Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal
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Lena was born in 1958 and grew up in the social tumult of 1960s Berkeley. His social worker mother and public school teacher father raised him with New Deal politics and Catholic faith. Lena was also influenced by the heritage of his father’s family, which had emigrated to Petaluma, California, from Florence. Before entering law school he studied history, and he enjoyed considering major events from a variety of perspectives that produced a nuanced understanding of people, places, and their time.
A law school exchange program brought Lena to Italy where he became fluent in the language. Between 1997 and 2005 he spent long periods teaching in Italy’s three major law schools—in Trento, Milan, and Turin—and developed both an appreciation for and deep understanding of the European justice system. In this time he found a mentor in Franzo Grande Stevens, who was chief counsel to Gianni Agnelli, president of Fiat. In the Italian model, a lawyer acted less like a public advocate and more as an adviser and assistant who handled sensitive issues with discretion. Lena, who considered American lawyers the equivalent of “hired guns” and U.S. law firms “corporate machines” preferred the Italian way, which encouraged long-term relationships conducted on a human scale.
An American who was well connected to prominent Italian lawyers and legal academics, Lena was a natural choice for the Holy See and it became, for all intents and purposes, his sole client. While the Pope sought reconciliation and confessed the Church’s sins, Lena squared off against Jeff Anderson in Oregon and Wisconsin. In both jurisdictions he would argue that as a sovereign, the Holy See should not be sued for the offenses of local clerics. Beyond this point he would insist that priests were not under the direct control of Vatican officials, and that responsibility for them rested with local bishops.
In Rome, Lena studied the Church to find out how the men who ran the institution thought and acted. He came to believe that their basic principles, which revolved around faith and forgiveness, had made it difficult for them to respond as others might. “They believed in the power of prayer and the capacity of people to reform themselves,” he explained. “They ignored the power of sex.” With Ronan, Church leaders also valued the man’s status as a priest, which “is not just something you are hired to do. It’s a matter of consecration, which puts a mark on the soul.” These facts persuaded Lena that his client was both morally and legally innocent and he set to work on a defense.
Lena worked out his legal perspective in his small office and at a cabin he and his sons built deep in a redwood forest north of the San Francisco Bay area. He gathered information, and rendered his advice during long visits to Rome, where he soaked up local culture and reveled in the cuisine. As Lena saw it, religious orders and dioceses were like independent corporations and the Holy See was “factually innocent” because its relationship to these entities was religious, not bureaucratic. “Jeff Anderson is trying to make it seem like this is an employment issue,” he said, adding that the “Holy See does have employees but they all work for the Curia [its bureaucracy] not in churches around the world.”
In the Oregon case of John V. Doe v. Holy See, the federal district court judge hearing the case rejected Jeff Anderson’s fraud argument but let it proceed as a tort case. When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this ruling, Lena asked the Supreme Court to throw out the claim. He sought support for his petition from the United States government, which had ongoing relations with the Holy See. In March 2010 the parties went to Washington to discuss the case with solicitor general Elena Kagan and State Department lawyer Harold Koh.
Kagan and Koh sat with aides on one side of a big table in a meeting room at the Department of Justice while the two sides presented their perspectives. Lena insisted that the Holy See was not responsible for individual priests and that no sovereign, not matter how small, should be hauled into an American court without more compelling reasons. Citing the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, he insisted that like any state of any size his client could not be forced into a courtroom on the basis of such limited evidence and claims.
On the same day Jeffrey Anderson appeared in front of Kagan and Koh with his co-counsel Marci Hamilton. A constitutional scholar who had clerked for Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Hamilton was questioned by government officials for two hours. They pressed her to admit that the Supreme Court should hear Lena’s appeal. Noting that John V. Doe was being considered under state statute, Hamilton repeatedly told the government lawyers “the high court never takes cases in order to interpret state laws and they shouldn’t do it now.”
Ultimately Kagan and Koh made a choice that Hamilton considered “political” and urged the Supreme Court to take up the case. Following the rule Hamilton cited, the court declined Jeffrey Lena’s petition and allowed the suit to continue. This decision marked the biggest victory to date in Jeff Anderson’s decades-long effort to force the Vatican to disclose documents. The first batch of papers, which Lena made public in the summer of 2011, suggested that the Holy See was not informed of the perpetrator priest’s criminal tendencies until after John V. Doe was abused and therefore could not be held responsible. However, this evidence came at the start of the discovery process and Anderson immediately requested a more thorough record be produced. Both sides expected this fact-finding phase of the case to continue for years.
In the meantime, Lena seemed to prevail in Wisconsin, where Anderson dropped a lawsuit naming the Holy See as a party responsible for Rev. Lawrence Murphy’s abuse of students at St. John’s School for the Deaf. Anderson’s decision was made as he received 30,000 pages of documents on Murphy, including papers from Rome, in a separate proceeding before a federal bankruptcy judge. The diocese had sought shelter in bankruptcy court, filing for protection as Anderson was about to begin deposing bishops. A few years prior to the bankruptcy filing the finances of the diocese were rearranged and more than $50 million was placed in a trust for cemeteries. Additional funds were moved from the archdiocese to individual parishes.
These moves, made before Archbishop Timothy Dolan was transferred to New York City, seemed to leave little for victims of abuse to claim, though the Church denied it had moved assets to shield them from victims. However, bankruptcy proceedings can yield unexpected results. The judge in this case allowed Anderson to search out three hundred additional clients whose abuse claims made them creditors. Two hundred others joined the action as clients of other lawyers. Together they alleged more than 8,000 incidents of abuse. Judge Susan Kelley established a process for discovery and depositions. Anderson deposed Archbishop Weakland and a longtime vicar general and auxiliary bishop, Richard Sklba, to determine if these actions were part of a deliberate effort to evade responsibility for claims. After reviewing the depositions, the judge allowed the fraud claims to go forward.
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The pressure placed on the Church by civil claims in the United States was matched by criminal investigations and suits around the world. Police in Brussels, where a cardinal had already been questioned by authorities, raided a bishop’s palace, interrogated Church officials, and confiscated their cell phones. In their search for documents they even opened a burial vault. All this was done as a government commission completed a report that found abuse cases throughout the Belgian Church involving more than 320 male victims and more than 160 female victims. The investigation found thirteen suicides among the victims.
Weeks after the Belgian report was issued, Jeff Anderson, John Manly, and Patrick Wall arrived in Brussels to meet with attorneys and victims who were just beginning to organize themselves for legal action. With the Belgian lawyers Anderson urged them to “be willing to take the hits and lose cases” in order to gather information and devise strategies for future successes. In the nearby university town of Leuven, Anderson spoke to about fifty abuse victims, some of whom formed the nucleus of a new SNAP chapter.
The meeting, which was held at a community center called Seniorama, was one part political rally, one part twelve-step meeting, and one part legal sem
inar. Outside the small meeting room a light rain fell on a narrow street. Inside middle-aged men and women cried as they told stories of childhood abuse and adult struggles with depression and dysfunction while Anderson sat in the middle of the crowd, listening to a translator and nodding. When it was his time to speak he stuck to generalities and answered questions the best he could. Many in the crowd were skeptical about him and SNAP, and they questioned his motivations. The session reminded him of the early days of the movement in America, when the terms of the campaign were not yet defined and victims moved warily around each other and the advocates who sought to help them.
Anderson received a warmer welcome when he flew from Belgium to London, where he negotiated the creation of a partnership with a British firm that would soon begin filing claims against Catholic institutions across the United Kingdom. In each country the courts permitted different kinds of actions and placed varying limits on discovery and the penalties that might be imposed if a plaintiff prevailed. But locals welcomed Anderson’s expertise in the affairs of the Church and he also brought Tom Doyle and Patrick Wall into cases as investigators and counselors. They would prove especially helpful in Ireland where male victims found them to be good listeners.
The Irish scandal never seemed to abate. In the summer of 2011 a third report, on the diocese of Cloyne, found that between 1996 and 2009 it had failed to report charges against sixteen priests. The furious political response to this report included a march through the streets of Dublin that ended at the seat of Irish Catholicism, St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, on Marlborough Street. There, more than a thousand people tied children’s shoes to an iron fence. The shoes represented child victims of abuse at the hands of priests. When a bishop appeared to speak with the protesters he was met with a furious response from men and women who called Irish clerics “child-abusing terrorists” and the Church “the largest pedophile ring in the world.” Anger flared in the Irish parliament and Prime Minister Enda Kenny condemned “the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, and the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.”
Normally mild mannered, Kenny excoriated the Church, noting that cover-ups had been practiced “three years ago, not three decades ago.” He added, “The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution—its power, its standing and its reputation.” Instead of dealing with abuse directly “the Vatican’s response was to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.” After Kenny’s statement the Holy See summoned its ambassador to Dublin home for consultation. In turn, Ireland closed, permanently, its embassy at the Vatican.
As the relationship between the Irish state and the Catholic Church soured, members of the hierarchy came under intense scrutiny. Eventually the BBC would implicate the highest-ranking churchman in the country, Cardinal Sean Brady, in a cover-up that had allowed Fr. Brendan Smyth to stay in ministry and gain access to his victim Andrew Madden. The TV network report showed that Brady had interviewed two boys whom Smyth had assaulted before he abused Madden, but did not report him to the police. One of the two, Brendan Boland, said he had reported to Brady that Smyth was continuing to abuse five other boys and girls. None of this information was reported to police or the families of the children, and in some cases the assaults continued into the 1980s.
The mere fact that the BBC would pursue, produce, and broadcast such an aggressive investigation of Cardinal Brady—and the Irish public would voice no real objections—showed how much had changed in the country. As the religious affairs correspondent of The Irish Times, Patsy McGarry, noted, “The obsequiousness of the Irish state toward the Vatican is gone. The deference is gone.”
Deference toward the Church was gone, too, in many parts of America. In staunchly Catholic Philadelphia, for example, 2011 found four clergymen, including a monsignor, indicted on criminal charges related to sexual abuse of children or child endangerment. The grand jury that indicted the men also reported that Church officials allowed dozens of accused abusers to remain at work. At first Cardinal Justin Rigali insisted none of these men remained in ministry. Weeks later he announced that twenty-one had been discovered in active service and suspended.
In time, the Philadelphia scandal would produce damning evidence of a cover-up conspiracy practiced by high-level Church figures. Charged with the criminal endangerment of children, Msgr. William J. Lynn revealed that then Cardinal Bevilacqua ordered the destruction of a 1994 memo that listed the names of thirty-five priests suspected of sexual abuse. As Lynn’s defense attorneys revealed, one copy of the memo was preserved by a Church official named James Molloy, who kept it in a safe along with contemporary notes about the cardinal’s order. Molloy’s papers were obtained by Lynn’s lawyers weeks before their client’s trial, when the eighty-eight-year-old Bevilacqua died of cancer. In ten appearances before Philadelphia grand juries, where he was sworn to tell the truth, Bevilacqua had denied playing a substantial role in abuse cases. He expired on the day after a judge ruled he was competent to testify at Lynn’s trial.
In the spring of 2012, Lynn was tried in criminal court on charges of child endangerment and conspiracy. The trial lasted for three months. In the end, Lynn was convicted of child endangerment and acquitted of the conspiracy charge. When she sentenced him to serve three to six years in prison, the judge said that Lynn had enabled “monsters in clerical garb.” The conviction marked the first time a supervisor of priests, and a higher Church authority, was convicted of a crime related to the abuse crises. Days later the press reported that the Philadelphia diocese was suffering a $17 million budget deficit and was shuttering parishes and schools to help close the gap. The diocese also put a beachfront villa in New Jersey up for sale. It was listed at $6.2 million.
While local civil officials pursued clerics in various jurisdictions, the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands considered a request for an investigation into the Holy See’s involvement in crimes against humanity. The complaint, filed by members of SNAP, named Pope Benedict and other high officials as potential participants in a conspiracy to allow the rape and torture of children around the world. Among them was the same William Levada who decades before had encouraged Thomas Doyle, Michael Peterson, and Raymond Mouton in their effort to help the Church avert a protracted crisis, and then withdrew his support for them. Joseph Ratzinger’s replacement as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Levada was the highest-ranking American at the Vatican.
Pamela Spees of the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights authored the complaint to the court. Her named complainants included victims from Africa, Europe, and North America. According to the complaint, Wilfried Fesselmann was abused by a priest in Essen, Germany. The priest was allegedly transferred with the consent of then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger. The complaint also claimed that Benjamin Kitobo of the Congo was thirteen when he was first assaulted by a priest who continued to abuse him for four more years. Finally, the complaint cited the case of Megan Peterson, who at age fourteen was raped by a priest visiting her diocese in northern Minnesota.
A client of Jeff Anderson’s, Peterson had recently settled her lawsuit against the diocese of Crookston for $750,000. She accompanied Spees and Barbara Blaine to The Hague and to a series of press conferences conducted in cities across Europe. Suicidal during her high school years, Peterson had been hospitalized more than twenty times for psychiatric care and she continued to need counseling. “It tears your soul right out of you,” she explained. “And the thing is, it’s still happening. It happened to me just a few years ago. And the priest who abuses me is still active. These are not just crimes of the past. Who is to say that in a few more years my generation won’t come forward and say it happened to us?”
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For their part, many Church authorities suggested that the incidence of clergy abuse had declined. In 2011 a Church-funded study by professors of criminology at John Jay College said that th
e majority of known offenses occurred before 1990 and the perpetrators were mainly men trained and ordained in the 1960s and 1970s. The John Jay report, which followed up a similar study issued in 2004, said that the majority of victims were males and that offenses against young children were unusual. (It estimated that 80 percent of victims were boys older then eleven or twelve.) The report also noted that homosexuality was not a major factor in the phenomenon, but that the influence of the 1960s sexual revolution may have been.
Not surprisingly, the John Jay paper brought protests. Critics noted the fact that the men ultimately responsible for the handling of the crisis had paid for the study, which a reasonable person might suspect influenced its outcome. They also pointed to its scientific deficiencies. The researchers had relied almost entirely on the Church’s own data on clergy sexual abuse, even though bishops had been consistently inaccurate in their accounting, erring always on the side of reporting fewer problems than they had. No accounting was solicited from victims, or their supporters. But while sober analysis was applied to the methods of the report, critics generally adopted a mocking tone as they considered its conclusion that “the sixties” were a causative factor.
In an open letter to New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Constitutional scholar Marci Hamilton solicited funds to “apply the tried and true research methods followed by the John Jay team to definitively link” a series of 1960s events to the trouble in the Church. The factors she proposed to assess included:
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was released. My educated guess is that most seminarians and priests started out the sixties scared stiff. Star Trek aired on television for the first time. Once Star Trek … made it eminently plausible that extraterrestrials exist—and can be more rational than humans—what man of God would not be concerned? The first Super Bowl. The beginning of the end of Western civilization. Neil Armstrong walks on the moon. As you may know, the Church once persecuted Galileo for saying that the earth was not the center of the universe …