In June of 1984, a year after the nine-year-old altar boy's bedtime confession, the Lafayette diocese secretly paid $4.2 million to nine of Gauthé’s victims. At about the same time, the families of four additional victims filed lawsuits against Gauthé and the diocese. Still, the mounting accusations and growing knowledge of Gauthé’s crimes were largely confined to village gossip and the hushed conversations of Church officials.
But in October, prosecutors indicted Gauthé on criminal charges that included rape and the possession of child pornography — photographs that Gauthé himself had taken of his victims. And Glenn Gastal, the father of a seven-year-old who was molested by Gauthé, became so outraged by what his son had suffered that he sought out reporters who had begun asking questions about Gauthé. The priest, Gastal said, had anally raped his son so viciously that the boy had had to be hospitalized. Gauthé entered a not guilty plea.
By late 1984 regional news organizations began reporting the Gauthé story. And in April, May, and June of the following year, Jason Berry, reporting for the
Times of Acadiana,
a local weekly, wrote definitively about Gauthé’s abuses and the Church leadership that had shunted him from parish to parish to hide his crimes. Berry followed up with a
piece in the National Catholic Reporter,
which were followed by stories by the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post.
For the first time, America's Roman Catholic Church was roiled by the scandal of clergy sexual abuse of children.
In October 1985 Gauthé changed his plea to guilty on the criminal charges and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. A decade later he would be released and arrested again on charges he had molested a Texas boy. But the scandal in Lafayette didn't end with Gauthé’s prison sentence. Gastal, the enraged parent, refused offers of a settlement and decided to sue the Church.
When his lawyer put him on the stand in a packed courtroom, with Bishop Frey and other Church officials in attendance, Gastal said that his son was so traumatized that he could no longer bear to be touched by his father. “After Gauthé, he kissed me only if I demanded it before he went to bed,” Gastal said. Jurors, several of whom wept during Gastai's testimony, awarded him $1.2 million, although Gastal later settled for $1 million after the Church appealed.
Despite assurances by Church officials that the Gauthé case was merely an aberration, bishops in dioceses around the country worried about new allegations against their priests. And they worried about what seemed to be a growing willingness on the part of parishioners to speak out and take their accusations to court.
Rev. Doyle said that he and the other authors of the 1985 report on clergy sexual abuse, which was written on the authors’ own initiative to address the bishops’ concerns, relied on support from Cardinal John Krol, then archbishop of Philadelphia, and, primarily, Law. “I met him [Law] when he was a bishop down in Missouri and we hit it off,” Doyle recalled. “I liked him because he seemed to be a thinker and not someone primarily concerned with Church politics.” Doyle said that he and Law would chat whenever Law was in the capital for a meeting at the apostolic nunciature (the Vatican embassy), and that it was only natural for him to turn to Law after allegations that priests were sexually abusing minors began to be heard in dioceses across the country. “Law was definitely a supporter,” Doyle said. “We never discussed any specifics from his experience in Boston, and he was in Boston when this was going down, because the issue was how do we get an action plan and how do we get the NCCB to do something?” But when the authors of the report tried to have it introduced at a 1985 bishops’ meeting in Collegeville, Minnesota, Law suddenly withdrew his support. Doyle said Law never explained why.
At their meeting the bishops declined to formally take up the ninety-two-page report. Mark Chopko, the general counsel for the NCCB, would say years later he had read the report and concluded that it merely repeated information previously gathered by the bishops. He also said he objected to a proposal in the report that called for a national crisis intervention team with expertise in medicine, law, and public relations to respond to allegations of clergy sexual abuse. “My judgment is that there is no substitute for local experts,” Chopko said. But by the early 1990s, few if any of the bishops in the nearly two hundred dioceses across the country had heeded the report's warnings about sexually abusive priests. In the meantime, Doyle lost his post at the nunciature. “I was too much of a maverick for them,” he would say later. The politically adroit Law, meanwhile, had been elevated to cardinal.
Aside from its recommendations for the treatment of sexually abusive priests, Doyle's report also took on the legal issues that were beginning to confront bishops presented with allegations of clergy sexual misconduct. In particular the report urged bishops to take scrupulous care of clergy personnel records, warning that they could be subpoenaed in civil lawsuits. It also dismissed talk by Church officials that files containing documents about sexually abusive priests could be cleansed of incriminating information. “The idea of sanitizing or purging files of potentially damaging material has been brought up.” But “this would be in contempt of court and an obstruction of justice if the files had already been subpoenaed by the courts,” the report said. “Even if there had been no such subpoena, such actions could be construed as a violation of the law in the event of a class action suit.” At the same time, the report also brushed aside a potentially more creative solution to the problems presented by incriminating documents: sending them to the apostolic nunciature in Washington, which enjoyed diplomatic immunity. ‘’In all likelihood such action would ensure that the immunity of the Nunciature would be damaged or destroyed by the civil courts,” the report concluded.
Still, the idea that bishops could use the Vatican embassy's diplomatic immunity to cleanse their files persisted. In a 1990 speech on pedophilia to the Midwest Canon Law Society, an organization of Church lawyers, Bishop A. James Quinn, himself an attorney and an auxiliary bishop of the Cleveland diocese, delivered a speech in which he appeared to recommend cloaking damaging records with diplomatic immunity. “If there's something there you really don't want people to see, you might send it off to the Apostolic Delegate, because they have immunity to protect something that is potentially dangerous, or that you consider to be dangerous,” Quinn said.
Quinn's remarks were recorded and transcribed into a document obtained by Minnesota attorney Jeffrey R. Anderson and Cleveland attorney William M. Crosby for a 1993 clergy sexual abuse lawsuit against the Cleveland diocese. As part of the suit, Anderson and Crosby took a sworn deposition from Quinn in which he denied that his reference to “protecting something that is potentially dangerous” was to documents that could connect a priest to allegations of sexual misconduct. “Obviously not a pedophilia report,” Quinn said, when asked what he had meant. “The use of the word ‘dangerous’ could be anything. It could be a confessional matter. It could be a matter, as we talked about this morning, that doesn't belong in the file.” In a statement issued through the Cleveland diocese, Quinn also said his comment “was a single sentence taken out of context from a transcript that covered more than twenty pages.” But as Anderson and Crosby noted in the deposition, the topic of Quinn's speech that day in 1990 was “NCCB Guidelines and Other Considerations in Pedophilia Cases.”
In 1984 Anderson had represented a Minnesota man who sued the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and Rev. Thomas Adamson, claiming that Adamson had molested him when he was a boy. Anderson had discovered that the families of other abuse victims had been complaining about Adamson since at least 1963, when a fourteen-year-old boy had told two priests that Adamson had molested him. Documents turned over by Church officials during the lawsuit showed that priests had informed their bishop about some of the allegations but that little if anything had been done. On the contrary, despite the complaints against him, Adamson had been named principal of a parochial school, where he abused at least one additional boy.
Other alleged victims of Adamson learned about the case and stepped forward with new claims. Some reached monetary settlements with the archdiocese. But one former altar boy pressed forward. In 1990, a jury awarded him $3.6 million in compensatory and punitive damages — the first time a jury had ever awarded punitive damages against the Catholic Church in a clergy sexual abuse case. A judge later stripped away most of the punitive damages, but the victim was left with nearly $1 million, and the precedent remained.
As word of the Gauthé and the Adamson cases spread slowly across the country, victims of clergy sexual abuse began to understand that silence was not their only option. And attorneys began to focus on trying to hold Church authorities — traditionally protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion, as well as by friendly judges and state legislatures — liable for the actions of their priests. Attorney Anderson, for example, would move on from the Adamson case to represent more than four hundred alleged victims of clergy sexual abuse, winning millions of dollars in judgments and settlements from several dioceses across the country. The result: still more victims stepping forward with claims of abuse, and more scandal for the Church.
The Archdiocese of Santa Fe, in New Mexico, was hit especially hard. In 1993 Archbishop Robert Sanchez stepped down after admitting he had had sex with several women. But his resignation came in the midst of a much larger scandal, involving dozens of priests accused of sexually molesting boys, that would leave the archdiocese financially hobbled. Many of the accusations of sexual misconduct were directed at priests who had come from other states to receive treatment for sexual disorders. The treatment was offered by the Servants of the Paraclete, a small Catholic religious order that had established a center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, for priests suffering from alcoholism and others who had been accused of sexually abusing children. But the priests who filled the center's fifty beds patronized local restaurants, mingled with townspeople, and even took on weekend parish duties. Two of the center's former residents — both of them from Massachusetts — would become notorious. James Porter, of the Fall River diocese, would later be sentenced to a twenty-year term in a Massachusetts prison, and David A. Holley, a sexually troubled priest of the Worcester diocese who molested more children after he was reassigned to a New Mexico parish, was eventually sentenced to a 275-year prison term in New Mexico.
In the meantime, complaints against priests who had received treatment at the Jemez Springs center mounted steadily. The first lawsuit was filed in 1991. Four years later, abuse victims had filed some two hundred claims and driven the Santa Fe archdiocese to the edge of bankruptcy through a combination of settlements and judgments estimated at between $25 million and $50 million. In the end, the archdiocese was able to cling to solvency only after selling off Church property and appealing to parishioners for extra cash.
The Dallas diocese also faced bankruptcy, in 1997, when a jury seeking to send a pointed message to the Church awarded $119.6 million to the families of eleven youths sexually molested at All Saints Catholic Church from 1981 to 1992 by Rev. Rudolph Kos. It was the largest verdict ever awarded against the Catholic Church in America. Kos was later sentenced to life in prison. After the Church appealed the award and said it might bankrupt the diocese, the families of the victims eventually agreed to accept $31 million. Jurors said they were motivated by the knowledge that Church officials had brushed aside earlier allegations against Kos and by their belief that Kos's abuse had led one victim to commit suicide. The jury even took the unusual step of including with the award a message to Church authorities: “Please admit your guilt and allow these young men to get on with their lives.” Later one juror explained the record award, saying, “We wanted to say that this must stop and never be allowed to happen again.”
The first public scandal to put Cardinal Law on the defensive was the case of Father Porter, a serial child molester from the neighboring Diocese of Fall River. In 1992 more than one hundred people who claimed they'd been molested by Porter over fourteen years in a string of parishes across southeastern Massachusetts were stepping forward.
By then Porter had been retired for eighteen years and was living in Minnesota with a wife and four children. But because the statute of limitations is frozen when an alleged criminal leaves the state, he was tried and prosecuted in Massachusetts for the crimes he'd committed decades earlier. Within eighteen months, Porter pleaded guilty to forty-one counts of sexual assault and was sentenced to prison. The Fall River diocese agreed to pay more than $7 million to his victims.
While the claims against Porter mushroomed, families and friends of the victims were overwhelmed by a single question: How could Porter have molested so many children without getting caught and being punished? Two answers came from the victims themselves: the unquestioning deference of Catholic children to clergy, and a profound reluctance on the part of Church officials to investigate the complaints of the few parishioners courageous enough to question a priest. “We were taught they were Christ's representatives on earth, and that's a direct quote,” said Fred Paine of Altleboro, one of Porter's victims. “A priest would walk in and nuns would bow.”
Roderick MacLeish Jr., a Boston attorney who represented most of Porter's victims, said several priests in the diocese were told of Porter's crimes against children yet did nothing to stop him. In fact, the lawyer said, at least ten individuals had informed two priests in St. Mary's parish in North Attleboro that Porter, who was their assistant, was molesting young children. In some instances the two priests, Rev. Edward Booth and Rev, Armando Annunziato, had actually witnessed the abuse. In one case, Porter had taken a young boy named Paul Merry into a rectory office and had begun molesting him when Booth, the church pastor, happened to walk in, “Father Booth looked at Father Porter and then back at me, and then at Father Porter, who was zipping his fly,” Merry recalled. “Then Father Booth shook his head and walked out the door. He didn't say a word.” In another case, Porter was once again in the rectory office at St. Mary's, molesting an eleven-year-old named Peter Calderone. This time it was Annunziato who walked in. But like Booth, he merely looked at Porter and said, “It's getting late. It's time for everyone to go home.”