The following is an edited
version of a presentation made by Fr. Tom Doyle at the SNAP Conference
held in Chicago, August 3-5, 2014.
WHERE WE'VE BEEN AND WHERE WE'RE GOING: HOW SURVIVORS
HAVE CHANGED HISTORY
Thomas P. Doyle, J.C.D., C.D.A.C.
A letter sent by the Vicar General of the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana to
the papal nuncio in June, 1984, was the trigger that set in motion a series of
events that has changed the fate of the victims of child sexual abuse by
Catholic clergy and clergy of all denominations. The letter informed the
nuncio that the Gastal family had decided to withdraw from a confidential
monetary settlement with the diocese. It went on to say they had obtained
the services of an attorney and planned to sue the diocese.
This long process has had a direct impact on much more than the fate of victims
and the security of innocent children and vulnerable persons of any age.
It has altered the image and role of the institutional Catholic Church in
western society to such an extent that the tectonic plates upon which this
Church rests have shifted in a way never expected or dreamed of thirty years
ago.
I cannot find language that can adequately communicate the full import of this
monstrous phenomenon. The image of a Christian Church that enabled the
sexual and spiritual violation of its most vulnerable members and when
confronted, responded with institutionalized mendacity and utter disregard for
the victims cannot be adequately described as a "problem," a
"crisis" or a "scandal." The widespread sexual
violation of children and adults by clergy and the horrific response of the
leadership, especially the bishops, is the present-day manifestation of a very
dark and toxic dimension of the institutional Church. This dark side has
always existed. In our era it has served as the catalyst for a complex
and deeply rooted process that can be best described as a paradigm shift.
The paradigm for responding to sexual abuse by clergy has shifted at its
foundation. The paradigm for society's understanding of and response to
child sexual abuse had begun to shift with the advent of the feminist movement
in the early seventies but was significantly accelerated by the
mid-eighties. The paradigm of the institutional Church interacting in
society has shifted and continues to do so as the forces demanding justice,
honesty and accountability by the hierarchy continue their relentless
pressure. The Catholic monolith, once accepted by friend and foe
alike as a rock-solid monarchy, is crumbling.
The single most influential and forceful element in this complex historical
process has not been the second Vatican Council. It has been the action
of the victims of sexual abuse. There are a few of us still standing who have been in the midst of this mind
and soul-boggling phenomenon from the beginning of the present era. We
have been caught up and driven by the seemingly never-ending chain of events,
revelations, and explosions that have marked it from the very beginning and
will continue to mark it into the future.
It has had a profound impact on the belief systems and the spirituality of many
directly and indirectly involved. My own confidence and trust in the
institutional church has been shattered. I have spent years trying to
process what has been happening to the spiritual dimension of my life.
The vast enormity of a deeply engrained clerical culture that allowed the
sexual violation of the innocent and most vulnerable has overshadowed the
theological, historical and cultural supports upon which the institutional
Church has based its claim to divinely favored status. All of the theological
and canonical truths I had depended upon have been dissipated to
meaninglessness.
Some of us who have supported victims have been accused of being dissenters
from orthodox church teaching. We have been accused of being
anti-Catholic, using the sexual abuse issue to promote active disagreement with
Church positions on various sexual issues. These accusations are complete
nonsense. This is not a matter of dissent or agreement with Church
teachings. It is about the sexual violations of countless victims by
trusted Church members. It is not a matter of anti-Catholic propaganda but
direct opposition to Church leaders, policies or practices that enable the
perpetrators of sexual abuse and demonize the victims. It is not a matter
of defaming the Church's image. No one has done a better job of that than
the bishops themselves. For some of us the very concept of a personal or anthropocentric god has also
been destroyed, in great part by an unanswerable question: If there is
a loving god watching over us, why does he allow his priests and bishops to
violate the bodies and destroy the souls of so many innocent children?"
Those of us who have been in twelve step movements are familiar with the usual
format recommended for speakers: we base our stories on a three-part
outline - what it was like before, what happened, and what it is like now.
This is the format I want to use as I look back on thirty years and try to
describe where I think we have been and where we are going. Much to the
chagrin of the hard-core cheerleaders for the institutional Church, there is no
question that the victims and survivors of the Church's sexual abuse and
spiritual treachery have set in motion a process that has changed and will
continue to change the history of the Catholic Church. The Catholic
experience has prompted members of other denominations to acknowledge sexual
abuse in their midst and demand accountability. It has also forever
altered the response of secular society to the once untouchable Churches.
What It Was Like Before
The basic facts need no elaboration. The default response to a report of
child, adolescent or adult sexual abuse was first to enshroud it in an
impenetrable blanket of secrecy. The perpetrator was shifted to another
assignment. The victim was intimidated into silence. The media knew
nothing and if law enforcement of civil officials were involved, they deferred
to the bishop "for the good of the Church."
A small number of perpetrators were sent to special church-run institutions
that treated them in secrecy and in many instances, released them to re-enter
ministry. The founder of the most influential of these, Fr. Gerald
Fitzgerald, firmly believed that no priest who had violated a child or minor
should ever be allowed back in ministry and should be dismissed from the
priesthood. He made his unequivocal beliefs known to bishops, to the
prefect of the Holy Office (1962) and to Pope Paul VI in a private audience in
1963. He was ignored.
What Happened
The Lafayette case involving Gilbert Gauthe was
the beginning of the end of the default template. I suspect that none of
the major players in the case had any idea of the magnitude of what they were
involved in. I was one of them and I certainly could never have imagined
how this would all play out.
The Lafayette case sparked attention because of the systemic cover-up that had
gone on from before Gilbert Gauthe was ordained and continued past his
conviction and imprisonment (see In God's House, a novel by Ray Mouton,
based on the events of this case). Jason Berry was singlehandedly
responsible for opening up the full extent of the ecclesiastical treachery to
the public. Other secular media followed suit. The story was picked
up by the national media and before long other reports of sexual abuse by
priests were coming in from parishes and dioceses not only in the deep south
but in other parts of the country (Required reading! Lead Us Not Into
Temptation by Jason Berry).
The report or manual, authored by Ray Mouton, Mike Peterson and me, is the
result of our belief that the bishops didn't know how to proceed when faced
with actual cases of sexual violation and rape by priests. Many of the
bishops I spoke to at the time admitted they were bewildered about what to
do. None expected the series of explosions that were waiting just over
the horizon. I asked several if a document or short manual of some
sort would help and the responses were uniformly affirmative. Some of the
bishops I consulted with were men I had grown to respect and trust. I
believed they would support whatever efforts we suggested to deal with the
developing, potentially explosive situation. Peterson, Mouton and I did
not see it as an isolated, one-time "problem." Rather, we saw
it is as a highly toxic practice of the clerical culture that needed to be
recognized and rectified...
...At the recent Vatican celebrations for Saint John XXIII and former pope John
Paul II, George Weigel and Joaquin Navarro-Valls created an outrageous fantasy
about the role of John Paul II, claiming that he knew nothing until after the
2002 Boston debacle. This was a blatant lie. John Paul II was given
a 42 page detailed report on the sex abuse and cover-up in Lafayette LA during
the last week of February 1985. It was sent as justification for the
request from the papal nuncio that a bishop be appointed to go to Lafayette to
try to find out exactly what was going on. The report was carried to Rome
by Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia precisely because the nuncio wanted it to go
directly to the pope and not be sidetracked by lower level functionaries.
The pope read the report and within four days the requested appointment came
through...
...
The papal nuncio, the late Cardinal Pio Laghi, was supportive of our efforts
and was in regular telephone contact with the Vatican. There were very
few actual written reports sent over although all of the media stories we
received were transmitted to the Holy See. Cardinal Silvio Oddi, then the
Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, visited the nunciature in June and
asked to be briefed. I was deputed for the task. By then we had
more information on the rapidly growing number of cases in all parts of the
country. I recall that by that time we were aware of 42 cases, which I naively
thought was a very significant number. I prepared a lengthy report that
was not only detailed but also graphic in its content. I read the report
to the cardinal and responded to his many questions. At the end of the
meeting at which only he and I were present, he announced that he would take
this information back to the Holy Father. "Then there will be a
meeting of the heads of all the dicasteries [Vatican congregations] and we will
issue a decree." I understand that he did take the
information to the pope but there never was a meeting of the heads and no
decree ever came forth.
Our efforts to get the bishops' conference to even consider the issues we set
forth in our manual, much less take decisive action, were a total
failure. Looking back from the perspective of thirty years' direct
experience, I believe they acted in the only way they knew how which was
completely self-serving with scandalous lack of sympathy for the victims and
their families. There were individual bishops who were open to exploring
the right way to proceed but the conference, which represented all of the
bishops, was interested in controlling the fallout and preserving their stature
and their power. We sent individual copies of the manual to every bishop in the U.S. on December
8, 1985. By then we still had hope that perhaps someone would read it and
stand up at the conference meetings and call the bishops' attention to what we
had insisted was the most important element, namely the compassionate care of
the victims.
In October 1986 Mike Peterson had flown to the Vatican to speak with officials
at the Congregation for Religious and the Congregation for Clergy. He was
in a better position than anyone else to expose this issue to them because he
knew how serious and extensive the problem of sexually dysfunctional priests
was from his experience as director of St. Luke Institute. He returned from
Rome dejected, angry and discouraged. I remember picking him up at the
airport and going to dinner. They not only were not interested but
brushed his concerns off as an exaggeration of a non-problem. Mike was
willing to keep trying with the American bishops. He arranged for a
hospitality suite at the hotel where the bishops were having their annual
November meeting. He invited every bishop to come and discuss the matter
of sexual abuse of minors by the clergy. There were over three hundred
bishops present. Eight showed up.
Between 1986 and 2002 there were several important developments in the
unfolding history of clergy sexual abuse. I would like to mention a few
that influenced the historical process.
1. The bishops addressed the
issue secretly in their annual meetings. The direction was
consistent: defense of the dioceses and the bishops. There was
never any mention of care for the victims.
2. The media continued to cover
the issue from coast to coast generally showing sympathy for the victims and
outrage at the Church's systemic cover-up.
3. Pope John Paul II wrote a
letter to the US bishops in June 1993 which clearly revealed his attitude.
4. The bishops formed a
committee in 1993 and produced a four-volume handbook.
The handbook and the committee had no appreciable impact.
5. There were increasing cases
of sexual abuse brought before the civil courts. There were also several
very public explosions during this period: the Thomas Adamson related
cases in St. Paul; St. Anthony Seminary, Santa Barbara CA; St. Lawrence
Seminary, Mt. Calvary WI; Fr. James Porter, Massachusetts; the Rudy Kos
trial,Dallas, 1997. None of these jarred the bishops loose from
their arrogant, defensive position and none served as a sufficient wake-up call
for the broad base of lay support for the bishops.
6. The "problem"
which John Paul II declared was unique to the United States, was
amplified in other countries: Mt. Cashel, St. John's Newfoundland, 1989;
Brendan Smyth and the fall of the Irish government in December 1994; the
exposure and forced resignation of Hans Cardinal Groer, archbishop of Vienna,
September 1995. So much for the U.S. as the scapegoat!
7. SNAP was founded by Barbara
Blaine and The Linkup by Jeanne Miller in 1989.
8. The first gathering of
clergy abuse victims took place in Arlington IL in October 1992, sponsored by
the Linkup. The main speakers were Jason Berry, Richard Sipe, Andrew
Greeley, Jeff Anderson and Tom Doyle.
9. In 1999 John Paul II ordered
the canonical process against Marcial Maciel-Degollado, founder and supreme
leader of the Legion of Christ, shelved. In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI
acknowledged the truth of Maciel's crimes against minors and removed him
from ministry. In 2009 the Vatican announced that Maciel had led a double
life, having six possible children with two women.
The pope made a total of 11 public statements about clergy sexual abuse between
1993 and his death in 2005. The letters showed little comprehension of
the horrific nature of the problem and no acknowledgement of the bishops'
enabling role. The culprits were, in the pope's eyes, secular
materialism, media sensationalism and sinful priests. He never even
acknowledged much less responded to the thousands of requests from individual
victims...
...The bishops' approach in the U.S. and elsewhere followed a standard
evolutionary process: denial, minimization, blame shifting and
devaluation of challengers. The bishop's carefully scripted
apologies expressed their regret for the pain suffered. Never once did
they apologize for what they had done to harm the victims. Likewise there was
never any concern voiced by the Vatican or the bishops' conference about the
spiritual and emotional damage done to the victims by the abuse itself and by
the betrayal by the hierarchy. It became clear by the end of the nineties
that the problem was not simply recalcitrant bishops. It was much more
fundamental. The barrier to doing the right thing was deeply embedded in
the clerical culture itself.
January 6, 2002 stands out as a pivotal date in the evolution of the clergy
abuse phenomenon. The Boston revelations had an immediate and lasting
impact that surprised even the most cynical. I was not surprised by the
stories because I had been in conversations first with Kristin Lombardi who
wrote a series based on the same facts for the Boston Phoenix in March 2001 and
later with the Globe Spotlight Team. The continuous stream of media
stories of what the bishops had been doing in Boston and elsewhere provoked
widespread public outrage.
The bishops' cover-up of sexual abuse and the impact on victims were the
subject of special reports by all of the major news networks and countless
stories in the print media. Newsweek, Time, U.S. News and World Report
and the Economist all published cover stories about the "scandal."
The number of lawsuits dramatically increased and the protective
deference on the part of law enforcement and civil officials, once counted on
by the clerical leadership, was rapidly eroding. Grand jury
investigations were launched in three jurisdictions within two months with
several more to follow. It was all too much for the bishops to
handle. They could not control it. They could not ignore it and they
could not minimize it or make it go away.
The most visible result of the many-sided pressure on the hierarchy was the
Dallas meeting. This was not a proactive pastorally sensitive gesture on
the part of the bishops. It was defensive damage control, choreographed
by the public relations firm of R.F. Binder associates. The meeting
included addresses by several victim/survivors (David Clohessy, Michael Bland,
Craig Martin, Paula Rohbacker), a clinical psychologist (Mary Gail
Frawley-O'Dea), a lay theologian (Scott Appleby), a Catholic author (Margaret
O'Brien Steinfels). The tangible result of the meeting was the Charter
for the Protection of Young People and the Essential Norms.
The impact of Charter and the Norms has clearly been mixed.
The lofty rhetoric of the bishops in the charter has not been followed up
with action, to no one's surprise.
The Essential Norms have not been uniformly and consistently
followed. As proof we can look to the steady number of exceptions
from 2002 whereby known perpetrators are either allowed to remain in ministry
or are put back in ministry. The National Review Board showed promise at
the beginning, especially after the publication of its extensive report in
2004. This promise sputtered and died as the truly effective members of the
board left when they realized the bishops weren't serious, and were replaced by
others who essentially did nothing but hold positions on an impotent
administrative entity that served primarily as an unsuccessful public relations
effort to support the bishops' claim that they were doing something.
Sexual violation of minors by clerics of all ranks has been part of the
institution and the clerical culture since the days of the primitive Christian
communities. Over the centuries the stratified model of the Church, with
the clergy in the dominant role and the laity relegated to passive obedience,
has held firm and allowed the hierarchy to maintain control over the issue of
sexually dysfunctional clerics who, by the way, have ranged from sub-deacons to
popes.
The paradigm shift, evident in the institutional Church since the years leading
up to Vatican Council II, laid the foundation for a radically different
response in the present era. The victim/survivors, their supporters and
the secular society have shaped and guided the direction and evolution of the
clergy sexual abuse nightmare. The Vatican and the bishops throughout the
world have remained on the defensive and have never been able to gain any
semblance of control. Those very few bishops who have publicly sided with the
survivors have been marginalized and punished. The general response has
been limited to the well-tuned rhetoric of public statements, sponsorship of a
variety of child-safety programs, constant promises of change and enlightenment
and above all, the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in attorneys
who have used every tactic imaginable and many that are not imaginable to
defeat and discredit victims and prevent their clients from being held
accountable. The apologetic public statements, filled with regret and
assurances of a better tomorrow, are worthless from the get-go, rendered
irrelevant and insulting by the harsh reality of the brutal tactics of the
bishops' attack dogs.
While the institutional Church has essentially remained in neutral, various
segments of civil society have reacted decisively. Between 1971 and 2013
there have been at least 72 major reports issued about sexual abuse in the
Catholic Church. The early reports (three in the seventies) were about
sexual dysfunction in general among the clergy but since 1985 they have been
about sexual abuse of minors. Some of these have been commissioned by
official bodies and are the result of extensive investigations such as the U.S.
Grand Jury reports, the Belgian Parliamentary Report and the Irish
Investigation Commission Reports. They come from several countries in
North America and Europe. A study of the sections on causality has shown
a common denominator: the deliberately inadequate and counter-productive
responses and actions of the bishops.
The unfolding of the events in this contemporary era can be divided into three
phases: the first begins in 1984 and culminates at the end of 2001. The second begins with the Boston revelations and extends to the beginning of
2010. The present phase began in March 2010 when the case of Lawrence
Murphy of Milwaukee revealed that the Vatican was directly connected to the
cover-up. In this case, in spite of the pleas of an archbishop (Weakland)
and two bishops (Fliss and Sklba) that Murphy, who had violated at least 200
deaf boys, by laicized, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with
Ratzinger as Prefect, refused. Instead, he allowed the culprit to live
out his days as a priest.
The three phases are arbitrary demarcation points based on the level of
exposure of the Church's true policies and actions. The difference is
only in the depth and extent of information discovered about the bishops'
responses to decades of reports of sexual violation by clerics.
In 1993 and 1994 Pope John Paul II attempted to persuade the world that sexual
abuse by clergy was an American problem, caused primarily by media
exaggerations, materialism and failure to pray. At the conclusion of his
first public statement on sexual abuse, a 1993 letter to the U.S. bishops, he
said, "Yes dear brothers, America needs much prayer lest it lose its
soul." It is ironic that this comment came from the leader of an
organization that had not so much lost but gave up its soul. By 2014
there was no doubt anywhere that geographic boundaries are
irrelevant. This highly toxic dimension of the institutional Church
and its clerical sub culture has been exposed in country after country on every
continent except Antarctica, where there are no bishops, no priests, and no
minors. The presence of God is found in a few scientists, some U.S.
military and a lot of
penguins.
The focus had finally shifted to the Vatican. In September 2011 the
Center for Constitutional Rights assisted in the filing of a case before the
International Criminal Court in The Hague. In January 2014 the U.N.
Commission on the Rights of the Child delivered a blistering criticism of the
Vatican's response to sexual abuse by clerics. In May 2014 the U.N.
Commission on Torture issued a report equally critical of the Vatican's
handling of sexual abuse claims and its opposition to U.N. policies. This
is truly momentous. The world's largest religious denomination has been
called to account by the community of nations.
What
It's Like Now
The foregoing paragraphs have provided a sparse but factually correct
description of the second element of the 12 Step presentation, "What
Happened." Now I would like to shift the focus to "What
Its Like Now." Any conclusions at this point, thirty years
later, are obviously very temporary since this is not the end of the issue but
simply a milestone along the way.
I'd like to summarize by asserting that in spite of all that has happened since
1984, I do not believe there has been any fundamental change in the
hierarchy. It may be true that individual bishops have either changed
or have been compassionately supportive all along but in general the hierarchy
is behaving today just as it did in 1985. The dramatic events in St.
Paul-Minneapolis are the latest example of this intransigence. After all
that has been revealed over these thirty years, one would think that the
constant exposure of the official Church's duplicity and dishonesty as well as
the vast amount of information we have about the destructive effects of sexual
abuse on the victims and their families, would cause some substantial change in
attitude, direction and behavior. The bishops and even the pope have
claimed they have done more to protect children than any other
organization. There may be some validity to this claim but what is also
true is that there has not been a single policy, protocol or program that was
not forced on them. In 30 years they have not taken a single proactive move
to assist victims or extend any semblance of compassionate pastoral care.
Programs and policies promoting awareness or mandating background checks do
nothing for the hundreds of thousands of suffering victims. The bishops
as a group have done nothing for them either because they will not or more
probably because they cannot.
There seems to be little sense in continuing to demand that bishops change
their attitudes or at least their behavior. We have been beating our
heads against the wall for a quarter of a century and the best we can hope for
is that the sound will reverberate somewhere out in the Cosmos and eventually
cause a stir before the end of time or the Second Coming, whichever comes
first.
The institutional Church's abject failure has revealed fundamental deficiencies
in essential areas, all of which have been directly instrumental in
perpetrating and sustaining the tragic culture of abuse:
1. The erroneous belief that
the monarchical governmental structure of the Church was intended by god and
justifies the sacrifice of innocent victims
2. The belief that priests and
bishops are superior to lay persons, entitled to power and deference because
they are ontologically different and uniquely joined to Christ.
3. A lay spirituality that is
dependent on the clergy and gauged by the degree of submission to them and
unquestioned obedience to all church laws and authority figures.
4. An obsession with doctrinal
orthodoxy and theological formulations that bypasses the realities of human
life and replaces mercy and charity as central Catholic values.
5. An understanding of human
sexuality that is not grounded in the reality of the human person but in a
bizarre theological tradition that originated with the pre-Christian stoics and
was originally formulated by celibate males of questionable psychological
stability.
6. The clerical subculture that
has propagated the virus of clericalism, which has perpetuated a severely
distorted value system that has influenced clergy and laity
alike.
Has Pope Francis brought a new ray of hope? I believe he is a
significantly different kind of pope but he is still a product of the
monarchical system and he is still surrounded by a bureaucracy that could
hinder or destroy any hopes for the radical change that is needed if the
institutional Church is to rise about the sex abuse nightmare and become what
it is supposed to be, the People of God. The victims and indeed the
entire Church are tired of the endless stream of empty statements and
unfulfilled promises. The time for apologies, expressions of regret and
assurances of change is long gone. Action is needed and without it the pope and
bishops today will simply be more names in the long line of hierarchs who have
failed the victims and failed the church.
I believe there is reason to hope, but not because of the engaging personality
of Pope Francis. This pope's overtures to victims are grounded on three
decades of courageous efforts by survivors. Without these efforts nothing
would have changed. Survivors have changed the course of history for the
Church and have accelerated the paradigm shift. If the Catholic Church is
to be known not as a gilded monarchy of increasing irrelevance but as the
People of God, the change in direction hinted at by the new pope's words and
actions are crucial and if he does lead the way to a new image of the Body of
Christ it will be due in great part because the survivors have led the way for
him.
-- the end --
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