In Los Angeles, the nation's largest archdiocese, Cardinal Roger Mahony admitted that he had made a mistake when he transferred a priest accused of assaulting children to a chaplain's post at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center fourteen years earlier without giving hospital officers details of the allegations against him, and publicly apologized to children who had been attacked by priests. He announced a zero-tolerance policy on sexual abuse: No priest credibly accused would ever return to parish work or retain any position with the archdiocese, he promised. And he fired eight priests, most of them retired, who had been accused of abuse.
For some, this was too little, too late. In 1998 Mahony himself had been at the center of a sensational clergy sexual abuse trial involving two brothers who lived near the industrial city of Stockton in California's Central Valley. They had allegedly been abused by a priest for years until they were in their late teens. The brothers won $7.6 million in damages after a jury heard testimony from a psychiatrist that Mahony, then Stockton's bishop but not a defendant in the suit, knew the priest was a pedophile and a risk to children. But Mahony then shipped the priest to another parish, where he abused others for years. At the trial, Mahony insisted he was not aware of the allegations against the priest. In late April, Mahony was sued under a federal racketeering law usually reserved for organized-crime figures, as two sets of brothers charged that they were abused as children by a Los Angeles diocesan priest.
The scandal also spread abroad.
By late March, a prominent Polish archbishop with ties to the Pope had resigned. Archbishop Juliusz Paetz of Poznan was accused of making sexual advances to young clerics, He denied it, but said he was leaving “for the good of the Church.” Paetz, sixty-seven, was trained in Rome at two prestigious colleges and worked closely with Popes Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II. He was a member of John Paul II's household staff before the pontiff sent him back to Poland as bishop of Lomza in 1982. Fellow priests had accused Paetz of paying night visits to the lodgings of seminarians, cuddling up to young clerics in public, and using an underground tunnel to pay unannounced visits to their dormitories. “Not everyone understood my genuine openness and spontaneity toward people,” Paetz said. “There was a misinterpretation of my words and gestures.”
Then, in early April, a senior prelate in Ireland was gone. Bishop Brendan Comiskey, the bishop of Ferns in Ireland's southeast, became the first known member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to resign voluntarily because of his mismanagement of a priest who had sexually abused children. Comiskey had been under fire for years for his handling of a pedophile priest, Rev. Sean Fortune. In 1999 Fortune had killed himself after he was charged with abusing boys, and Comiskey's resignation came on the eve of the airing in Ireland of a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary about some of Fortune's victims. “I did my best,” Comiskey said outside his office in Wexford, reading a statement that shocked a nation where more than 90 percent of the 3.6 million people are Catholic. “Clearly that was not good enough…. As bishop I should be a binding force among people and priests within the ministry of Christ. I had hoped that I could bring about reconciliation between the diocese and those who were abused. Such, I hope, might be part of the healing. I now recognize that I am not the person who can best achieve these aims of unity and reconciliation. My continuation in office could indeed be an obstacle to healing.”
In Mexico, whose 90 million Catholics make up the religion's second-largest congregation after Brazil, Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Mexico City rebuffed the nation's conference of bishops, which had maintained that charges of sexual abuse by priests should be dealt with internally. Bishop Sergio Obeso of Japala had argued that abusive priests should not be handed over to police, saying, “Dirty laundry is best washed at home.” That position was assailed in the Mexican press and derided by Mexican judicial officials, who equated any move to stifle the reporting of abuse with cover-up and disaster. Rivera agreed. The cardinal said priests who abuse children deserve no special treatment. “They should be denounced to the corresponding authorities and justice must be done” Rivera announced in a sermon on national television. “No one should have immunity or privileges or be above the law.”
In the United States, the impact of the scandal and the Church's struggle to cope with it were dramatically underscored by a series of Cardinal Mahony's confidential e-mails that were leaked to Los Angeles radio station KFI, which made copies available to the
Los Angeles Times.
The archdiocese's emergency appeal to a court to block their publication failed when a superior court judge ruled that the U.S. Constitution did not allow him to keep the cardinal's correspondence out of the pages of one of the nation's largest newspapers.
In one e-mail, dated March 27, Mahony was frustrated by his aides’ failure to hand over to the police some of the names of the priests he had fired. The cardinal took to his computer to warn that he could be subpoenaed by a grand jury. The e-mail was entitled “Our Big Mistake.” It was sent at seven o'clock on a Wednesday morning to Sister Judith Murphy, the archdiocese's general counsel.
Mahony, the nation's youngest cardinal, wrote:
Sr. Judy,
As the drum beats continue from every side for us to release the “names,” I must still point to what I consider our greatest tactical mistake of the past few weeks.
If I recall, of the 8 priests involved, 5 had already been reported to local law enforcement agencies. That leaves 3.
Mahony's e-mail recounted how Murphy had resisted Mahony's suggestion that she consult with police about the other three priests. He said he had run out of patience and ordered immediate action. The tone of the electronic conversation underscored the gravity of the crisis that was by then the talk of the nation.
If we don't, today, “consult” with the Det. about those 3 names, I can guarantee you that I will get hauled into a Grand Jury proceeding and I will be forced to give all the names, etc.
I must now insist that this matter is no longer open for discussion. You must consult with the Det. about those 3 cases.
Mahony had reason to worry. Two days before, Los Angeles chief of police Bernard Parks had demanded to know the names. Mahony was frustrated that the archdiocese's lawyers were not forthcoming:
I'm not sure you grasp the gravity of the situation and where this is heading — not only with the media, but with the law enforcement and legal folks.
… If we don't take immediate, aggressive action here — the consequences for the [archdiocese] are going to be incredible: charges of cover-up, concealing criminals, etc., etc.
PLEASE make this task your highest priority this morning! I have reached the point where if I cannot guarantee that all 8 have been appropriately reported, then I will have to call the Det. and do it myself— today.
There is no middle ground on this one; we are losing the battle because we are somehow “hiding” those 3. The best way is to “consult” with the Det, about them, and let them decide what needs to be done next.
Thanks for listening. This public media pressure will never stop until we can announce that those few priests have all been reported to the appropriate authorities over the years.
+RMM
The archdiocese ultimately turned the priests’ names over to the police, and Mahony became a leading voice for reform among American prelates. But when he and the other American cardinals met at the Vatican with the Pope, they did not, as Mahony had hoped, have a serious debate about priestly celibacy. The cardinals could not even agree on the details of a zero-tolerance policy under which any priest who sexually abused a child would face instant removal. Instead, the princes of the Church embraced a set of very traditional tenets: Priests and bishops should be holier. Pastors should reprimand people who spread dissent. Seminaries should more carefully screen applicants.
In the end, all the cardinals could muster was a single acknowledgment of the bishops’ role, saying in a letter to priests, “We regret episcopal oversight has not been able to preserve the Church from this scandal.”
As summer approached, that scandal turned violent and, in one case, deadly.
In the same week in mid-May, a man shot a Catholic priest in Baltimore who he said had sexually abused him nearly a decade before. It marked the first time since the scandal broke in January that an alleged victim had responded with such violence. Days later, a priest from Bridgeport, Connecticut, committed suicide at a Catholic psychiatric hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was found hanged in St. Luke Institute seventeen days after he was removed from his parish when several men accused him of molesting them two decades ago.
The Decline of Deference
W
hen Daniel F. Conley was growing up in the Hyde Park section of Boston, it was not uncommon for some of the nuns to smack children who stepped out of line. And if they did, kids wouldn't say anything when they got home, because they feared their parents would smack them again. If the nuns hit you, it was thought, you deserved it.
It was a different time. If the police pulled over a weaving car and saw that the driver was wearing a Roman collar, usually they would either drive him home or let him go with a warning: “Be careful, Father.”
But that was then. In March 2002 Dan Conley, the district attorney for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, opened a file on his desk and saw that the target of a criminal investigation generated by allegations of sexual abuse was Monsignor Frederick J. Ryan — his religion teacher at Catholic Memorial High School approximately thirty years earlier.
Conley, the chief prosecutor in Boston, is a devout Catholic. He is pained by what is happening to his Church. But unlike some previous generations of law enforcement officials, who turned a blind eye to their Church's crimes and misdemeanors, Conley's reaction to the file he had before him was a no-brainer. He picked up the phone and called his colleague, Martha Coakley, the district attorney in neighboring Middlesex County, to ask her to handle the case, to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest.
Given the predominance of Irish Catholics in Massachusetts law enforcement circles, it's not surprising there had been little appetite to prosecute priests for anything, including the sexual abuse of children. Until recent years most Boston cops still had the map of Ireland on their face. Even when Ralph G. Martin II, Conley's predecessor, became the first African American to hold the post of district attorney in Boston in 1992, he inherited a roster of lawyers that read like the Dublin phone book.
It was the same in politics, where the names that dominated city hall and the State House, and those who represented the city and state in Washington, were Curley, McCormack, O'Neill, Flynn, and, most famously, Kennedy. When John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic to be elected president, one of the first people he invited to his inauguration was Boston's Cardinal Richard J. Cushing. Three years later Cushing flew from Boston to Washington to preside over the assassinated president's funeral.
The deference that politicians, police, and prosecutors showed the Catholic Church (to which most of them belonged) mirrored a deference shown in the wider society. But the extent of the sexual abuse that spilled out after the Geoghan case, especially the Church's efforts to buy the silence of the victims, shook to the core even the most devout Catholics in law enforcement and politics. A culture of deference that had taken more than a century to evolve seemed to erode in a matter of weeks. In other parts of the United States, there was a similar change in the way secular power viewed Church authorities. On Long Island, in Cincinnati, and in Philadelphia, district attorneys convened grand juries to investigate the role Church officials may have played in the scandal.
Many ordinary people said the newfound willingness of some prosecutors to hold the Church more accountable still showed deference because most still seemed unwilling to haul priests and bishops before grand juries to try to build criminal cases against them for harboring child molesters. But most prosecutors said they simply didn't have the laws to use.
The shift in attitudes toward the Church among secular authorities was nationwide, but it was most dramatic in Boston. The children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of immigrants who would never dream of challenging anything a priest did now demanded not just answers from their Church leaders but accountability. Even as Cardinal Law struggled to maintain his grip on power inside the Church, outside forces were building against him and other officials who never before had to worry about such pressure. The First Amendment, guaranteeing a separation of church and state, had always served as a deterrent to secular authorities probing too deeply into Church affairs. Local custom made it even more taboo for secular power brokers to throw their weight around with the Church. Cardinal Law could rightly say that by hiding the sexual abuse of priests from public view, he was doing no more than what his predecessors did. But that no longer cut him any slack with prosecutors and politicians, whose outrage at the Church's conduct was rising as their deference waned.
“I remember reading the first Spotlight reports and just getting furious,” recalled Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, the state's top prosecutor. “I found myself yelling out loud, ‘My God, this is about children!’”
Reilly's parents had come from Ireland and were deeply devoted to the Church. Like many Irish immigrants who settled in Springfield, the third-largest city in Massachusetts, one hundred miles west of Boston, his mother hailed from Dingle, a picturesque harbor town in County Kerry. His father worked for the Springfield Department of Public Works but had grown up in a small village in County Mayo, where the priest was the most important person. Reilly's parents set a devout tone for his three brothers and two sisters. Even when he was teenager, Reilly was expected to be home at 7
P.M
. “We knelt down and said the Rosary, as a family, every night,” the attorney general recalled.