Can the Church Be Saved?
As allegations of sex abuse—and official cover-up—mount, outraged Roman
Catholics are urging their leaders to redeem and reform the faith
BY JOHANNA MCGEARY
The shock is that so many cases have spilled like stained vestments into
public view—not just in Boston but in Los Angeles and St. Louis, Mo., and
Philadelphia and Palm Beach, Fla., and Washington and Portland, Maine, and
Bridgeport, Conn. The horror is not their singularity but their ghastly
similarity: claims of a Roman Catholic priest sexually abusing children, and
the church covering it up whether it involves Father Dan or Father Oliver or
Father Rocco ...
Or Father Brett. Frank Martinelli was an impressionable 14-year-old altar
boy who yearned to be a priest. He saw a holy future unfolding when the Rev.
Laurence Brett, the charismatic young priest at St. Cecilia's in Stamford,
Conn., enrolled him in a select teen group dubbed Brett's Mavericks. It
wasn't quite the kind of special relationship with a trusted priest that
Martinelli expected. On a Washington field trip, Father Brett allegedly
fondled young Frank in a bathroom. Martinelli claims that while Brett was
driving him home, the priest urged the boy to give him oral sex, blessing it
as a way to receive Holy Communion. Like most youngsters 30 years ago, Frank
was too ashamed, too scared, too uncomprehending ever to say a word.
Martinelli, now 54, didn't become a priest after all. He married, had a son
and settled in Milwaukee to work as a consultant for nonprofit
organizations. His life was marred by inexplicable confusions, anger,
depression and lost faith. Not until one night in 1991 did he understand
why. He was talking on the phone to an old Connecticut friend when the
friend blurted out that he had been abused back in those Maverick days by
Father Brett. "I had this rush of feeling," Martinelli told Time. "I
realized, Wow, that's what happened to me." He began seeing a therapist and
a year later filed a civil suit in New Haven, Conn., federal court against
Brett and the Bridgeport diocese, then led by Bishop Edward Egan.
Church authorities in Bridgeport had discovered Brett's proclivities as
early as 1964. They did not report him to civil authorities or warn
parishioners, and they let him minister at ecclesiastical posts around the
country. In 1990 when Egan took over as bishop, he met with Brett and later
noted, "All things considered, he made a good impression. In the course of
our conversation, the particulars of his case came out in detail and with
grace." As a result, Egan let Brett come back to Bridgeport as a priest.
In November 1992 Brett confessed to an indiscretion and later to two
more—but stayed in the ministry. Then came Martinelli's allegations, and
then another accuser surfaced. A week later, Egan finally told Brett he
could no longer serve as a priest. In mid-1997 a jury decided the diocese
had breached its duty by not warning Martinelli of the priest's
predilections and awarded him nearly $1 million. An appeals court overturned
the award, and the case was later settled for an undisclosed amount.
Today Brett is on the run and still officially a priest, despite pleas to
defrock him. Egan, now Cardinal and Archbishop of New York and perhaps the
pre-eminent prelate in the U.S., is under heavy fire to explain his handling
not just of Brett but of other pending cases of priests whose abuses he
allegedly hushed up while in Bridgeport. For Martinelli, there's still no
solace. He would, he says, have settled for nothing in cash if he just could
have got a public apology.
Thousands of Frank Martinellis and hundreds of Father Bretts cast a dark
shadow over the Roman Catholic Church this Eastertide—and so have the U.S.
bishops who let the crimes fester. The crisis gathers steam day after day,
with perhaps 2,000 priests accused of abuse across the country and hot lines
jamming with more victims' calls. It is not just what Boston's Bernard
Cardinal Law called "a tragic error" but a spiritual and financial body blow
to church authority as well, demoralizing to every man who wears a Roman
collar. Lives have been hurt, trust damaged and the credibility of the
church to speak on social issues tainted.
How long does it take powerful institutions to learn that it's not just the
crime, it's also the cover-up that damns you? The Roman Catholic Church kept
silent for decades about the immoral, even criminal betrayal of its
children, but in this era of openness, that just won't do. When priests
stand in their pulpits this holiest week of the Christian year, what are
they going to say to congregations shamed, in pain, frustrated, angry that
so much was so hidden for so long? As the Roman Catholic faithful in America
are bidden to rejoice that a risen Christ will save their souls, they now
want to hear how their church is going to save itself.
After weeks of silence, Pope John Paul II issued a vague Holy Week message,
saying, "As priests we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins
of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination" and
offered "concern" for the victims. But the muted words would not satisfy
those looking for a concrete course of action. In a Palm Sunday pastoral
letter, Egan reiterated his policy of overseeing abuse allegations himself
but urged victims to bring them to the attention of police. And he defended
his Bridgeport conduct like a lawyer: every case disclosed had occurred on
his predecessor's watch; he took the word of experts when he recycled
abusive priests back into the ministry.
Culture of Secrecy
Many of us may have just awakened to the stunning extent of priestly
pedophilia since January, when the Boston Globe exposed the predations of
John Geoghan and the habit the diocese had of systematically concealing
them. But the U.S. church has known all about it—how deep sexual misconduct
ran, how widespread, how frequent— at least since the first big abuse
scandal broke at a Louisiana trial in 1985, when the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe was
sentenced to 20 years for molesting dozens of children, who were awarded a
combined $18 million in damages.
In the years that followed, there were more big cases and big financial
settlements—an estimated $1 billion or more—but only halfhearted efforts to
adopt firm guidelines on how to handle the problem. Early on, the Rev.
Thomas Doyle, then a canon lawyer at the Vatican embassy in Washington,
drafted a 100-page report advising that offenders be moved away from kids,
that victims be succored and that the public be told the truth. But whenever
a fresh case erupted, the church said it was an aberration, an isolated
example, one bad apple. Or media bashing by an anti-Catholic press.
Dioceses lapsed into a pattern of denial and deception. They treated sexual
pathology as a moral failure and crime as a religious matter. The Roman
Catholic Church is a stern hierarchy that has always kept its deliberations
secret, policed itself and issued orders from the top. An obedient priest
moves up in power by keeping his head down, winning rewards for bureaucratic
skills and strict orthodoxy. When Cardinals are created, they take a vow
before the Pope to "keep in confidence anything that, if revealed, would
cause a scandal or harm to the church."
When it came to sex abuse, the Vatican essentially told bishops, You're on
your own. But if saving the church from scandal was literally a cardinal
virtue, then the bishops of America's 194 dioceses who had direct
responsibility for priestly misconduct would make it their first principle.
Better by far never to let the public know.
If allegations came to diocese attention, the bishop, a power unto himself
who often operated as if ordination gave him a share of the Pope's
infallibility, acted as prosecutor, judge, sentencer. Desperate to retain
even sinful men, as the number of priests shrank alarmingly, and ever
putting the image of the church first, bishops refined the system. Convince
the family that publicity would harm the faith. Don't report to the police;
don't warn the parish. Treat the priest with confession, time out at a
discreet rehab center and Christian forgiveness; then let him resume duties
at a new parish, the same way they dealt with whisky priests' alcoholism.
For years the bishops believed, or made themselves believe, pedophilia could
be "cured," until the serial molestations and multiple victims and repeat
offenders proved it wasn't so. Only the most recalcitrant recidivists were
eventually "laicized"—forced to give up their priestly vocation—long after
they had done their worst. And if a victim finally sued, the strategy was to
admit nothing, buy silence, settle out of court and seal the deal with a
confidentiality contract. The church, said Richard Sipe, a former
Benedictine monk who testified as an expert for plaintiffs in priest-abuse
cases, "took a very defensive position, rather than proactive."
It is hard to remember in this age of confession, but 30, 20, even 10 years
ago, children kept silent about sexual molestation. By and large they were
ignorant, scared, guilty and sure no one would believe them. "I don't know
that I identified it [as abuse] then," Chris Dixon, 40, told Time. He came
forward only this month to detail two-decades-old allegations against Bishop
Anthony O'Connell, of Palm Beach, Fla., who resigned a few days later: "Why
would anyone believe me? I thought my parents would blame me."
Devout families—and predator priests frequently chose their victims from the
most ardent parishioners—had been taught for generations to exalt, respect
and trust priests. Who could imagine dear Father Tim— who came to dinner,
played with the kids, counseled mom, acted like a dad—would do something so
sinful? Doubting the priest would cost you your spiritual security. When
Ralph Sidaway told his mother roughly 65 years ago that a parish priest had
molested him, "she beat the crap out of him, because you don't say that
about priests," says Sheldon Stevens, a Florida lawyer who handled a case
lodged by Ralph's adult son Kevin, who says he was molested by the Rev.
Rocco D'Angelo as a child. The church knew it and used it to dissuade people
from pressing complaints.
Nor is there any way of knowing whether the pedophile epidemic is being
checked. Almost every case on record happened years ago. Even if it has
grown easier for adults to reveal shameful incidents in their past, it's
still hard to get young males to come forward while the abuse is going on.
"The last thing I want to do as a teenager is run around telling everybody
some priest gave me a b___ j__," says John Falls, a grown-up Californian who
says he was molested by his boyhood priest. Says Neil Blake, a New Mexico
lawyer litigating abuse cases: "I don't know if priests are still out there
molesting kids, because they won't tell anyone about it. We'll find out in
about 2015."
Here Comes the Law
The horror stories exploding onto front pages are modifying church behavior,
whether its leaders like it or not. Under duress, some bishops have
scrambled to announce "zero tolerance" toward any priest, past or present,
against whom allegations have been made. Up to a dozen Los Angeles priests
have been quietly dismissed in recent weeks. Southern California's Orange
County diocese removed the Rev. Michael Pecharich from his church in early
March as soon as it substantiated a single case of abuse, which was decades
old.
And when Kathryn Barrett-Gaines and her sister, now in their 30s, contacted
the archdiocese in Washington two weeks ago to accuse Monsignor Russell
Dillard, 54, the popular pastor of the city's oldest African- American Roman
Catholic congregation, of "kissing and inappropriate touching" when they
were teens, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick immediately suspended his good
friend. Dillard told his spiritual superior he "did not exceed the bounds of
propriety" any further than "father-daughter kissing." Nevertheless,
McCarrick shipped Dillard off for evaluation at a sexual-abuse clinic,
informed the police of the complaint and will not let the much loved pastor
return if the sisters are telling the truth.
Already Dillard's loyal, well-educated and well-connected parishioners are
vocally contesting his suspension. There's a tough trade-off for swiftly
protecting the public: not everyone is comfortable with the lack of due
process that zero tolerance provides for the accused. Of course, there was
little due process when investigations were left in bishops' hands. And last
year the Vatican issued new rules so discreetly that most churchmen don't
know that anything was changed. Rome quietly published, in Latin, a papal
directive known as a motu proprio (meaning under his personal authority),
tucked inside a long annual record of the Holy See. It directed that
allegations of sex abuse be brought secretly for judgment by Rome's
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, once known as the Inquisition,
keeping procedures strictly in church control. No mention was made about
informing civil authorities.
Nor has the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops produced universal
guidelines for how zero-tolerance policies will be fairly administered. Jan
Malicki, ordained in Poland, came to North Miami in the late '80s as an
associate pastor. In 1998 two women accused him of sexual abuse while one of
them was a minor. Malicki says the diocese made him a scapegoat, rushing to
announce his imminent arrest, and then claimed the church bore no
responsibility under First Amendment protections. Even though county
investigators concluded two years ago that they had no basis to charge him,
Malicki is still on a leave of absence. "The archdiocese has left this
priest twisting in the wind, trying to wash their hands of this," says his
attorney, Ellis Rubin. "Has this gone too far?" wonders Dillard's
predecessor at St. Augustine's. "I think every priest now worries every day
he may be accused of something."
As the accusations pile up, the church's relationship with the law is facing
revision. To this day, only 19 states require clergy to report suspicions or
allegations of sex abuse against minors to civil authorities. While
legislators rush to write the church into "mandatory reporter" laws, many
bishops say they've already pledged to tell the cops of any new charges.
Some dioceses, like those in Boston and Bridgeport, are combing through
their secret archives to hand over details of all cases, going back 49
years. But in New York, Cardinal Egan has barely noted the changing weather.
He will retain power over problem priests for himself, reporting abuse
charges to police only if the victims agree and he feels there is
"reasonable cause" to believe them. Back files will stay closed.
States are also looking at their statutes of limitation for sex-abuse
claims, which differ widely. A few, such as Florida, can pursue criminal
charges in most cases, but some states don't allow prosecution more than one
or five or 10 years after an injured child turns 18. That has freed most
predator priests from criminal convictions and long jail terms. But neither
side felt it won a resounding victory when the suit filed by a plaintiff
against Denver's highly popular Rev. Marshall Gourley was thrown out because
the statute of limitation had expired. Gourley maintains his innocence.
For years most cases that made it to trial were civil complaints, but they
were financially devastating, sometimes costing millions. So some dioceses
adopted hardball legal tactics that abused victims all over again. A group
of 39 plaintiffs have been battling the diocese of Providence, R.I., for as
long as 10 years to get recompense for alleged abuse at the hands of 11
priests. Church lawyers attack the victims' credibility and besmirch their
families. They bombard victims with as many as 500 written questions, demand
30 years' worth of tax returns, require names and dates for every doctor
visited back to age 12. They cross-examine mothers about their children's
sex lives. "It's intimidation," says Lee White, 45, one of the plaintiffs.
"I feel like I am being reabused."
Looking to the Future
First, the institutional church has to acknowledge the magnitude of the
damage. The Pope's cryptic paragraphs at the end of his Holy Thursday letter
to priests hardly constituted a ringing mea culpa. At a stiff press
conference afterward, Dario Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, a contender for the
next pontificate, short-circuited the avalanche of questions with a sample
of Vatican stonewalling, sternly defending current policy. Citing the
"serious and severe" internal rules the church has applied to pedophile
priests, the Cardinal looked up from his text and asked what other
institutions had such guidelines. "I would like to know one!" he demanded,
waving a finger.
The Vatican has long dismissed all the fuss as "an American problem," as if
it plagued no other countries. In the corridors of Rome, prelates disparage
the "litigious" nature of U.S. society and blame abusive priests on lax
American sexual mores. Complains a Vatican official: "In America there is
too much reliance on modern psychology in place of the church's traditional
wisdom." Officials say the Pope is greatly pained by the crisis in the U.S.
church. But that doesn't mean he is ready or able to confront such an
explosive issue. The papacy hates to bend to outside pressure. St. Paul,
Minn., attorney Jeff Anderson, who has been suing the church regularly for
abuse victims, says, "They're not going to change until a bishop goes to
jail and every bishop hears the door clang behind him and that sound
resonates to the Vatican."
But it wouldn't take a Vatican II-style revolution to start improving the
church's handling of sex abuse. Atlanta's Archbishop John Donoghue ticked
off a few lessons in a recent pastoral statement: Report accusations
immediately to the law. Cooperate in investigations. Move the accused away
from kids. If he's found guilty, bar him from the ministry.
Scott Appleby, director of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of
American Catholicism, says the Conference of Catholic Bishops should
immediately hammer out an enforceable uniform code of binding policies that
enshrine those principles. "The problem in the past," he says, "has been the
autonomy of each bishop, free to adopt or ignore conference policies." Many
have suggested that each diocese name a board of independent lay
advisers—lawyers, psychologists—to oversee every abuse case. More rigorous
screening and modernized seminary training for sexually immature priests
would help too.
Good baby steps, all. But growing numbers of Roman Catholics, such as
Northwestern University professor of religion Cristina Traina, say that's
not enough to make up for the church's "extreme violation" of trust. Many
victims accused of suing for the money say that what they really want is
spiritual generosity: an apology from the church, acknowledging that crimes
were committed and explaining how the church let known pedophiles abuse
again. Anger will not begin to heal until prelates from the top down profess
genuine confession and true contrition, says Traina. "There has to be a
public expression on behalf of all the people involved in the cover-ups,"
and then the power structure that exalted secrecy must be altered to meet
"industry standards" of ethical behavior.
Realistically, Rome will not address big reforms while the crisis is
boiling. That is a reassuring tradition for the two American Cardinals most
implicated in the scandals, Boston's Bernard Law and New York's Egan. But
plenty of influential Catholics are suggesting that the U.S. church would
benefit from penitential resignations at the top. Says an editorial in the
upcoming issue of the national Roman Catholic weekly America: "If early on
some bishops had been willing to claim full responsibility and resign,
victims, parishes, the media and juries might have been less inclined to
vent their anger on the church as a whole. That not one bishop (except the
two who were themselves abusers) has resigned during this 15-year-long
crisis is astonishing."
If the bishops stay, Roman Catholics would like their leaders to trade the
church's culture of secrecy for openness and accountability. The first
obligation, says Bishop Wilton Gregory, head of the Conference of Catholic
Bishops, is "to make such matters known." The second is to set transparent
rules that hold the church responsible for its mistakes. That clarion call
comes from conservative columnists like William J. Bennett, who advises,
"Candor and full disclosure are a must if the reputation of the church is to
be protected." And it comes from sex-abuse experts like Richard Sipe, who
says, "The church is not going to get out of this without opening fully a
dialogue and going beneath the secret system of handling things." Even
victims say it, over and over. Jim Griley, 39, who says he was abused by
California priest Michael Pecharich 30 years ago, is on a mission to break
the church of its secrecy. "This is going to bring a cleansing to the
church," he says. "They need to turn these stones over. They need to get
this out in the open."
The enormity of the scandal has provoked American Roman Catholics as nothing
has before to call for debate on controversial doctrines—like celibacy,
married priests, women priests. The Rev. Richard McBrien, a religion
professor at the University of Notre Dame, thinks these issues lie at the
root of the pedophile problem. The Boston archdiocese's official paper last
week urged Roman Catholics to question and study whether these age-old
tenets are still relevant.
Liberal advocates argue that a church struggling to fill its depleted ranks
of priests might get more healthy, sexually mature candidates if married men
and women were allowed in. But there is no sympathy in Rome for any
alteration of the celibate, men-only clergy. The only realistic hope for
such drastic reform, says Chester Gillis, a professor of theology at
Georgetown University, lies with whoever succeeds the current Pope.
Roman Catholicism has never been a democratic faith. But in an impassioned
sermon two weeks ago, Monsignor Clement Connolly, of the Holy Family parish
in South Pasadena, Calif., which isn't involved in any of the allegations,
challenged authorities to open the church's heart and mind to unprecedented
dialogue. "We don't have an instrument in place," he told Time, "but I think
if we talk with the people and listen to the people and share with the
people, the instrument will emerge."
As Roman Catholics across the country fill the pews for Easter Mass, many
lament the scandal that has shaken their belief to the core. "Of course
we're outraged," says Herb Timm, a Winnetka, Ill., parishioner. Holy Family
worshiper Ed Ternan called it a "milestone moment in the life of the
church," tragic for the victims, tragic for the priests, tragic for the
church. "The old way of dealing with it by not dealing with it is not going
to work." Instead church leaders need to pray that they can find the remedy
before parishioners lose their faith.
—Reported by Rebecca Winters/ Bridgeport,Siobhan Morrissey/Palm Beach, Sean
Scully/Los Angeles, Maggie Sieger/Chicago, Simon Crittle/Providence, Sarah
Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis, Andrew Goldstein and Sally Donnelly/Washington,
Jeff Israely/Rome, Tim Padgett/Miami and Deirdre van Dyk/New York
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