Perhaps the most threatening case, where Mahony was concerned, involved a priest named Michael Baker. In the summer of 2002 one of Baker’s victims, Matthew Severson, contacted Jeffrey Anderson and said that he had been raped by Baker multiple times and that when he and his family complained Mahony had promised to remove him from ministry. Anderson called an attorney for the diocese who refused to discuss Baker at all.
In a deposition he gave to Anderson, Mahony recalled that in 1986 Baker had admitted to the cardinal that he had molested two or three boys. At that time Mahony could not have been ignorant of the seriousness of Baker’s problem. The press had revealed the Gauthe scandal in Louisiana and the national bishops’ conference had begun to confront the issue of clergy abuse as an organization. Even so, Mahony did not remove Baker from the priesthood. Instead he sent him for treatment, allowed him to return to the ministry, and transferred him to nine different parishes where he allegedly abused, at a minimum, twenty-three more young people. None of the parishes were notified of Baker’s past problems and, according to Baker, Mahony had said, “No, no, no” when he was asked if the police should be contacted about his offenses. Baker’s escape from the law was not an exception. As the Los Angeles Times and other news organizations reported, other priests who had committed sex crimes had evaded prosecution, and some had even fled the country without facing the authorities, while Mahony was head of the archdiocese.
As Mahony resisted handing over documents to officials conducting criminal probes, he also stood fast against providing them to victims of abuse. This stance prolonged negotiations on a mass settlement for years. Victims grew angrier as time passed and expressed themselves with rallies and protests at Mahony’s new cathedral. In 2003, victims paraded inside with a six-by-eight-foot cross plastered with photos of children who had been abused. In 2005 a man who said he had been abused by two brothers at a Catholic school handcuffed himself to the cathedra—or bishop’s chair—as Mahony conducted Mass. James C. Robertson had bought the handcuffs at a yard sale with this protest in mind. He watched in silence as Mahony calmly finished the Mass. When it was over, a few of the two thousand worshippers came to speak to Robertson. Some snapped pictures. One man told him, “Don’t you dare scratch that throne.” As they exited the cathedral people discovered about two hundred SNAP members conducting a protest. Some of the SNAP protesters had stretched yellow crime scene tape around the building.
The victims of abuse had been frustrated by the ways Mahony and his attorneys had resisted efforts to obtain full access to files on priests identified in lawsuits. Insisting the Church was protected by the First Amendment, Michael Hennigan had provided a limited accounting on these priests. He had also fought Boucher’s $1 billion estimate of the final cost for settling the five-hundred-plus cases that became part of a global negotiation. However, Hennigan and Boucher were not opponents at all times. When insurance companies filed a separate lawsuit against the archdiocese, complaining about the lack of documentation they had received, Boucher said they were trying to avoid paying their fair share of the money due to victims.
The money was always a big issue for victims, who believed the Church should be punished and they should be compensated for their pain and suffering. But it was not any more important than the documents. Individual claimants wanted to understand fully who knew what, and when, about the crimes committed against them. Activists and plaintiffs’ lawyers believed they would find, in the files, previously unknown perpetrators as well as communications proving that liability extended all the way to Rome. In time the phrase “exposure, disclosure, and then closure” would become a kind of mantra, signifying that what plaintiffs wanted was for children to be protected and for the truth to be known.
Raymond Boucher felt he bore the primary responsibility for moving both the defendants and the courts toward the release of the documents. To accomplish this he put a substantial effort into building a relationship with Cardinal Mahony, whom he met with in private several times. Boucher gave Mahony copies of the video statements made by his clients and he confirmed that the cardinal had watched many of them and that they had moved him to tears. But while he recognized Mahony “as a person with real empathy” he also considered the cardinal to be a “chameleon” who was able “to rationalize and convince himself that he was not a part of it.”
Still a Catholic, Boucher had long believed he had been born to serve some higher purpose. As a high schooler he had experienced something of a miracle when, during a fight, he was struck by a 22-caliber gunshot. The incident occurred outdoors in the dead of winter and Boucher was wearing a big down parka. The bullet hit a double seam in the coat and was slowed so much that it barely penetrated his skin. Boucher and some friends went to a drugstore and bought tweezers and antiseptic. The other boys removed the lead from Boucher’s back, cleaned him up, and Boucher wore the coat for the rest of the season.
In surviving, Boucher later said, he became far more alert to the possibilities of life. He was ambitious enough to come to California as a young man and rise quickly to become an insider in Democratic politics. Like Jeff Anderson and Larry Drivon and Roderick MacLeish, he was a driven and highly energetic man who seemed capable of accomplishing much more than the average person. He studied the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and wrote poetry about racism and war. One of his favorite sayings was, “Life’s short, eat dessert first.” At many meals, he did exactly that.
Life had taught Boucher that “really good people can still do really bad things” and for that reason he believed that big institutions required others to keep them in check. In the clergy abuse crisis the courts and the press had been activated to check the power of the Church and an unstoppable process had begun.
“I told Hennigan, ‘This isn’t revenge, it’s a reckoning,’” recalled Boucher. “And I said that I can have hundreds of people at the cathedral tomorrow hanging him in effigy if that’s what it takes.” On occasion Boucher leaked items to the press to shame the archdiocese, but if called by a judge to compromise so that talks wouldn’t break down, he tried to compromise.
In the end, the struggle over documents, particularly priest personnel files, proved frustrating to Boucher and his colleagues. Although attorneys for victims were certain the dossiers showed that Mahony kept priests in ministry after he had been informed of their crimes, the documents remained locked away. Boucher felt like the battle had consumed his life for several years and that for all concerned, including himself, he needed a deal. Estimates of the archdiocese’s wealth ranged as high as $4 billion, but most of this was tied up in real estate. Beginning with the value of insurance policies, the attorneys then worked toward a number that could be reached without forcing the sale of parish properties or the bankruptcy of the institution. In July 2007 the pressure of delivering opening statements in a trial that was slated for a Monday morning produced an agreement on Saturday. The Church and insurers would create a $660 million fund to settle 570 claims against more than 220 priests. This figure pushed the aggregate of money paid by Church entities in California to the $1 billion mark.
Big as it was, the Los Angeles settlement did not spark any criticism among the faithful. Some even suggested that the Church got off easy, considering the lifelong effects of child abuse. Victims were also generally positive about the deal, telling reporters that the average payout—more than $1 million—was a potent symbol. However, parts of the settlement governing the documents sought by victims disappointed many. It created a review process, to be overseen by a judge, that was supposed to lead to the release of files. Instead of producing a flow of information this system cut it to a trickle. Years would pass with few documents reaching the public as lawyers for the Church contested requests and each page was analyzed. Five years after the settlement, the clergy personnel files remained secret. Cardinal Mahony was retired, and Raymond Boucher struggled to repair the parts of his life that had been broken under the weight of the big case.
* * *
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sp; Unbeknownst to any of his co-counsel and clients, or even Boucher himself, the marriage that had anchored his life was falling apart during the last stages of the settlement negotiation. Days after the settlement was announced and Boucher made the rounds of TV news programs, his wife left him. The divorce and subsequent battle over assets shocked Boucher and the people around him. It would continue into the year 2012.
Boucher was not the only lawyer in the clergy cases to reach a point of personal crisis in the aftermath of a big victory. In New England, Roderick MacLeish entered psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder related to abuse he had suffered in childhood and the demands of his work. In therapy he realized that his work for clergy victims had been inspired and driven by his own experiences as a boy. MacLeish also divorced but, unlike Boucher, he quit the practice of law entirely. He traveled to Great Britain to visit the boarding school where he was abused but discovered no records were available. He eventually settled in New Hampshire, where he took a teaching job at tiny Plymouth State University. In 2010 he told a reporter for The Boston Globe, “I need to be peaceful, I need to be nonadversarial. I fell pretty far, but I am in a good place now.”
The demands of representing abuse victims against the Church also took a toll on John Manly, whose practice drew hundreds of cases from Alaska to San Diego and additional ones in the East and Midwest. Once an altar boy, Manly had given the priesthood serious thought before attending a two-week spiritual retreat that helped him decide against it. He remained devout through college, where he also became a staunch member of the right-wing group called Young Americans for Freedom. He went to Central America as part of a study mission for young conservatives. When he married his wife Jill in 1999 he was still so committed to the Church that he asked her to convert to Catholicism. She did.
Loyalty to conservative institutions made sense to Manly until he began investigating abuse cases. The abuse and cover-up he discovered among powerful men he once respected led him to first question and then abandon most of the assumptions that guided his life. One by one, he changed his political, religious, and spiritual views.
On an intellectual level, Manly accepted the facts in clergy cases and understood how power might corrupt leaders. But emotionally, he was unable to manage the disillusionment he felt about the Church. A frequent guest on local talk radio shows, he often made pointed statements about corruption in the Church. He did the same in interviews with print reporters, telling the Los Angeles Times, “I think the institutional Catholic Church—from Rome all the way to Orange County—is absolutely and completely corrupt.”
As assertive as he seemed on the outside, Manly often struggled to maintain his composure. He failed when he publicly accused opposing attorneys of delaying a deposition in the hope that “the witness will die” before he could testify fully. The outburst earned Manly an official rebuke from the court and he was forced to pay a fine. It also led him to seek psychotherapy and, finally, a weeklong stay at a therapeutic center where he began to confront his abuse of alcohol and his suicidal feelings. At the center, Manly wound up in a group that included a man who reminded him of priests he had known. (To make matters worse, the fellow had complained about Manly’s swearing.) For most of the week Manly found himself obsessing over the man and growing angrier and angrier about his presence. At one point he broke the rules, got in his car, and drove to a spot where he could use his cell phone to call his wife.
“Go back,” she told him after he calmed down. “Go back and do what you have to do.”
When he returned to the group, Manly decided to confront the staff and the man he believed was a priest. “He’s a fucking priest!” shouted Manly. “I didn’t come here to be lectured by some fucking priest on the language I use or anything else.”
The therapist leading the group interrupted Manly and asked, “Do you know him? Do you know anything about him?”
“I know he’s probably a priest.”
“Do you know how much power you are giving him?”
In an instant, Manly understood the effects of his own rage. For years he had used this anger to power his work, but it had also hurt his family, colleagues, clients, and himself. The outburst in court and the loose-cannon comments to the press were also the product of this feeling, which came from a limited understanding of the cause he served. He later said, “I had to get to the place where I could deal with the perpetrators and the bishops as wounded people who had gone on to hurt other people, not just monsters who had to be slain.” Beginning the transition from rage to understanding saved Manly’s marriage and, perhaps, his life. The ultimate destination remained years in the future, but the nature of the abuse scandal, which continued to evolve, would provide him hundreds of opportunities to practice advocacy with less anger.
23. “DON’T TRUST ME”
Most addicts in recovery say that before they let go of drink or drugs, they worried about who they might be without them. Many do discover they are different, but not in the ways they expect. Jeff Anderson, for example, still worked long hours and when a trial was nearing he labored through the night over arguments drawn on yellow legal pads. But he no longer needed to take big personal risks—in his car or in his marriage—in order to feel alive, or connected to the world. As his wife Julie would say, “He didn’t need extreme experiences in order to feel real.”
Which isn’t to say that Anderson stopped pushing limits. With Joseph Ratzinger’s ascent to the papal throne, he saw a greater opportunity to connect the crimes of priests with fraud and conspiracy at the very highest levels of the Church. Before he became the Pope, Ratzinger and the men he supervised directed Rome’s response to claims of abuse against priests all over the world. They were the ones who needed years to investigate priests who were subject to multiple complaints. Their signatures were on the documents. In U.S. District Court in Portland, Oregon, Anderson’s suit on behalf of men making claims against Fr. Andrew Ronan would be amended to include Benedict XVI by name. At the same time Anderson began discussing with other lawyers the possibility of suing Vatican officials in some international legal forum, like the World Criminal Court at the Hague.
The irony of a recovered drug and alcohol addict with a truly sinful past becoming the Church’s main legal tormentor was not lost on Anderson. Enriched by settlements, he bought an old bank building in downtown St. Paul and renovated it with an ecclesiastical flair that included marble floors, stained glass windows, an old confessional, and ornately carved moldings that looked like they had been ripped out of a gothic cathedral. His own massive desk and chair, made of heavy carved oak, could have come from a bishop’s palace. Anderson added lawyers and administrative staff to his firm and encouraged them to be as aggressive as criminal prosecutors. He also set about digitizing millions of pages of documents to make them useful for future cases and he made all of it available to colleagues around the world.
Although no one at the Vatican uttered his name in public, Anderson was, by 2006, the man most identified with the decades-long campaign to hold the institution accountable for clergy sex abuse. Not bound by the demands of dignity necessary for the Pope and leading cardinals, William Donohue of the Catholic League identified Anderson as an enemy, calling him a “radical who hates the Catholic Church.” In the summer of 2006, when a judge in Oregon allowed Anderson’s case against the Pope to proceed, Donohue told the press, “What’s really going on here is an attempt to fleece the Vatican by a multimillionaire with an agenda—it has nothing to do with justice. Look for Anderson to lose in the Supreme Court.”
In addition to predicting Anderson’s failure, Donohue tried to make him a subject of controversy, noting he was a former student radical and explaining that one of Anderson’s children had been abused by a psychotherapist who was formerly a priest. In this event Donohue saw the motive for the attorney’s work. Never mind the fact that the incident in question occurred long after Anderson had focused on clergy abuse or that he considered the man a therapist and no lon
ger a priest. Donohue found the association strong enough to declare, “Hate, mixed with greed, makes a sick stew.”
Such attacks—personal and insinuating—were Donohue’s stock in trade. When he argued with the gay Catholic writer Andrew Sullivan, he would make sure to recall that a decade in the past Sullivan, who was HIV positive, had taken out a personal ad seeking unprotected sex. This fact was presented as if it disqualified Sullivan’s suggestion that the police get more involved in clergy abuse cases. “It just doesn’t get much sicker than this,” wrote Donohue. He also dismissed another opponent, writer Mark Silk, because “Silk is not a Catholic—he is a Jew.” And between 2002 and 2012 Jason Berry would evolve, in Donohue’s view, from a “loyal son of the Church” into a “liar” who practiced “Church-bashing.”
Donohue’s use of language—his opponents were “well greased” and “goose-stepping”—reflected his personality and his perspective. When Philadelphia district attorney Lynne Abraham investigated abuse claims in 2002 he declared she had begun a “witch hunt” and was guilty of “anti-Catholic bigotry.” Although Abraham found broad evidence of abuse by clergy, the statute of limitations prevented her from prosecuting them. This decision was announced in 2005 and provided an occasion for Donohue to mock the DA—“how disappointing it must be”—and accuse her of wasting taxpayer money with her investigation.
Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal Page 38
