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

by D'Antonio, Michael

  Sobriety remained the foundation of Doyle’s life and when he returned to Washington, D.C., he found support in several Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. At some of these he ran into prominent Washington figures who trusted the group’s promise of anonymity and were never betrayed. But for the most part the meetings were filled with a cross-section of everyday Americans, from secretaries and custodians to doctors and lawyers. Doyle loved these men and women. On more than one occasion Doyle found himself listening to the wisdom of a homeless man or a lifelong drunk who had lost almost everything—family, career, friends—and thought, “There’s more wisdom in one of these guys than in all those fuckers in Rome.”

  Besides the AA fellowship, Doyle found inspiration in writings of theologians like John Shelby Spong, the former Episcopal bishop of Newark who advocated a modern view of Christianity that was less rules-bound and more inclusive. By the time he was done with active ministry Doyle was also finished with the fear that he might face the wrath of God for his straying from Catholic orthodoxy. He took comfort in the camaraderie he found within the movement that had grown up around the abuse issue. Attorneys such as Jeff Anderson, a fellow alcoholic in recovery, became his colleagues and friends. At SNAP conferences and other gatherings Doyle sometimes attended local AA meetings with Anderson. Doyle also set to work on a book he would publish with Richard Sipe and Patrick Wall.

  Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes would trace the Roman Catholic struggle to control sex back to the year 309 and document more than ten centuries of crimes committed by priests against children. In conducting research for this book, and for later projects, the three men targeted the Servants of the Paraclete, who had established the first treatment program for priest sex offenders. Founded by a priest named Gerald Fitzgerald, the center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, first admitted priests who molested and raped minors in the early 1950s. Fitzgerald, who originally intended to treat alcoholism, reluctantly agreed to deal with these men but from the start he held out little hope that they could change. In fact, he became the first whistleblower of the modern crisis when he began warning bishops, and even the Pope, about the men guilty of “tampering with the virtue of the young.”

  The line about tampering was in a letter Fitzgerald sent to the bishop of Reno, Robert Dwyer, in 1952. In it he urged that priests who abused be defrocked and cast out because “leaving them on duty or wandering from diocese to diocese is contributing to scandal or at least to the approximate danger of scandal.” Of course “scandal” was, and continued to be, the preferred euphemism for sexual abuse and despite Fitzgerald’s many warnings to his superiors, they did let hundreds of these men wander about as priests.

  Fitzgerald’s letter to Dwyer was found in a box of documents that the Paracletes had sent to an attorney in Santa Fe named Stephen Tinkler, who had sued them on behalf of people abused as children by men the order had sent into local communities while they were in treatment. It was discovered when Doyle, Patrick Wall, and Richard Sipe went to New Mexico to conduct research for their book. As they read Fitzgerald’s papers the three men found a kindred spirit who doubted that priests who abused children could ever be allowed to return to ministry. Among the more compelling finds were letters noting that Fitzgerald intended to discuss the issue of clergy abuse with Pope Pius XII in 1957 and his plan to house offender priests, whom he called “vipers,” on an isolated island. Fitzgerald actually paid a $5,000 deposit on an island that was for sale in the Caribbean, but he never completed the purchase. As his papers showed, Fitzgerald became more alarmed the longer he served. After discussing the problem with Pope Paul VI he followed up with a letter that said, in part:

  Personally I am not sanguine of the return of priests to active duty who have been addicted to abnormal practices, especially sins with the young. However, the needs of the Church must be taken into consideration and an activation of priests who have seemingly recovered in this field may be considered but is only recommended where careful guidance and supervision is possible. Where there is indication of incorrigibility, because of the tremendous scandal given, I would most earnestly recommend total laicization.

  Along with this correspondence, Sipe, Wall, and Doyle found photos of Fitzgerald with the Pope and documentation showing that high-ranking officials from many dioceses, including the archdiocese of Los Angeles, had sent sexually abusive priests to New Mexico for treatment long before the current crisis erupted. Altogether, the Fitzgerald documents contradicted Catholic leaders who said the Church was ill-informed on the problem and only came to understand it in the 1980s or 1990s. Fitzgerald’s repeated warnings were delivered to responsible men at every level, including the Vatican, in the 1950s and 1960s. When Los Angeles attorney Anthony DeMarco persuaded a judge to release them, they became key documents in future lawsuits.

  Because they did research that produced results, Doyle, Wall, and Sipe were often quoted in the press and invited to conferences around the world, where they offered insider perspectives on the Church and its problems. The three former priests approached the subject with varying types of expertise. As the most academic and psychological of the three, Sipe was the intellectual leader who knew more about the spiritual, historic, and mental health aspects of Catholicism. Doyle possessed a canon law degree, had experience with the many layers of the hierarchy, and knew the details of the modern crisis better than anyone. Wall understood how the Church responded institutionally to trouble in a parish, because he had been one of its troubleshooters. He also had a gift for on-the-ground investigations.

  Part pastor, part jock, and part Emery freight salesman, Wall could talk to anyone. Victims of abuse were comforted by the fact that he understood their faith but shared their critique of the Church system. His uncanny ability to make people feel comfortable was especially valuable as he travelled rural Alaska, often by small plane, meeting native people who had been abused as children by Jesuit missionaries. Wall wound up in Alaska at the invitation of a local attorney named Ken Roosa, who represented several native Alaskans who had been abused by a locally famous Jesuit priest, Rev. James Poole. A non-Catholic, Roosa had first consulted Richard Sipe to help him understand the Church and its bureaucracy. When Sipe met with five of Roosa’s clients in the small village of Bethel, a high-ranking official of the Jesuit order arrived to offer them settlements of $10,000 apiece. To Sipe, this man’s presence signaled that the Jesuits were deeply concerned, which meant the problem was probably bigger than Roosa knew. He urged Roosa to reject the offers and call in Wall and Manly for backup.

  Wall would travel north many times, racking up frequent flier miles on Alaska Airlines and learning to tolerate stomach-churning flights with the bush pilots who brought him to villages that could not be reached by any highway or scheduled commercial flights. Moving from one isolated village to another, he listened to men and women talk about Jesuit missionaries who had raped and molested them. Some of the women had given birth to fair-haired children. Every one of the victims expressed profound grief and anger. Entire communities were outraged by testimony offered by a former Jesuit leader of the order who minimized the harm done and said the Alaskans “were fairly loose on sexual matters.” (His words, uttered in a deposition, were made public by Manly.) In the same time period a spokesman for the Jesuit province of Oregon, which included Alaska, explained that priests in the wilderness of the north endured “a Third World existence. The priests are out in the middle of nowhere. They don’t have a lot of supervision. We did the best we could.”

  Among the Jesuits in Alaska, three abusers stood out. Two—Rev. George Endal and a former monk named Joseph Lundowski—traveled the state together from the 1940s to the 1980s. Lundowski, who was called “Brother,” became notorious for molesting dozens of boys as young as six. Endal was also accused by multiple victims. In one village, 80 percent of the men in one generation said they had been sexually abused by Lundowski, Endall, or both of them.

  During the time when Lundowski and Endall were moving from assi
gnment to assignment, Fr. James E. Poole’s voice boomed across the tundra on the power of KNOM radio, a station he helped to found. Named Alaska’s “hippest DJ” by People magazine, Poole was attracted to young girls and eventually admitted in a deposition to molesting many of them. As an adult, a native woman named Rachel Mike accused Poole of getting her pregnant when she was fourteen. She also claimed he encouraged her to get an abortion and blame the pregnancy on her father, who went to jail. The Jesuit order settled Mike’s claim and others and apologized to victims, but Poole never admitted wrongdoing in her case and has never been convicted of a crime. When another victim complained to Poole’s direct supervisor, a bishop named Michael Kaniecki wrote a letter indicating he had “tried to cover all bases, yet not admit anything” to anyone who knew of the complaint.

  Kaniecki’s letter, Poole’s confession, and volumes of additional evidence led eventually to a $50 million settlement for more than a hundred victims of Jesuits. A few years later, the order would settle a larger suit involving five hundred victims across the Pacific Northwest for $166 million. In the same states, local dioceses faced hundreds of separate lawsuits involving allegations against their own priests. Most would pay settlements in excess of $10 million. The dioceses of Spokane and Fairbanks would declare bankruptcy.

  Keeping track of the thousands of lawsuits filed in hundreds of cities would have been impossible for any one person, and as the crisis continued no one was able to describe, with real certainty, how many victims and priests were involved and how much money had been paid out. David Clohessy and Barbara Blaine of SNAP traveled widely to meet with victims and the membership of their organization exceeded four thousand, but they didn’t keep records that would describe the actual scope of the scandal. Far more people called for counsel and never signed up to participate in the organization.

  Perhaps the best running account of the national and global crisis was maintained by Terry McKiernan in Boston, whose BishopAccountability.org Web site became a repository for thousands of articles, depositions, and court rulings. Lawyer Sylvia Demarest and others donated their case files, and McKiernan busily scanned and indexed their contents so they could be searched online. Other databases, including AbuseTracker, which was begun by the Poynter Institute for journalism, were folded into BishopAccountability, which would eventually employ both McKiernan and fellow activist Ann Barrett Doyle. The site made legal concepts and news instantly available so that individuals and small groups could act in hundreds of places at once. It also reinforced the idea that the Church was not suffering from the sins of a few bad actors but was afflicted, systemically, with a kind of moral disease.

  * * *

  For dioceses and religious orders challenged in the courts, the volume of claims and the unpredictable nature of juries posed an existential threat. Bishops who were required to respond in these cases were also responsible to serve Catholics as pastors, which required answering their concerns without losing credibility. Almost all conducted their own studies, sending researchers to comb through files and produce reports on the history of abuse allegations in their communities. Though intended to settle controversy, many of these reports prompted journalists and critics to conduct their own analyses, which often uncovered more cases not previously revealed by Church authorities. In Los Angeles, for example, BishopAccountability.org quickly found more than two dozen accused priests not counted in the archdiocese’s official report on the issue of clergy abuse, which was called Report to the People of God.

  On a national level, American bishops commissioned a similar accounting by professors at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who asked dioceses to disclose cases going back to 1950. Their report suggested that about 4 percent of priests had been accused of sexual crimes. They also noted that abuse complaints had risen steadily until the 1980s and then declined. The vast majority of victims were boys between the ages of eleven and fourteen.

  Because it was based on self-reporting by Church officials, the John Jay study—titled The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States—arrived with limited authority. SNAP leaders immediately said the estimate for the number of offenders was too small and, as a self-survey, the study was seriously flawed. In fact, in several dioceses a case-by-case check of claims against priests revealed that as many as 10 percent had been accused of sexual abuse by a minor. (By 2012 the American bishops would count more than 6,100 accused priests among those who have served since 1950, a figure that represented 5.6 percent.)

  The John Jay authors didn’t attempt to name a cause for the crisis, but others used their findings to make arguments that fit their preconceived notions. William Donohue of the Catholic League said the study “vindicates what we have been saying for the past two years. The report notes that the scandal began in the late 1960s and trailed off considerably after 1984. This coincides with the onset of the sexual revolution and its waning after AIDS was discovered in 1981.”

  In Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland’s successor Timothy Dolan interpreted the report to mean that gay men should be watched more closely in seminaries because “there would be added temptations to the fruitful living of one’s chastity.” Bishop Wilton Gregory, head of the bishops’ conference, used the report to declare an end to the crisis. “I assure you that known offenders are not in ministry. The terrible history recorded here today is history.”

  The record was a matter of history, but despite periodic claims that it was over, the crisis would grind on. As bishops across the country plotted their own courses through lawsuits, most tried to avoid liability by taking cover behind statutes of limitation and other legal and technical defenses. Among these were the claims that priests were independent contractors not under direct supervision by bishops and that they were protected by the First Amendment. A few sought to negotiate settlements that would resolve large numbers of cases with a single signature. In Orange County, California, Bishop Tod Brown agreed to a court-managed settlement process overseen by Judge Owen Kwong, who sat in Superior Court in Los Angeles. Kwong, known as an expert in settlement, said, “I have no authority to do anything on my own. I’m not the slayer of bad people and I can’t punish you for not settling. I work for the government and I only do fair deals. That means I have a purpose for everything I do. Even the chitchat has a purpose.”

  Kwong worked in a massive building where courtrooms lined hallways that stretched the length of a city block. In his chambers, which were behind one of these courtrooms, he labored at a desk piled high with papers and files. Few judges would speak as bluntly as Kwong, who said from the start that the struggle would revolve around money. “Settlement conferences are dirty business,” he said. “And this was a settlement conference for what was basically a personal injury case. It was not that complicated.” Kwong was right. The money would be a major factor. But victims bringing the suit also pressed for access to Church documents that held the truth about what had happened to them.

  In most cases, including this one, Kwong studied briefs and developed a view about an equitable financial settlement before he ever met directly with attorneys. In the summer of 2004 he greeted the parties, including insurance companies, by saying, “Gentlemen, I’ve got this case settled. I’m only waiting for you to catch up with me.” Kwong’s mathematical model for the settlement, which he plotted on a single sheet of paper, was based on what he believed was fair payment to each of the people who said they had been abused by Orange County priests. The final agreement would depend on how many individuals were included. This process was complicated by the fact that the victims were represented by several different attorneys and they had trouble reaching agreement. At least one argued that the victims each deserved $2 million.

  Kwong’s goal was to reach a settlement that included as many plaintiffs as possible, which would take pressure off the courts and deliver prompt justice. As he watched the attorneys for the victims debate proposals, he signaled his impa
tience with blunt declarations. Raymond Boucher would recall the judge snapping, “You fucked up, Ray,” when it appeared that lawyers representing half the cases had rejected a proposed agreement. Boucher also recalled that the attorneys on his side finally came together and Kwong reached the point where he would agree to propose a deal of $99,950,000 to the diocese. Boucher and the others insisted the figure be $100 million and that the diocese release all records of priests who faced abuse claims. The victims and their attorneys knew that in these records would lie both an accounting of their cases and clues to incidents not yet made public. Both of these demands were agreed to by the diocese and its insurers. The settlement, a full $100 million, was announced in early January 2005.

  Although he was not much involved in the actual negotiations, the leader of the diocese got credit from victims who praised his willingness to release documents and his candor about the damage done to those who were abused. Bishop Tod Brown conducted a service of thanksgiving at the Orange County cathedral on the night the agreement was announced. For the first time, members of SNAP were invited into the sanctuary to distribute literature and participate in a Mass. Afterward, at a reception where he spoke privately with victims, Brown was startled when a few of them met him with an embrace. He said, “I wondered why I didn’t anticipate being embraced. I finally came to realize why I hadn’t. It’s because I was unworthy.”

  * * *

  By the end of the Orange County scandal, Bishop Tod Brown had earned the admiration of lawyers on all sides of the conflict and the respect of local SNAP leaders. As Brown moved on to other issues, his neighbor and seminary classmate Cardinal Roger Mahony sank into a protracted struggle with the 570 people who had charged more than 220 Los Angeles priests with sexual abuse. Represented by Michael Hennigan, Mahony refused to hand over many of the sensitive documents victims sought, and rejected Raymond Boucher’s prediction that the Church would have to pay $1 billion to get out of the tangle of crimes committed by priests. Mahony was also imperiled by an ongoing criminal investigation that put him in danger of indictment and prosecution.