The fax went to Edwin O’Brien, the archbishop of the military diocese. As Doyle would recall, “O’Brien had been looking for a way to get rid of me for at least four years prior to this.” Doyle said that the bishop had objected to public statements he had made about clergy abuse but “he didn’t have the ammunition on either occasion to make a move.” At one point in their conflict an aide to O’Brien threatened Doyle with excommunication because he was in “schism” with the Church. “I responded that I knew what schism was and I didn’t qualify. But what really enraged him was when I told him to go ahead and excommunicate me because it meant nothing to me anyway.”

  Ultimately O’Brien withdrew Doyle’s endorsement, which meant he could not function in the military as a priest. The Air Force kept Doyle on for a while in the role of a substance abuse counselor. He was the only Catholic clergyman in the service with credentials for this work, but eventually his superiors could not justify keeping a chaplain who could do no chaplaining. Having reached the rank of major, Doyle had been looking forward to the possibility of retiring with twenty years of service, but he was discharged just six months shy of the twenty-year mark. He believed it was payback for all his outspoken agitation on behalf of sexual abuse victims, but he fought the urge to lash out at the hierarchy over his personal problems. “I’m a good AA guy,” he told friends. “I’ll be sober today and sober tomorrow.”