Canonical trial
An extrajuridical procedure envisioned under canon 1720. This option allows the bishop, if he is morally certain the priest is guilty, to remove him from ministry without the time and expense of a trial. The canon requires that the accused be notified of the charges and given an opportunity for defense.
Dismissal from the clerical state ex officio et in poenam , meaning an involuntary laicization approved personally by the Pope. This is a rare option because it short-circuits procedural guarantees. In most cases, however, the accused priest has already had several opportunities to mount a defense. Sometimes he may already have been convicted criminally.
In October 2002, the Vatican rejected the first set of norms approved by the U.S. bishops in Dallas. The reason was the need to protect due process rights of accused priests; the Vatican insisted that priests receive a full canonical trial, instead of being dismissed through the exercise of a bishop’s administrative authority. The American bishops had opted for this administrative procedure on the basis of perceptions that the Holy See was reluctant to remove abuser priests, based in part on the case of a Pittsburgh priest named Anthony Cipolla. In 1988, Cipolla and the Pittsburgh diocese were sued by a thirty-three-year-old man who claimed that Cipolla had begun molesting him at age twelve and continued until he was seventeen. Bishop Donald Wuerl removed Cipolla from ministry in 1988 but allowed him to remain a priest, settling the civil lawsuit in 1993. In 1991, Cipolla filed a canonical appeal with the Vatican asking that he be returned to ministry. His first attempt failed, but a second appeal to the Apostolic Signatura succeeded. In March 1993, the Signatura ordered Cipolla reinstated. The basis was that by sending Cipolla to St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland, for an assessment, Wuerl had denied Cipolla the right to a fair judgment. “St. Luke Institute, a clinic founded by a priest who is openly homosexual and based on a mixed doctrine of Freudian pan-sexualism and behaviorism, is surely not a suitable institution apt to judge rightly about the beliefs and the lifestyle of a Catholic priest," Cipolla’s appeal read. Wuerl fought back, heading to Rome with the case files. In 1995 the Signatura reversed itself, and again ordered Cipolla barred from ministry. Despite the edict, Cipolla continued to act as a priest, leading to a 2002 decree expelling him from the priesthood signed by John Paul II. The experience taught many American bishops that trying to handle cases in Church courts could be long, cumbersome, and fraught with potential setbacks.
Despite the Holy See’s initial insistence on canonical trials, Vatican sources say that as American case files arrive in Rome, in many instances the accused priest’s guilt appears clear to the canonical tribunals in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In such cases, the Vatican is opting for the swifter extrajudicial option, a solution not all that different from what the American bishops had originally intended. This stance is of concern to some American canonists, who worry that the due process rights of accused priests may be sacrificed.
A further reason for the extrajudicial route can be prescription, the statute of limitations in canon law, which for the sexual abuse of a minor is ten years from the victim’s eighteenth birthday. When the American norms were debated, many victims’ advocates worried that prescription would be used to shield accused priests. In fact, however, Vatican sources say such an outcome is more likely in secular criminal law, where the statute of limitations is an absolute barrier to action against the accused. For example, the June 26, 2003, decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Stogner v. California, which struck down a California law restricting the statute of limitations for some sex crimes, resulted in the dismissal of charges against some priests. Canon law’s bias is that a rupture in the community has to be repaired even if penal action is barred, and hence the extrajudicial option remains.
On the other hand, the congregation may review the case file, and any accompanying submissions from the bishop, and conclude there isn’t any warrant for proceeding. In that case, the congregation will direct that the priest should either be reinstated to his position or, in any event, returned to active ministry. In July 2003, Fr. Philip Feltman of the Toledo archdiocese became the first American priest to be reinstated following a finding of insufficient evidence. Most observers expect there will be other such cases, and it’s an open question how public opinion in the United States will react. News reports suggest that Feltman’s congregation cheered his return.
As of this writing, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was preparing a set of guidelines about the ongoing obligations of dioceses to former priests even after dismissal from the clerical state. The idea is that a diocese should not simply dump an abuser on the wider community. The Vatican is also preparing to take another look at the American norms after the two-year review called for by the U.S. bishops. Some officials believe that a quiet, case-by-case relaxation of the zero tolerance stance may result from that review. This is based in part on evidence from therapists. St. Luke Institute claims a 4 percent recidivism rate for priests it has treated and released. Although this figure reflects only instances of abuse reported either to the police or the Church, and the actual number of new acts of abuse could be higher, nevertheless it suggests that treatment and follow-up supervision can be successful in at least some cases. Other observers, however, believe that public pressure and the interests of the broader community will make any relaxation of the zero tolerance standard impossible, even if the Holy See should favor it.
In terms of civil litigation, the damage to the Catholic Church has been enormous. In terms of settlements that are a matter of public record, Catholic dioceses have paid out between $138 million and $173.5 million. This, however, is the tip of the iceberg, because only a couple dozen dioceses out of the 195 in the United States have disclosed how much their settlements have cost. Forbes magazine estimated in June 2003 that the Church in the United States has paid a total of $1 billion either in jury-awarded damages or settlements to end lawsuits, and projected that the eventual price tag would be $5 billion. In the Boston archdiocese, personnel have been laid off and fifteen properties are up for sale in an attempt to offset costs related to litigation.
A similar toll is being taken across the country. The Worcester, Massachusetts, diocese acknowledged in January 2003 that it had spent $2.1 million settling lawsuits related to sexual abuse by priests. In June 2003, the Louisville, Kentucky, archdiocese agreed to pay $27.5 million to 243 people who accused priests of child sexual abuse. In 1997 the Dallas diocese was hit with a $120 million jury verdict in the case of former priest Rudy Kos, which was eventually negotiated down to $30 million. To date no American diocese has declared bankruptcy as a result of sexual abuse litigation, but several, including Boston, Dallas, and Santa Fe, have seriously considered the option. They have held back in part in fear of the ripple effects for other dioceses, since insurers and credit agencies might be more reluctant to do business with Catholic dioceses once the precedent is set that they can default on their obligations. The millions of dollars being consumed by dioceses on litigation is obviously money that otherwise could be spent on building church facilities, educating students, or feeding the hungry.
The total number of lawsuits pending against Catholic dioceses in the United States as of this writing was estimated to be 1,500, representing thousands of alleged victims. Attorneys who specialize in this kind of litigation, such as Roderick MacLeish Jr. of Boston, Jeffrey Anderson of Minneapolis, and Raymond Boucher of Beverly Hills, themselves represent hundreds of clients. MacLeish alone has won some $30 million for more than one hundred clients in the past decade. Boucher has a website with a secure form for alleged victims to submit information as potential clients. Moreover, these attorneys predict that success in litigation against the Catholic Church will prompt victims of sexual abuse by agents of other social institutions to come forward, including schools, day-care centers, the entertainment industry, and even the Boy Scouts. Some legal experts believe the eventual impact of sex abuse litigation may be
measured in the tens of billions of dollars.
Though this book is not the place to develop the point, it’s important to note that while the dimensions of the sexual abuse crisis are perhaps greater in the United States, this is not an “American problem." To take just a few examples, Archbishop Juliusz Paetz of Poznan in Poland was accused in 2002 of sexually abusing seminarians, and stepped down from office on March 28. Cardinal Hans Hermann Gröer of Vienna was forced to resign in 1995 after similar accusations. The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland agreed in 2002 to pay the equivalent of $110 million to compensate thousands of victims of molestation in church-run schools and child-care centers over most of the last century. Thirty French priests have been convicted in recent years of pedophile activities and eleven are currently in prison. One French bishop, Pierre Pican of Bayeux, received a suspended three-month jail sentence for failing to report the conduct of a priest who was allegedly engaged in sexual abuse. In October, then-Archbishop George Pell of Sydney, Australia, now a cardinal, was cleared after suspending himself when faced with charges of sexual abuse. More than ninety priests and church employees have been convicted of sexual abuse in Australia over the last decade. A former Catholic brother in Australia, for example, was recently jailed for ten years for a series of sexual assaults against young children from 1975 to 1999. Examples could be taken from all over the world. My newspaper, National Catholic Reporter , broke a story two years ago concerning the sexual abuse of nuns by priests in Africa and elsewhere. No one whose eyes are open can pretend that the phenomenon of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is restricted to American airspace.
The financial and legal dimensions of the American crisis, despite the difficulty of obtaining precise data, are in many ways far easier to establish than the human and spiritual costs. Few would argue the point, however, that the Catholic Church in the United States has been badly damaged and that it will likely be the work of a generation or more to recover. Many U.S. bishops had no doubt hoped that with the December 13, 2002, resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law, the dramatic arc of the sex abuse story had come to a close. Many signals gave them reasons for optimism, above all the fact that media interest in the story dropped off dramatically in the early months of 2003. As the year wore on, however, indicators suggested a much longer shelf life for the story. Chief among them were the burgeoning lawsuits in the Los Angeles archdiocese, bringing with them the potential for more explosive revelations of documents unsealed by court order, such as the ones that had originally triggered the crisis in Boston. The deal struck by Phoenix Bishop Thomas O’Brien with Maricopa County to avoid criminal prosecution, followed by his arrest on a hit-and-run charge and resignation from office, further sullied the public image of the Church at a critical moment. With the Church still facing hundreds of lawsuits, and new accusations continuing to emerge, it seems clear that the close of the sexual abuse crisis is not at hand.
Moreover, the Church in the United States does not appear to have reached anything like a consensus on the root causes of the crisis. Public debate seems polarized between leftists who blame a clerical culture of secrecy, a hierarchy that looks more to Rome than to the local community, and celibacy; and their right-wing counterparts who blame tolerance for doctrinal dissent, asleep-at-the-switch bishops, anything-goes sexual morality, and homosexuality. Not only do these perspectives seem to be moving further apart, but it is increasingly difficult to identify spaces in the public life of the Church in the United States where people who hold these views are engaged in conversation with one another. The drift seems to be a more fragmented and divided American Catholicism—sociologically, one could make the argument that there are in fact three or four American Catholic “churches."
The crisis has generated a new literary genre of insta-books devoted to the scandals, from George Weigel’s The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Catholic Church (Basic Books, 2002) and Fr. Benedict Groschel’s From Scandal to Hope (Our Sunday Visitor, 2002), representing the conservative view, to Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church by Fr. Donald Cozzens (The Liturgical Press, 2002) and Toward a New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform by James Carroll (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), embodying the liberal perspective. Each book is well written, thoughtful, and contains useful insights. They should be read by anyone seeking to understand the situation facing the American Church. At the same time, however, each reads like it could have been written before the crisis began. In a sense, the books were written before the crisis, because they present familiar points of view from each of the authors. Weigel decried doctrinal dissent well before he knew who John Geoghan and Paul Shanley were; and likewise, Cozzens thought clericalism was a serious woe long before Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law ever gave a deposition. The books thus become a battleground for familiar ideological duels. Where Weigel exonerates celibacy, Cozzens challenges it. Cozzens allows that there is no “inherent relationship, in itself, between Catholic clergy abuse and celibacy," but goes on to say, “it may foster or reinforce, at least in some, the very psychosexual immaturity that leads to compulsive and diverse manifestations of destructive behavior." Where Weigel scoffs at the notion that an “authoritarian church" played any role, Cozzens is sure of it. Cozzens condemns the “sacred silence" imposed by church leaders and laments the “feudal, clerical culture of secrecy."
The status quo in American Catholicism, therefore, seems to be an ongoing crisis that is exacting massive financial, legal, human, and spiritual costs, and a Catholic community badly divided as to how to analyze what has happened. In this context, the frequent misunderstandings between the American street and the Holy See have been an important factor in aggravating and prolonging the crisis. It is to that story we now turn.
THE VATICAN RESPONSE TO THE AMERICAN CRISIS: A CHRONOLOGY
This section provides a chronological review of events involving the exchange between the United States and the Holy See connected to the American sex abuse crisis. In certain cases the items below summarize interviews given by foreign prelates to the respected Italian Catholic magazine 30 Giorni , to the National Catholic Reporter, or other news outlets. While some of these prelates are not Vatican officials, they are included because these interviews were widely read and discussed in the Vatican, and they often gave voice to views held by many in the Holy See.
December 2001 The Catholic News Service and the National Catholic Reporter reported that under a papal motu proprio entitled Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela and dated May 18, 2001, but not previously disclosed, John Paul had assigned exclusive canonical authority over cases of sexual abuse of a minor by a priest, along with five other grave crimes, to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This action predated the eruption of the current American scandals, but was in part motivated by a desire to bring the handling of these cases in other countries in line with procedures established in the United States. Under the rules, bishops were required to report probable sexual abuse of minors by priests to the congregation, which can decide to let a local tribunal handle the case or to take it up in Rome. The rules imposed strict secrecy, extended the canonical statute of limitations for this crime to ten years from the accuser’s eighteenth birthday, and specified that such cases must be handled by priest-staffed courts. In addition to sexual abuse of minors, the new rules assigned several other matters to the doctrinal office, including sacrilege of the Eucharist, forbidden concelebration with Protestant ministers, and abuse of the sacrament of penance, including cases in which a priest uses the pretext of confession to solicit sexual favors.
February 2002 In an interview with 30 Giorni, then-secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Italian Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone commented on the new Vatican norms. (Bertone has since become the Cardinal of Genoa.) Among other points, he suggested that the desire for financial payoffs was fueling the American litigation. “Even though the absolutely negative judgment on this behavior remains even if the acts happened 30 or 40 y
ears ago, there is a well-founded suspicion that some of these charges, that arise well after the fact, serve only for making money in civil litigation," he said. Bertone called it a “strange fact" that in the United States the Church is forced under civil law to pay for the misdeeds of single individuals. “This ordinarily doesn’t happen, and shouldn’t happen," he said. Bertone criticized proposals to make bishops “automatic reporters" of abuse allegations, arguing that a priest should be able to confide in his bishop without fear of being denounced to the police or other civil authorities. “In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated to contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has admitted the offense of pedophilia is unfounded," Bertone said. “Naturally civil society has the obligation to defend its citizens. But it must also respect the ‘professional secrecy’ of priests, as it respects the professional secrecy of other categories, a respect that cannot be reduced simply to the inviolable seal of the confessional. If a priest cannot confide in his bishop for fear of being denounced," Bertone said, “then it would mean that there is no more liberty of conscience."
March 3, 2002 In an interview on the sexual abuse crisis published in the New York Times, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls cited canon law on homosexuality and said, “People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained" as priests. Navarro-Valls compared the situation of a man with homosexual inclinations who becomes a priest to that of a man with the same affliction who marries. Just as such a marriage can be annulled, he said, the ordination might similarly be invalid. (Canon lawyers later said that this argument is incorrect since sexual orientation is not one of the conditions for a valid ordination.) Navarro-Valls also insisted that the Vatican was not out of touch with regard to the American crisis. “We’re very well aware of the dimension and implications of the problem," Navarro said, “very well aware." He said the Pope was distressed by the scandals. “He has shown tremendous sadness, a very physical sadness that affected his whole body and said, ‘How can this happen?’ "
All the Pope's Men Page 27
