Losing My Religion (10 page)

“He is a victim,” said Sharon Cody, a Mission Viejo councilwoman, at the rally. “I believe in the end we will find he has done nothing wrong. But in the meantime, the real sadness is that his life will forever be changed because of this. This is not deserved.”

Church officials again decided to let the lies go unanswered.

Finally, the church’s attorneys were let loose on Price in May 1995. By Price’s count, they deposed him for 11 days, eight hours a day, despite repeated motions to the trial judge to end the ordeal. In his memoir, Price wrote that he was questioned by about a dozen attorneys who represented the church or Harris. They asked about his sexual history, whether he liked the way Father Harris touched and sucked him, if he fantasized about having sex with his father, if he ever resisted the sex acts, and if he welcomed the sex acts. They also asked, “What do you think God thinks of your lawsuit?”

When his suit was eventually tossed out of court because of the statute of limitations, he said the diocese threatened him with $60,000 in legal bills unless he dropped his appeal. Not wanting to go deeper in debt, Price agreed.

The diocese’s strategy of using disinformation and hardball legal tactics worked. Harris’s accusers—already emotionally fragile—faced the wrath of the public, a battery of church attorneys and an expensive legal battle. Who would want to take on such formidable opponents?

Ryan DiMaria didn’t want to sue the diocese. He only wanted an apology, and some money for counseling for what he claimed Harris had done to him as a high school sophomore. In 1988, when Ryan was despondent over a friend’s suicide, his parents had asked Harris to counsel the boy. Ryan said Harris took him out for dinner and a performance of
The Phantom of the Opera
in Los Angeles before returning to the priest’s house, where the boy spent the night. Ryan said Harris invited him to share his bed. He refused and slept on a couch in another room. The next morning, Ryan said, Harris repeatedly abused him.

Ryan spent the next six years battling depression and thoughts of his own suicide. He wanted to tell his secret, but to whom? Who would believe his word against Father Hollywood’s? His parents had even attended the rally to support Harris. Ryan vowed he would go to his grave with the secret—and he wanted that grave to be an early one. In 1996, after a night of drinking, Ryan called his father and said he was going to kill himself. He started to explain how to access his various bank accounts. Ryan’s family rushed to his home in time to stop him. Finally, the secret came out.

Ryan brought his case to the district attorney’s office, which declined to press charges in what was then a six-year-old incident despite pleas made by Ryan and his parents the day before the criminal statute of limitations expired. In the fall of 1996, church officials met with the family, but offered no apology.

“We thought we were doing the church a favor,” his mother, Diane DiMaria, told me. “What we found out a long time later is that they knew much more [about Harris] and really didn’t care. They were trying to keep us quiet about it.”

Unhappy with the church’s response, DiMaria filed a civil lawsuit in 1997.

His attorneys had no experience in clergy sexual abuse cases, and most of their colleagues advised against taking Ryan as a client. They took the case anyway and spent the next four years fighting the dioceses of Orange and Los Angeles. At the time, few people had ever beaten the Catholic Church in a clergy sexual abuse suit. The bishops had superior resources. They also maintained a secret set of files where sensitive documents were stashed, unbeknownst to plaintiff’s attorneys. The statue of limitations was often a problem because victims of childhood sexual abuse usually don’t come forward until well into adulthood. The victims and their families were frequently told by bishops, parishioners and friends that the church shouldn’t have to endure a scandal.

Getting ready for the DiMaria trial, his attorneys spent more than $150,000—a fortune for a small law firm. Along the way, Ryan’s team floated various settlement offers: $100,000, $150,000 and, as the case got closer to trial, $1 million.

“They basically told us to drop dead,” Manly recalled. “That’s how stupid they were.”

As the trial’s opening neared in the summer of 2001—and a judge gave the okay for Ryan’s attorneys to depose Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the powerful archbishop of Los Angeles—settlement talks accelerated. Mediated by Judge James Gray in Orange County Superior Court, the two sides agreed to an unprecedented $5.2 million settlement, and at Ryan’s and Gray’s insistence, to a new set of rules the church would enact when dealing with allegations of clergy sexual abuse.

The negotiations got stuck on two points. First, Ryan’s attorneys insisted that Harris be removed from the priesthood. The priest, who continued to deny any wrongdoing, didn’t want to leave the clergy. It took hours before church officials and Ryan’s attorney could extract that concession. Harris reluctantly agreed to ask Pope John Paul II to release him from his vows.

Second, Judge Gray wanted to get a promise from Ryan. He asked the young man, who often had suicidal thoughts, to vow to him that he would live a long and happy life. It took most of a day, but the judge finally got the promise.

Our lengthy profile, “Sins of the Father,” came out in November 2001, two months after the settlement. It portrayed a deeply conflicted man who spent the vast majority of his time in saintly pursuits that positively affected thousands of students and parents, but who harbored untamed demons that turned him into an alleged predator.

Yet there was a bigger, deeper story here that I didn’t fully recognize at the time: the response to the victims by the bishop and his lieutenants. They had acted more like Mafia bosses than shepherds. I wrote off their actions as the work of a single, morally corrupt diocese. I filed the story neatly away in a compartment in my mind. And even if all of organized religion were somehow fundamentally corrupt, that didn’t mean God isn’t real. It seemed a ridiculous thought. Besides, I was still quite sure that organized religion was not inherently bad—only a few individuals were, as is the case in every organization. I had just gotten an unvarnished look into a single diocese that had forgotten what it was about.

I was attending my Catholic conversion classes twice a week and was being fed all the rich teachings of the church. I felt inoculated from an attack on my faith from the likes of Father Harris and the Diocese of Orange.

In a boxing match, a powerful body blow early on might not seem too damaging to the fighter. But it can have a devastating effect. The boxer who is pounded hard in the ribs will instinctively lower his guard to protect against another blow, leaving his chin open to attack. He’ll be sapped of strength. And he’ll think twice about aggressively punching away, knowing that he’ll be exposing his tender midsection.

For me, the Father Hollywood story was a spiritual body blow, but I didn’t sense it at the time. Of course, it wasn’t an isolated story for the Catholic Church, as we now know. I have also come to realize the widespread church corruption reflected in the sex scandal is not isolated to the Catholic institutions. Much that would trouble me about my faith in the next five years of reporting was neatly contained in the Father Hollywood story. Hypocrisy at all levels of the church, innocent people put in harm’s way by the church’s “shepherds,” self-interest triumphing over Christian values, lies big and small and a general lack of courage among followers of Christ, especially those in power, would be recurrent subjects of my reporting.

My reporting on Michael Harris had one other effect. It made me realize I had a knack for investigative reporting, and that the world of religion offered fertile ground for my use of that God-given gift. I still didn’t think it would harm my faith. My beliefs were too strong, too real. Father Vincent had taught me to pray the Rosary. I studied the Bible. I walked the Stations of the Cross inside my parish. I read books about St. Francis of Assisi, St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Theresa of Lisieux, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross. I prayed that I would experience a sense of holiness that infused the saints, and occasionally—surprisingly—got glimpses of it. I wanted to be like the biblical David, a deeply flawed person who was still described in Scripture as “a man after God’s own heart.”

My faith was as natural—and essential—to me as breathing. I thought nothing could take it away.

…If your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him something to drink…

—
ROMANS
12:20

 

M
OST PEOPLE OF
faith don’t spend a lot of time considering beliefs different from their own. For Christians, for example, it is comforting to believe that all denominations—Protestant or Catholic—share the same belief in Jesus as their Savior and the Bible as Holy Scripture. Most differences between Christians can be chalked up to hair-splitting. But as a journalist, I was exposed to a much wider range of religious experience and needed to take all seriously. I covered many stories about Judaism and Islam, in addition to having some contact with Buddhists, Unitarians, Hindus, Sikhs, Scientologists, Jains and Baha’is. This can raise questions most of us don’t usually confront. What would you do if you met people you admired greatly, who reminded you of the best examples of your fellow believers, yet whose faith rested on what you saw as patent absurdities? In my case, I met such folks when I covered Mormonism.

I found Mormons mesmerizing—especially their generally high moral conduct—even though I didn’t believe a word of their doctrine. In a nutshell, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that an angel named Moroni led Joseph Smith in 1827 to discover a divine set of golden plates buried in a hillside near his New York home. God provided the 22-year-old Smith with a pair of glasses and “seer stones” that allowed him to translate the “Reformed Egyptian” writings inscribed on the plates into an additional revelation from Jesus called the “Book of Mormon.” Mormons believe this scripture restored the church to God’s original vision, leaving the rest of Christianity in a state of apostasy.

The book’s narrative focuses on a tribe of Jews who sailed from Jerusalem to the New World in 600 BC and split into two main warring factions. The God-fearing Nephites were “pure” (the word was officially changed from “white” in 1981) and “delightsome.” The idol-worshiping Lamanites received the “curse of blackness,” turning their skin dark. The resurrected Jesus appeared in the Americas in about 34 AD and gave instructions on how his followers should conduct themselves. This ushered in 200 years of peace until the Nephites and Lamanites began fighting again. By 385 AD, the dark-skinned Lamanites had wiped out their Hebrew enemies. The Mormon church calls the victors “the principal ancestors of the American Indians.”

Independent scholars have dismissed this account as implausible. In 1996, the Smithsonian Institution responded to rumors that it was using the Book of Mormon as an archeology guide. It issued a stinging eight-point statement on why there was “no direct connection between the archeology of the New World and the subject matter of the [Book of Mormon].” Smithsonian officials and others point out that the Book of Mormon contains a long list of anachronisms unknown in ancient America, including such animals as cattle, horses, oxen, domestic sheep, pigs and elephants; such metals as steel; such weapons as swords; and such inventions as the chariot.

“Reports of findings of ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, and other Old World writings in the New World in pre-Columbian contexts have frequently appeared in newspapers, magazines, and sensational books,” the Smithsonian wrote. “None of these claims has stood up to examination by reputable scholars.”

Of course, absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence, but you won’t find many Mormon archeologists digging up the Americas in expectation of unearthing ancient chariots and swords. And the best Mormon apologists can say is that the text is rich, complex and written in a revelatory style that Joseph Smith, a rural man of simple education, wouldn’t have been capable of producing.

But those are minor problems compared to recent DNA evidence that shows the descendants of Native Americans came from Asia, not the Middle East. This knocks away the underpinnings of the Mormon scripture, though church officials are hurriedly reinterpreting the Book of Mormon on the fly to account for the absence of Hebrew blood in Native Americans. These hastily constructed explanations, mostly by Brigham Young University scholars, contradict 150 years of teachings by the church and its prophets, but have been mostly unquestioned by the Mormon faithful—if they are bothered by the controversy at all.

Mormons also believe the leader of their church, called their president and prophet, has the ability to receive direct revelations from God. For example, Joseph Smith learned from the Lord that the Garden of Eden had been in Jackson County, Missouri, and it was there that Jesus Christ would return to Earth.

In a revelation that became better known, God instructed Smith in 1831 to begin the practice of polygamy within the church. Smith later explained that he had no choice but to take multiple wives (33 in all, most historians believe, ranging in age from 14 to 58 at the time of the marriage).

“God commanded me to obey it,” Smith said. “He said to me that unless I accepted it, and introduced it, and practiced it, I, together with my people, would be damned.”

But in 1890, long after Smith’s death, the Lord instructed another Mormon prophet to halt the practice. The timing was fortuitous, as federal opposition to Utah’s statehood was gaining strength because of the Mormons’ polygamous practices. God also sent a message in 1978 to the Mormon prophet that blacks should be treated equally in the church and should no longer be barred from ministry. This particular revelation came 116 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 13 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Cosmologically, Mormons believe that human souls begin as a pre-human spiritual—but also physical—presence on a crystal orb in outer space. These spiritual children are made by God the Father and His wife procreating and eventually make their way to Earth. After humans die, they have a chance to become gods themselves and live on their own planet. Mormons are also taught that once our planet reaches its “sanctified and immortal state,” it too will turn into crystal.

I thought this was all quite nutty, yet from what I could see, Mormons faithfully lived out their beliefs in far greater numbers than other Christians. Most of them tithed, giving 10 percent of their income to the church, as instructed. This provided the church with a large revenue stream for building projects and for charity. The church had developed a private welfare system that would be the envy of any government, creating a large safety net for Mormons down on their luck. Members in good standing neither drink nor smoke. Their clergy comprise a nearly all-volunteer force, with most of the church’s paid members headquartered in Salt Lake City. Their members observe Family Home Evening, a weekly at-home event where the television is turned off and the parents and children sit down for spiritual lessons or board games, conversation and special treats. About 40 percent of young Mormon men agree to go on a two-year mission where they spend their days in short-sleeve, white dress shirts, ties and black slacks, knocking on doors and telling people about the Mormon faith. Can you imagine any other Christian denomination where nearly half of the young adult males sacrifice two years of their life to go and make converts?

Jesus said a person’s faith could be judged by the fruit it bears:

Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

—
MATTHEW
7:15–20

 

Judged by its fruits, Mormonism compares favorably with other Christian denominations, even as many Protestants dismiss the Latter-day Saints as a non-Christian cult. So why do many Mormons practice so many of Christ’s teachings better than “real” Christians? As a mainstream Christian and budding Catholic, I often was amazed at how devoted and unquestioning Mormons could be to a faith that seemed so preposterous—not to mention racist—on its surface. I knew doctors and lawyers and other professionals at the top of their field who were practicing Mormons. How, I wondered, did they suspend their disbelief long enough to get around the many common-sense obstacles put in their path by the Book of Mormon and the life of Joseph Smith? Around the world, the church was (and still is) recruiting new members at an explosive pace, approaching 500,000 per year, according to church figures (numbers that critics say are inflated). Do they all believe the tenets of the faith? Do they look the other way theologically in order to join a lifestyle they admire? No one seemed bothered in the least by the speed bumps I encountered through a simple reading of their holy scriptures and the tiniest bit of research. For them, there was no need to debate their faith, just as there was no reason to bicker about whether the Earth was round.

Many non-Mormon Christians share my reaction to Mormon doctrine. Yet what’s so strange about Mormonism compared to traditional Christianity? At the time, I didn’t see any parallel between the Mormons’ fidelity to the claims in the Book of Mormon and my allegiance to the New Testament, which included stories of a virgin birth, water turning into wine, two people rising from the dead, a coin to pay a temple tax being found in a fish’s mouth, Jesus walking on water, five loaves of bread and two fish feeding 5,000 families, and Jesus and his apostles curing people of crippling and fatal illnesses. And that’s just the New Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures talk about a global flood, people living well into their hundreds, a parted sea, a vast exodus not yet found in the archeological record, bread falling from heaven daily for 40 years and a man living three days inside a whale before being spit out. The details of Mormonism are fresher, but not much more strange and mythical. I just happened to have grown up with the stories of the Bible. I was more used to them.

I was drawn to Mormons because they seemed to be in a spot similar to mine: they were people who believed deeply in their faith despite its challenges to rationality. At this point, after a decade of the Christian life, I wasn’t worried about specific details of my faith not making sense. I just assumed man’s hand in writing the Bible had injected some harmless contradictions into the Holy Book, and many of the wilder stories were simple allegories. But I did ponder deeper theological problems—the why-do-bad-things-happen-to-good-people kind of thoughts. Why are some prayers answered directly while others appear to be ignored? When a little girl gets raped and killed, where is God? Why might a busload of Christian high school athletes crash on the highway? Why does God play a hide-and-seek game with us, making it difficult to figure how He wants us to act?

I often felt silly just having these kinds of doubts because the questions seemed so elementary. By this point, I thought my faith should have been more advanced. I saw it as a defeat, in a way, as if I had lasted long into a marathon and now was forced to go back to the starting line. I fought back with heavy doses of Christian reading, church services, prayer and long talks with my friend Hugh. On our weekly run around the Back Bay, I’d bring up the suffering of innocent children, and Hugh admitted that there wasn’t an easy answer to the pain they suffered, and that it broke his heart—and the Lord’s—to see it happen. But, he would always tell me, “Compared to eternity, we’re on this Earth for less than a blink of an eye. With that perspective, any suffering here is so minimal, and we won’t know why we even have that until we see the Lord. It will all be made clear, Billy, in less than a blink of an eye. I can wait. Heaven will be a wonderful place.”

In retrospect, the Mormons were also part of my therapy. In them, I could see people living a faithful life while relying on a doctrine that to me seemed wildly flawed. Perhaps what mattered wasn’t theology, but the quality of life it created. I admired them because they lived a healthy and holy life. They were more admirable than I was. Yet I also thought my Scriptures, though they contained some contradictions, made far more sense. Was I thinking too much? At some point, didn’t I need to take a leap of faith? That’s why it’s called “faith” and “belief.” Science couldn’t prove or disprove the existence of God. Perhaps I could learn from the Mormons and conclude that intellectuals far wiser than myself had explored the tenets of Christianity and found them solid. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Still, I wondered, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, atheists and others each had their own scholars, who tackled great questions and confidently reached conflicting answers. These arguments would ricochet in my head until I just didn’t want to think about them anymore.

I longed to be Mormon-like, accepting my faith and moving on to more productive matters—such as living it. I wrote often about Mormons, covering everything from their paradoxically hip teenage dances, which attracted 700 students from across Southern California, to the success of Mormon temple weddings, which boast a low divorce rate of 6 percent (the born-again Christian divorce rate is about 27 percent). I reported on a trio of moms who talked a Nordstrom department store into holding a fashion show that featured dresses that Mormon (and Orthodox Jewish and Muslim) teenagers could wear at their proms to retain their modesty.

I even spent a day and night as part of a wagon train that journeyed 800 miles across the deserts of the Southwest, from Salt Lake City, Utah, to San Bernardino, California. The trek commemorated the Mormons’ first settlement in Southern California in 1851. I marveled at the commitment by the 60 or so Latter-day Saints who volunteered for the 50-day journey. Dressed in pioneer garb, they rode in seven covered wagons, which included a two-seater “potty wagon,” over the dirt trails, dried creek beds and some paved roads that roughly paralleled Interstate 15. They braved 100-degree-plus desert heat and fierce sand storms. They washed their clothes in tubs or over rocks. They settled squabbles in group meetings before each day’s ride.

During my short time on the trail, I began to appreciate what the Mormon pioneers had gone through. The combination of the wooden-plank seats and rocky trail pounded relentlessly at my kidneys. The novelty wore off quickly, replaced by boredom. The desert landscape passed at less than five miles per hour. I especially felt for the young mothers on the trip. I have enough trouble entertaining my kids on car trips, even with an array of electronic devices at my disposal. These modern mothers had nothing, but somehow kept their young sons and daughters entertained for nearly two months, trapped in a tiny wagon.