Now, it's the attorneys

Thursday December 28, 2006

Church officials play the blame game

By MARY GAIL FRAWLEY-O’DEA

Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea is a psychologist who works with survivors of sexual abuse. She addressed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Dallas in 2002 and is author of Perversion of Power: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church and coeditor of Predatory Priests, Silenced Victims: The Sexual Abuse Scandal in the Catholic Church.]

Since sexual abuse of young people by priests drew national attention in 2002, church officials have offered a litany of assertions that things are not really as bad as they seem, or that groups and individuals, such as the scandal-obsessed media or those opposed to the teachings of the church, are engaging with the crisis to advance their own agendas.

Lately, there is a new word on the street. Now, according to the claims of spokespersons for the church, it’s plaintiffs’ attorneys and their greedy clients who are victimizing the Catholic church and fueling the scandal.

Rachel Zoll of The Associated Press reports that church leaders are taking an “aggressive public stand against attorneys who represent victims.” There are three complaints: plaintiffs’ claims are excessive and line the pockets of lawyers with the faithful’s hard-earned dollars; plaintiffs’ lawyers and victim advocates work together to further state legislation that rolls back statutes of limitations on sexual crimes; and attorneys donate to victims’ groups, creating an unseemly symbiosis.

In the archdiocesan newspaper, Portland, Ore., Archbishop John Vlazny described his elevation to bishop as a lamb being led to the slaughter and terms sexual abuse claims “excessive.” Francis X. Maier, chancellor for the Denver archdiocese, writing in Crisis magazine, compared the efforts of plaintiffs’ attorneys to a “shakedown” and said, “Unfortunately, some attorneys have built an industry on twisting the goodwill of today’s Catholic community into a hammer for smashing American Catholic life.” Mark Chopko, general counsel for the U.S. bishops’ conference, has urged victims to deal directly with dioceses so that attorneys do not pocket up to 40 percent of settlement funds.

Personal injury litigation is a source of debate in all sectors of American life. What is “excessive” to some is barely just to others. There is no question that plaintiffs’ attorneys can walk away from a case with large sums of money. But, let’s take a closer look.

The most salient point is that these lawsuits began only after victims had made repeated attempts to obtain apologies and compensation directly from dioceses and were rebuffed, or forced to sign confidentiality agreements limiting their ability to talk about the abusing cleric or the settlement terms. Since most bishops did not respond pastorally, lawyers got involved. Early on, these attorneys were blasted by church authorities and lay people for coming after accused priests or the bishops who abetted them. For example, Frank Bruni and Elinor Burkett (Gospel of Shame) say that when attorney Bruce Pasternack of New Mexico began to represent plaintiffs in lawsuits involving abusive priests, he was called a “money-grubbing Jew, priest-hater and Catholic-basher.” Pasternack did not convince his critics when he stated quite reasonably: “I’d sue a Buddhist monk, a Protestant minister or a rabbi. I don’t have any animosity toward the Catholic church. I just have animosity for people who rape children.”

Bags of hate mail

Jeffrey Anderson, a Minnesota attorney who has been involved in more than 500 lawsuits against the church, said he has received bags of hate mail. According to the Minnesota Lawyer, one writer called him “the scum maggot of this country,” while another insisted, “When the Catholic church needs advice from a WASP, Swede, bigoted shyster lawyer, we’ll ask for it.”

In Massachusetts, attorney Eric MacLeish received bomb threats at his office, someone threatened to kidnap his daughter from daycare if he continued representing sexual abuse victims suing the church, and a weapon was fired outside his home while he and his wife watched TV.

By August 2005, the church had paid out more than $1 billion in claims and there was no end in sight. Lawyers indeed can receive up to 30 or 40 percent of the proceeds from these cases. It is important to note, however, that in the 1980s and 1990s, and into 2002, there was no guarantee that these cases would generate any money at all. All the investment is up front for the lawyers who may or may not recoup their expenses years later when cases settle or receive jury awards. In Rhode Island, for example, Carl P. DeLuca, a attorney representing alleged survivors against the Providence diocese borrowed and then fell behind on a $50,000 loan to keep his business open, bought his own home back in a tax sale, let go of his BMW, office staff and downtown Providence office. His colleague in the cases, Timothy J. Conlon, had his car repossessed and a foreclosure notice issued on a summer cabin in New Hampshire. Eventually, the Providence diocese settled 36 claims for $13.5 million.

Many plaintiffs’ attorneys involved in the sexual abuse scandal are or were Catholics whose relationships with their faith were forever changed by their involvement with the Catholic scandal. Richard Cappalli, another Providence attorney, was so disillusioned with the church that he and his wife stopped practicing their religion. John Manly, a California attorney representing victims up and down the West Coast, wears a Miraculous Medal he received in second grade, and he continued to attend Mass during his first case against the church. He will always consider himself a Catholic but can no longer bear to attend Mass. The Orange County Weekly quotes Manly: “How do I explain to my children what I know, and still sit in the pews? It’s a feeling of loss. I’m in a spiritual desert. I have two young ones who aren’t baptized. ... I don’t know what to do. I have memories of great priests who were my teachers, my mentors. Now, I look back and think, ‘What do I do with those memories as an adult?’ ”

So—it’s a little more complicated than church officials would have us believe. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have paid in time, treasure and emotional duress for their involvement with the sexual abuse scandal orchestrated by the bishops of the church.

Statutes of limitations

Particularly irksome to the church are attempts by attorneys and advocacy groups to forward state legislation that rolls back statutes of limitations on sexual abuse lawsuits. According to Zoll of The Associated Press, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput termed such legislation “a conspiracy between advocacy groups and attorneys to enrich lawyers at the church’s expense.” Chopko of the bishops’ conference was quoted as saying, “The group that stands to gain the most from this is the plaintiffs’ bar.” The Denver archdiocese’s Maier complains that attorneys and victims groups work together to “troll a new territory for cases” then work with sympathetic lawmakers to initiate legislation from which the plaintiffs’ attorneys will profit. Sometimes, he says, plaintiffs’ lawyers will draft the proposed law.

However, Steven Lubet, a Northwestern University law professor and ethicist, said he finds nothing unethical about plaintiffs’ attorneys drafting abuse-related bills, according to Zoll’s report. Pointing out that the Catholic church has its own state legislative lobbyists, Lubet noted that people who are interested in particular issues often try to influence legislation on those topics. In fact, who would be more qualified to draft a law regarding sex abuse than lawyers who have worked in the field for some time?

Finally, church officials complain that victims groups, especially the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), take donations from plaintiffs’ attorneys. Here, the lawyers can’t win. If they keep all the money, they are greedy and self-centered. If they give some of the money away, they are unethical. Lubet states that there is nothing unethical about these donations as long as they are not linked to referrals from the advocacy groups. SNAP, for example, asserts that they do not refer victims to particular attorneys. Having said that, since advocacy groups quite rightly have demanded financial transparency from the church, it would be prudent for advocacy groups to publish audited financial statements on their Web sites, citing where their money comes from, where it goes, and what their policies are on issues such as attorney referrals.

It is discouraging that bishops and their advocates are still attempting to cast the sexual abuse scandal as something other than a colossal failure of pastoral response and management by the bishops. To date, only Boston Cardinal Bernard Law lost his job because of his complicity in the sexual abuse of minors and he went on to a pretty good deal in Rome. If the bishops spent as much time repenting and censuring themselves as they do searching for scapegoats, the people of God would be well served. And, when it comes to lawsuits, the bishops might reflect on the words of Jesus recorded in Matthew:

“Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown in prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. ... And if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.”

National Catholic Reporter, December 29, 2006
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Planning a day of fasting and penance – An NCR Editorial Issue Date: December 29, 2006

Pope Benedict XVI’s personal preacher, it was reported recently, asked the pope to declare a day of fasting and penance to atone for the “abominations” committed inside the church “by its own ministers and pastors.”

The moment passed with relatively little fanfare, and that is unfortunate, because it is certainly noteworthy that a figure so close to the pope, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, would acknowledge that the crisis is severe. The church “paid a high price,” as a result of the scandal, he said. Cantalamessa also suggested that “a day of fasting and penance” take place “at local and national levels, where the problem was particularly strong, to publicly express repentance before God and solidarity with the victims.” We have some suggestions that we’ll dare to pass on about how such days of repentance might occur.

But, first, it is also worthy of note that 22 years after the first national story about the crisis appeared in these pages, the Vatican this year is not only taking notice but also finally taking significant action. Cantalamessa’s works come in the wake of Benedict’s own assessment to bishops in October that the sex abuse scandals had damaged trust and confidence between people and clerical leaders and that “the wounds caused by such acts run deep.”

And those words followed Benedict’s swift action in 2005 to remove Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative religious order, from public ministry. To the outside world, it was a light sentence for one repeatedly and credibly accused of molesting youngsters in his charge over the years. But for anyone familiar with the slow and cautious pace of ecclesiastical justice and the awful record of the recent pope on this matter, the disciplining of Maciel, a favorite of Pope John Paul II, was momentous. It sent a clear signal that 20 years of papal indifference and refusal to look honestly at the facts had come to an end.

One of the dangers of reporting this story aggressively and consistently over the years is the possibility of getting lost in the church’s wounds. The church, after all, is far more than the sex abuse scandal. But since the pope’s own man has made a case for the seriousness of the matter and suggested that public repentance is in order, we’ll risk a few more thoughts on the subject.

By all indications, Benedict became convinced by the facts that he had begun to read in the files from the United States on other cases and, in the case of Maciel, by the preponderance of evidence that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had gathered from former seminarians and priests in the United States, Spain, Mexico and elsewhere. In other words, he put aside his earlier presumptions that the crisis was the work of anti-Catholics and irresponsible media, and he apparently turned down the volume on those who were trying to convince the world that the solution to the problem was simply a matter of “fidelity” and that Maciel was a victim of either imaginative or lying scoundrels. To the church’s benefit, Benedict took the time to see for himself and began actually looking at the data, even before he became pope.

The evidence was, apparently, compelling.

So we would suggest one more step for those in the Vatican who finally “get it” and who see the significance of some public declaration about what went on. Before the wheels get rolling on a symbolic gesture that will dissipate into the air as quickly as many others have, consider what is at stake and what our traditions require of us.

Let us, finally, tell the truth.

What is it? Much of it is contained in documentation that remains tied up in legal proceedings and protected by members of the hierarchy, the very ones being called on to publicly repent.

This issue, as the Vatican is now well aware, has become a crisis not so much of sex abuse as of abuse of authority and trust. The pope has said as much and Cantalamessa’s words reveal as much. The truth is the first step in healing the breach.

If any entity in the world can demand that the truth finally come out, the Vatican can. There are several ways this can be done. One way is to require bishops to assemble the truth in the form of documentation that is contained in chancery office files, the kind of information that some communities have been successful in acquiring through grand jury proceedings. Bring on legal and other experts to comb through the correspondence and depositions in order to develop a narrative of what happened. Then the dioceses can report back to their respective communities on the dimensions of the crisis, where the system failed, who failed it and how. Further, the Vatican can decide what sanctions might be placed on those responsible for abusing the power of their offices and the trust of the community. (But please don’t allow those responsible, as occurred in the case of Cardinal Bernard Law, to remain on significant Vatican congregations so they can continue to influence the leadership and direction of the church.)

Another way to learn the truth is to consult Dominican Fr. Thomas Doyle. We know that in many clerical circles he is considered a pariah. We would simply ask that you talk to him, read what he has written. If his language is a bit heated at times, understand that he has been banging his head against institutional denial for more than two decades. Understand, too, that he is one of the rare priests who, when confronted with the awful reality of clerical sex abuse, thought not of his career, or saving face, or protecting the institution. He thought of the children in light of the Gospel and decided he could not cooperate with a cover-up. Talk to him. He knows an enormous amount. He gave up a promising climb up the clerical ladder to be true to his conscience. Honor his integrity.

With such information in hand, the entire church can then engage in meaningful penance and reconciliation because we’ll know what we’re doing penance for; who we’re forgiving and for what and with whom we are reconciling. All of those steps fit well into a sacramental tradition with which we are all familiar.

If we finally do the difficult work up front, the forgiveness and reconciliation and penance will certainly be humbling, but also deep and meaningful. If not, we’ll simply skip to another empty ceremony that will only hint at the reality and the truth.

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