Back from Rome, again in the sanctuary of his compound, Cardinal Law got back to business, His humility, so in evidence in Rome among his peers, was nowhere on display as he engaged an angry and increasingly empowered laity. He had his top aide send out a letter to priests, cracking down on a proposed association of parish councils. In Law's view, the idea of a coalition of laypeople working together on common problems facing the Church was “superfluous and potentially divisive.” Laypeople should express their desires to change the Church “within the hierarchical structure of the Church.” In other words, sit down and shut up.
“It's astounding to me that this Church seems to be so afraid of dialogue with its own members, people who love it and who would give almost anything to see the Church get back on track,” said David Zizik, a parish council leader whose idea it was to bring other councils together in a coalition.
If it was any consolation to laypeople like Zizik, Law wasn't being any easier on priests who were trying to band together to fill the vacuum created by the sexual abuse crisis, which had virtually silenced Law in speaking out on issues of social justice and morality. Law's auxiliary bishops began summoning the leaders of a nascent priests’ alliance in an apparent effort to exert some control over the group. The message was clear: dissent will not be tolerated.
According to canon law specialists, the cardinal was fully within his rights to crush potential dissent. But his timing, so soon after his humiliation in Rome, did little to suggest that a man whose arrogance was cited by critics as a leading cause of the predicament he now found himself in had truly changed.
And for all the apologies, for all the expressions of deep regret to the victims of sexual abuse, Law seemed as though he still didn't get it when it came to taking their feelings into account. In his first legal response to charges that Shanley had molested a six-year-old boy, Law's defense included the assertion that the boy and his parents contributed to the abuse by being negligent.
Carmen Durso, a Boston lawyer who represents victims of priests, said that using such insensitive language, however much it was legalese, betrayed arrogance, ignorance, or both. “From the start, the archdiocese has been incredibly stupid in the way they have handled this crisis,” said Durso. “And as hard as it was to do, they have managed to make things worse.”
Rodney Ford, whose son was six when Shanley allegedly raped him for the first time, was almost speechless in his rage. Two weeks later, the archdiocese reneged on its earlier agreement to pay eighty-six of Geoghan's victims. The victims’ lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, called the cardinal “a despicable human being.”
Judge Constance Sweeney ordered Law's immediate deposition, saying the Vatican might transfer him to Rome so he could avoid questions from the lawyers representing Geoghan's victims. On May 8, Law became the first cardinal questioned under oath for actions taken as a prince of the Church. It was as humiliating a moment as any he had endured. Law was smuggled into the underground garage of the Suffolk County Courthouse in a car with darkly tinted windows and used a back elevator to avoid the myriad cameras in the lobby. But some photographers captured Law moving quickly from the elevator to the closed courtroom where he was questioned. It was for all intents and purposes a perp walk. During the first day of questioning, Law said he could not recall any of the critical events surrounding his 1984 decision to send Geoghan to St. Julia's after abruptly removing him from St. Brendan's for molesting children. He said he had expected his top aides to handle the particulars involving a troublesome priest like Geoghan.
So as the victims seethed, and the demonstrators gathered outside his residence, Law soldiered on, rarely leaving his compound. When he did, to say Mass at the cathedral, the demonstrators followed him.
On TV, local-boy-made-good Jay Leno kept the jokes coming on the
Tonight Show.
“Tomorrow night, a very, very special edition of
E.R.”
Leno intoned. “Doctors in Boston desperately try to remove Cardinal Law's foot from his mouth.”
If he was watching, His Eminence probably wasn't laughing.
Sex and the Church
F
rom the time Peter lsely was seven years old, he knew he was to be his family's contribution to the Roman Catholic priesthood. One of six boys in a devoutly Catholic family in rural Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, he saw his future on an isolated rise in nearby Mount Calvary, at a small seminary that had been founded by a pair of Capuchin friars in 1857.
His early model for life in the priesthood was his local parish's monsignor, an intimidating figure who would announce from his pulpit the names of parishioners whose weekly collection contributions he deemed insufficient. “I remember being out in the parking lot of the parish,” lsely said. “He takes my hand in his gnarled hand — like a stone figure — and he looks straight at me. This is like God looking at me. And he said, ‘Peter, you will be a priest.’”
Isely's mother liked the idea; it was understood that young Peter would be the lsely family's seminarian. And for a time, he was.
At the age of thirteen, lsely headed up that hill to St. Lawrence Seminary, which prepared adolescent boys for the rigors of college-level seminary study. Isely can still remember his boyhood bravado about the school's patron saint. “Saint Lawrence's claim to fame was that as he was being martyred — roasted alive — they asked him if he had any last words and he said: Turn me over on the other side.’” True or not, it was the kind of story that schoolboys liked. Rev. Gale Leifeld was gregarious, jolly — the sort of “neato” priest that could talk to a young kid without condescension. He taught modern history, and the pupils were drawn to him. And Leifeld took a special liking to young Peter Isely — too special, as it turned out. One day, Leifeld called Isely into his office. The class was preparing for its first oral exam, and the priest said he wanted to make sure his favorite student was ready. Leifeld leaned back in the chair behind his table, puffed away on his pipe, and asked Isely to give him the definition of
nationalism,
a concept the teacher had asked the students to memorize. “I gave it to him word-for-word and he leaned forward and said, ‘No,’” Isely recounted in an interview years later. “I was so naive and so trusting I became completely confused and disoriented. I froze. He came up from his chair and came around and began massaging my shoulder. I had not a clue. What it felt like was that my head was being pumped with gas and my body was being pumped with gas. It was like anesthesia. He moved down my body, into my pants, and began fondling me. Then he stopped, like nothing happened.” Leifeld fondled Isely several more times, Isely said, before the student learned to stay away from the popular teacher. Isely suffered a dramatic weight loss, a sleep disorder, and a sharp decline in his grades. Leifeld, who was eventually sent for extensive treatment to the Servants of the Paraclete center in New Mexico, never admitted his abuse of Isely, but in a 1994 deposition, he acknowledged abusing others. Isely blamed himself for the abuse. “I thought there was something in me that was so evil and I didn't know what it was that was making him do this,” he said.
Why did Leifeld abuse seminarians? Was there an aspect of his character that made him desire adolescent boys? Was there something in the clerical culture that enabled or even encouraged such behavior? Leifeld has taken his own theories to his grave. And Isely, a psychotherapist who ran a Wisconsin treatment program for victims of clergy sexual abuse in the 1990s, isn't sure. “What he was doing, in his mind, I think, was some kind of initiation into a special experience of love,” Isely said. “I was a boy who needed love and this was what love was to him. But it was really all coercion, force, and terror for me.”
Long after the lawsuits are settled, the new policies are enacted, and names like
Geoghan
and
Shanley
have faded into the recesses of memory, scholars of the Church and human psychology will still be debating what happened in the second half of the twentieth century, when, it now seems clear, more than fifteen hundred priests sexually abused many thousands of minors who had been entrusted to their care. The debate is freighted with ideology—progressives are quick to blame celibacy and clericalism, while traditionalists are eager to fault homosexuality and sexual permissiveness. And, as is often true, an argument can be made that each of those factors played a role in some cases, with each abuser having his own story, and with no easy explanation in sight. “It's a great question, why do priests act out sexually against minors, and the answer is far more complex than saying it's just a reflection of society in general,” said A. W. Richard Sipe, the monk-turned-psychotherapist. “People don't like to deal with multifactored realities, but this is a multifactored reality. It's not just one thing. You have to understand that the priesthood is a powerful, enduring, beautiful, productive culture that has a very, very dark side.”
Social science has had little to say about the abuse of minors by priests — neither the Church itself nor academics who study mental health have undertaken a rigorous quantitative study that would shed some light on the frequency or nature of this startling phenomenon. But in the wake of relentless revelations about sexually abusive priests, even the most conservative defenders of the Church have abandoned the argument that the priesthood is no worse than any other profession in which adults work with children. “At the end of the day, this problem is more than a few rotten apples,” said William Donohue, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights president. “This is very big. I don't think this is a time for Catholics to become defensive. You can love the institution, and at the same time understand the need to get this out.” Even in the absence of hard data, it seemed increasingly clear that, although clergy from every religious denomination have sexually violated children, no major denomination has had a problem of the scale that has plagued the Catholic Church. “There are absolutely no Protestant equivalents,” said Anson D. Shupe, a professor of sociology at Indiana University–Purdue University in Fort Wayne who researches clergy misconduct. “If I could find some spectacular cases, that would help my career, but I can't. You don't have rapacious serial predators, and the Protestant establishment doesn't tolerate it the way the Catholic establishment has.”
Catholic Church officials are also now acknowledging a characteristic of sexual abuse by priests that differentiates it from other kinds of child sexual abuse: the majority of victims are teenage, post-pubescent, and male. Some researchers were using a new term,
ephebophilia,
to differentiate this phenomenon from pedophilia, the attraction to pre-pubescent children. “Almost all the cases involved adolescents and therefore were not cases of true pedophilia,” the American cardinals declared in a joint communiqué issued after their April 2002 meeting at the Vatican.
Part of the explanation for the high incidence of sexual abuse by priests seems to lie in the culture of the priesthood itself, a lonely profession that confers upon its members prestige and — at least in the years before the current crisis exploded—plenty of access to young children, especially young boys. “It has always been welcome to parents when they see a priest taking a boy to a ball game, or hunting or fishing or camping — the priest acts as a chaperone as well as companion — and conventionally, people have not raised an eyebrow,” said Rev. James J. Gill, a Jesuit priest and physician who directs the Christian Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. “If a priest is taking a girl off for walks or swimming or any of these social or athletic events, there is some question. I think parents are a little more skeptical about turning girls unreservedly over to the priest for companionship.” And Sipe called the priesthood a “homosocial culture. All the values within the culture are male, and the reason there has been such a tolerance across the board of sexual activity by priests or bishops is that there is a boys-will-be-boys atmosphere. It's kind of a spiritual fraternity — like a college fraternity, but with a spiritual aura around it.” Like many who have spent time in the clerical culture, a former Boston seminarian, Edward Cardoza, points to the twin factors of power and access. “The priesthood is a profession where you can find yourself around an incredible number of children, very quickly, and it is a profession that immediately grants you a certain amount of respect and standing in the community. It you have access to a vulnerable group like children, and you are able to come in as a person with power, you can really cause harm. It is a dangerous formula for havoc.”
Church insiders, who as recently as 2001 would routinely shrug off clergy sexual abuse as no different from sexual abuse by a Boy Scout leader or a teacher, are increasingly adopting a more shaded view that acknowledges some unusual aspects of the Catholic clergy. “I think there were a lot of factors,” said Rev. Christopher J. Coyne, an instructor at St. John's Seminary in Boston. “The most simplistic answer is that it happened because some men didn't embrace the life of the priest to which they were called. But why did that happen? If you look back at the fifties, for example, the number of men accepted into seminaries, without rigorous screening, was very high, and as you move all these men along in large classes, some are going to fall through the cracks. And then there was a second aspect: there was not recognition of the need to deal with issues of intimacy and sexuality. There were all kinds of euphemisms. And if you entered seminary as an adolescent, and had never had an opportunity to acknowledge who you were sexually, never got into a position of healthy relationships with others, then when you leave, to whom do you relate? Adolescents. And that caused all kinds of wreckage.”
The most obvious distinction between priests and other men is the vow of celibacy, and many critics are quick to charge that celibacy, as well as the Catholic Church's general discomfort with talking about sex, contributes to a clerical culture in which some men choose children as an outlet for their sexual desire. But Church officials point out that most child sexual abuse occurs at the hands of married men, and there are no studies suggesting that celibacy actually causes sexual abuse.