Losing My Religion (9 page)

Blind loyalty to a member of the clergy would be a recurring theme during my next five years as a religion writer. For Catholics, the bond between parishioners and their priests was particularly strong. Unquestioning loyalty was one of the most cherished values in the Catholic hierarchical pyramid—from pope to cardinals, cardinals to archbishops, archbishops to bishops, bishops to priests and priests to the people in the pews. In my Catholic conversion classes, I was taught that priests were people set aside by God and endowed with special powers that allowed them alone to dispense the sacraments of the church. A layperson could recite the liturgy of the Eucharist perfectly, but, according to the church, he or she could not turn the bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Christ. The laity couldn’t grant someone absolution after hearing a confession, or give Last Rites to expedite passage into heaven. Only a priest had those powers. This separation between the clergy and laity served to emphasize the dependence, deference and loyalty expected of the parishioners to their “Fathers.” In that light, it was easier to account for the defensive reaction Catholics had to the Harris news.

Jean Pasco and I told our disbelieving editors about the ground-swell of support in the community for Harris, and we agreed we should produce a detailed profile that would explain how such a beloved priest, who did so much good, could hide such a dark secret for so long.

A few days later, I found myself in Long Beach, walking into a nondescript therapist’s office on Atlantic Avenue with Mary Grant, the survivor of clergy sexual abuse who had invited me to witness her support group. The seven survivors gathered there had been told I would be joining them.

Entering the room, I awkwardly said hello to everyone, and they introduced themselves. I was struck by the range of ages in the room: from 30-something to more than 70. The first person to speak was the mother of Rita Milla. Her neck was being gently rubbed by her daughter, who sat next to her. From earlier news accounts, I could only vaguely recall the bare outline of their story, and I had to look up the details the next day at the office. As an awkward, overweight young teenager, Rita Milla had caught the eye of a parish priest named Santiago “Henry” Tamayo at St. Philomena Church in Carson, California. In 1978, after grooming her with special attention and visits to her home, the priest first molested Rita, then 16, through a broken screen in the confessional. He later introduced her to six other priests, who took turns having sex with her—once allegedly at a hotel room that was rented by the hour and then in the parish’s rectory. When Rita became pregnant in 1982, Tamayo wanted her to get an abortion, but she refused. So instead, he shipped Rita off with $450 to the Philippines, where she and her baby almost died in childbirth.

When the scandal came to light two years later, Bishop Juan A. Arzube of Los Angeles—who later would be accused of molesting an 11-year-old boy—blamed Rita for luring the priests into bed.

“This girl has had very bad actions even with altar boys,” the bishop told a Spanish-language television station in 1984, responding to a $15 million lawsuit she filed against the priests and Archdiocese of Los Angeles. “She is a person of bad reputation.”

Not that it mattered, but Rita said she was a virgin until the priests got a hold of her. On the day her civil suit was filed, all seven priests disappeared from their posts. Later, church officials encouraged Tamayo to stay in the Philippines to avoid the authorities and to keep quiet about the archdiocese’s continued payments to him. Rita’s initial case was thrown out because of the statute of limitations. None of her alleged rapists was arrested.

In 1991, Tamayo returned to the United States against the wishes of the archdiocese and publicly apologized to Rita. He died in 1996.

That was Rita’s story, but that night in the Long Beach therapist’s office, her mother’s anguish dominated the room. Through sobs and tears, Rita’s mother talked, in a heavy Spanish accent, about how honored she had been that Father Henry had taken an interest in her daughter. Father Henry, she had believed, was a godsend. With bitterness dripping from her voice, Rita’s mother recalled how she would send her daughter off with Father Henry into the night, even when Rita begged to stay home. She believed that her daughter was being mentored by a man of God.

“Why didn’t I see what was going on?” she said between heartbreaking sobs. “Why did I keep making her go with him?” Her face contorted in agony. “Why did they do this to us?”

I’d never seen such raw pain. It had been nearly 20 years since the last of the rapes, but the mother’s guilt and sense of betrayal were still fresh. My heart pounded, and tears welled in my eyes. I felt ashamed just to be there. I was a voyeur, peeking into another world. I hadn’t earned this kind of intimacy. I just stared at the floor as she talked. Rita kept rubbing her mother’s back and telling her it was okay.

I learned several facts that night about survivors of clergy sexual abuse that would inform my reporting in the months ahead when the Catholic sex scandal burst open. These insights haunt me to this day.

I discovered that as horrific as the abuse was, most survivors experienced the most lasting damage from church leaders whom they approached for help. Instead of receiving protection and justice, these children and their parents were vilified for coming forward, called liars or accused of being bad Catholics for trying to bring scandal upon the church. The victims and their families were routinely told that they were the first to complain about a priest’s behavior, though it often wasn’t true. Church leaders acted as though “they had no fear of God,” as Rita Milla put it. Sitting there, listening to the victims, I couldn’t imagine why any bishop, upon hearing about an abuse claim, would not immediately pick up the phone, call the police and bar the cleric from ministry pending the outcome of a criminal and church investigation. It rarely, if ever, happened.

I also learned that the media’s terms “sexual abuse” and “molestation” were far too neutral to describe what happened to most of these people. (The church even shied away from those terms, preferring instead such Orwellian language as “boundary violations” and “inappropriate conduct.”) During my time covering the Catholic sex scandal, I tried in vain to get my editors to use more accurate and graphic descriptions: “child rape” and “sodomy,” to begin with. The more descriptive words in my copy were always changed. They were considered too graphic for a family newspaper. I thought our readers were grown-up enough to handle the more precise description. Molestation or sexual abuse could refer to a child being fondled through layers of clothing. That was bad, but it didn’t compare to violent sex acts performed on children. I always thought there would be less loyalty and more outrage if the laity knew exactly what their molesting priests had done.

By contrast,
The Times
’s editors saw the wisdom of using graphic descriptions when the paper published a story in 2003 about women who claimed Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a candidate for governor of California, made unwanted sexual advances and behaved cruelly in front of them.
The Times
wrote that one woman said Schwarzenegger “whispered in her ear: ‘Have you ever had a man slide his tongue in your [anus]?’”

In another section of the story, we ran a quote from a waitress who said Schwarzenegger beckoned her to his side. “I bent down to listen to him,” she recalled. “He said, a little louder than a whisper, ‘I want you to do a favor for me.’ I thought, OK, maybe he wanted more bread. And he said, ‘I want you to go in the bathroom, stick your finger in your [vagina], and bring it out to me.’”

I admired the editors for not patronizing their readers with vague paraphrases of Schwarzenegger’s alleged quotes. They put them right out there with only the thinnest of filters (e.g., the word was not “vagina”). But how can the accuracy of a salacious quote be more important than the accuracy of actual behavior? I never got a satisfying answer. I don’t think there’s any conspiracy here; I just think that the very idea of priests sodomizing a boy on an altar until he defecates, or plunging an aspersorium, used to sprinkle holy water, into a girl’s vagina, or a little boy hiding his bloody underwear from his mother was too much for even jaded journalists to consider.

The last thing I learned that night from the survivors concerned the deep wounds and permanent damage inflicted on children who were sexually abused by priests. The acts badly twist and retard a child’s spiritual and sexual development. Children simply have no way to process what’s happening to them when a religious icon performs sex acts on them. When the Catholic faithful say victims filed suits primarily for the money, I learned quickly not to argue with them. They wouldn’t understand until they attended a therapy session of survivors of clergy sexual abuse.

On the road to Damascus, a light from heaven blinded Saul of Tarsus, who had been attacking Jews who believed Jesus Christ was the Messiah. He fell to the ground and heard God’s voice ask, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Three days later, a disciple named Ananias restored Saul’s sight and baptized him. From that moment, Saul—with the new name Paul—dedicated his life to spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ, becoming one of history’s most influential figures. I didn’t have a sudden conversion—or rather, de-conversion—after meeting with the sexual abuse survivors, on the 30-minute trip from Long Beach to my home in Costa Mesa. But looking back, it now appears to me as a Road to Damascus moment that I kept safely locked away in my subconscious. I drove in almost a trance. I had written so much about the redemptive power of faith, but I had never seen, in a real and personal way, the opposite: the damage religion could do in the hands of bad people. I looked back on what I had seen on the faith beat and started to wonder, for the first time, about the low level of holiness I was seeing. It was the reason why stories were so easy to spot—the people with deep faith, real faith, shined brightly against the dullness of the spiritual pack. This short supply of holiness was something that began to stick in my throat, a disconcerting fact that I washed down with prayer and Christian aphorisms such as “Don’t mix up man’s shortcomings with God.” It would take a lot of processing and several years for my conscious thinking to catch up to my gut.

When I got home, I tried to tell my wife what I had seen at the survivors’ meeting, but it was impossible to properly put into words. The closest I could come was to say these people had had their souls shattered, and they would never be whole again. I would later run across a better description given by Father Thomas Doyle, whose career was stunted by church leaders after he became, in 1985, a leading advocate for victims of clergy sexual abuse. Molesting priests and their superiors, he said, were committing “soul murder.”

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.

—
EPHESIANS
4:14–15

 

B
ACK IN THE
newsroom, I started to do what I should have done nine months earlier when Jean Pasco dropped the stack of legal documents on my desk: put together the story on Michael Harris. Thanks to the DiMaria lawsuit, which caused the church to disgorge documents from their secret files and forced church leaders to testify under oath in depositions, Jean and I were able to piece together an in-depth story of Father Harris and his fall from grace. I had glanced through the documents on the day of the settlement press conference, gleaning a few highlights for the next day’s story. But now, I had the time to put together all the pieces of the puzzle. This was one of the best positions for a journalist to be in—to be able to draft a story from hundreds of pages of highly revealing, exclusive documents. For most articles, you had to fight for scraps of information, file public records requests to pry information from the government and beg sources for copies of key documents. But DiMaria’s attorneys—Freberg and her partner, John Manly—had already spent five years wielding the court-backed power of discovery, as it is aptly named. And their work was in front of me now. The story could be something special, and I attacked it as a journalist, leaving behind any questions of faith it raised. For now, it was all about the story.

The documents showed—with remarkable clarity—the gaping difference between how an ancient structure and modern society dealt with sexual abuse. The real shock wasn’t what Michael Harris allegedly had done. The story turned out to be the behavior of his superiors and colleagues, who lied to and misled the victims, their families and the public to avoid a scandal and protect their brother priest. Going through the pile, I found the story of Vincent Colice, a student at Mater Dei High School when Harris was principal from 1977 to 1979. After being diagnosed with AIDS in 1992, Vincent confessed to his mother that during his junior and senior years, Harris had molested him. He asked her not to tell anyone. The secret weighed greatly on her. Two weeks before his death, in the fall of 1993, Vincent released his mother from her vow of secrecy. After her son died, Lenora Colice sat down and wrote Harris. It was Thanksgiving Day. A copy of the neatly written note was included among the documents.

“Today of all days I have to write, to finalize my thoughts and put them to rest,” Lenora Colice began. “Over the years I thanked God many times for the support and love you showed to my family through times of adversity and sorrow.” She went on to state that Vince had told her that he had been molested by Harris after going to him for counseling.

“I will never ever forget or forgive what you did to my son. Only God in his merciful way knows how you feel for what you have done and continue to do to others. My prayer for you is that you seek help and you never ever again do to any young boy what you did to Vince. [No one should] have to live with the torment that Vince did.

“The anguish he lived with can never be taken back. I only hope that his life and death were not in vain. He is at peace now.”

Next was a copy of a handwritten card Harris sent to Lenora Colice a week later: “Through counseling and other resources I have endeavored to work through many things. Hard work and prayer have helped. It may not be any consolation, but I am very sorry.”

Was it a tacit confession? Colice thought so, and she took it to church officials in December. She wanted Harris removed as principal of Santa Margarita. Around the same time, the diocese had been contacted by an attorney who claimed she had two clients who also were sexually abused by Harris. She wouldn’t reveal their identities, perhaps fearing the power and retribution of the church.

Worried about Harris’s note and the anonymous allegations, diocesan officials shipped Harris off to the St. Luke Institute in Maryland for an in-patient evaluation. St. Luke was the preeminent Catholic psychiatric facility, specializing in treating priests with sexual problems. It was standard practice in those days, when faced with a credible allegation of sexual abuse, for the church to send a priest for counseling. Though the acts in question were felonies, civil authorities were kept out of the matter. Usually, after treatment, the priest received a clean bill of health. His bishop would then place him in a new, unsuspecting parish. All too often, he would molest again.

Before the Diocese of Orange sent Harris away, Harris and church officials concocted a cover story about his “stress” and need for time away from his job to recuperate. They didn’t explain that they had sent him across the country to psychiatrists to determine whether he was a child molester. They certainly didn’t ask whether anyone had information about Harris that would be useful to the church’s investigation.

I turned to the deposition of Monsignor John Urell, the church’s chief investigator into the Harris accusations. A rising star in the diocese, Urell was rumored to be in line for appointment as a bishop. With sandy brown hair, a round, boyish face and an easy manner, Urell looked as though he would fit in on a country-club golf course or in the halls of Congress. He was also a good friend of Harris.

John Manly, one of DiMaria’s attorneys, took the deposition in July 2001. Manly was an aggressive lawyer whose temper and wild streak scared church leaders. He was also a cradle Catholic and the product of a Catholic education. His principal at Mater Dei had been Michael Harris. Manly felt that church leaders had forsaken the Catholic principles of morality and justice that were drilled into him during his schooling. In the deposition, he didn’t hide his disgust.

I skimmed down to the section where he asked Urell about the apparent letter of confession. Manly asked whether he considered the note an admission of guilt. Urell gave several conflicting and evasive responses, including “I did not consider it an admission because it doesn’t say it was an admission of it. So I did not consider it an admission. I considered it very troubling and concerning to me.”

Later, Manly asked Urell whether he thought the diocese’s cover story blaming “stress” for Harris’s abrupt departure from Santa Margarita High School was misleading.

URELL
:
No, I did not…. I believe he was under tremendous stress at that time.

MANLY
:
That’s not the reason he took a leave. He took a leave because you made him take a leave because he had been accused of child molestation.

URELL
:
He was on administrative leave.

MANLY
:
Because he had been accused of child molestation.

URELL
:
Because there had been an accusation made by the parent of someone who was not alive to talk about it, yes.

MANLY
:
You think this statement and article is consistent with the bishop’s motto of “walk in truth”?

URELL
:
Yes, I do.

 

In the stack of documents, I next turned to the key piece of evidence generated in the DiMaria case: a psychological report written by Harris’s doctors during his five-day stay at the St. Luke Institute. Their findings were so damaging to the church’s case that its attorneys appealed to the California Supreme Court to prevent its release. They lost. The 12-page report—first delivered to the diocese in March 1994—would become a part of the public record.

Doctors at the Catholic facility diagnosed Harris with same-sex paraphilia (deviant sexual behavior) and ephebophilia (a sexual attraction to adolescent boys). Harris would not confirm or deny the alleged molestations because he knew his superiors would be receiving the report, but the institute’s doctors were unequivocal: “Our clinical team believes that there is substance to the allegations. It has been our experience that in many cases like these, the allegations that have surfaced are only a few of the actual incidents of abuse that have occurred.” Indeed, Harris was eventually accused of molesting a dozen children, and the church has paid out more than $15 million to settle claims against him. He has always maintained his innocence.

At St. Luke, doctors noted that Harris was depressed and anxious as he revealed disturbing childhood secrets, but still impressed them with an external demeanor “striking for its calmness.” Harris’s appearance was so polished that other patients started to confide in him “as if he were a therapist,” according to the report.

“Michael has always been most concerned about appearances and his reputation at the expense of his own healing and inner health,” wrote Dr. Stephen J. Rossetti. “As a result, he has been applauded by the community, but he has become isolated, confused, anxious and depressed.”

Harris told doctors he had suffered from sexual conflicts for years and suggested that his affection for students could have been misinterpreted. He admitted his sexual development appeared to be arrested in adolescence, when he went into the minor seminary. He also said he sometimes was sexually aroused by hugging high school boys.

For devout Catholics, one of the priest’s most striking confessions was that he was engaged in virtually no prayer life “except for a few minutes of the Rosary before he falls asleep. He used the Rosary not only as a prayer but as a repetitious act to help him fall asleep.

“Upon inquiry, Michael said that he is afraid to spend time alone praying. He is afraid of what will surface.”

By March 1994, top officials in the Diocese of Orange knew from the St. Luke report that Harris was sexually attracted to boys and that he was likely a serial molester. But they kept the information a secret, even to another Harris accuser who had come forward.

Larry Rehab claimed that Harris had sexually assaulted him in counseling. Rehab, who was 20 at the time, had been struggling with his sexuality when he turned to Harris. Rehab claimed that after one counseling session at Harris’s home, his car wouldn’t start and Harris offered to let him spend the night. During that evening, Rehab claimed that Harris sexually attacked him by ramming his penis forcefully into his mouth.

Rehab detailed the sexual encounter to Urell, who confronted his friend about the allegations. Urell testified that Harris—a priest who had taken a vow of celibacy—admitted to having sex with Rehab, claiming it was by mutual consent. After hearing Rehab’s story, Urell attended an intimate farewell dinner for Harris that very night given by his close friends in the diocese.

An incredulous Manly asked Urell in his deposition if “it was appropriate to go to dinner with somebody who admittedly sexually assaulted somebody and was accused at this point by a whole bunch of people of molesting children…?”

“I can say now I believe it was inappropriate to go, yes,” Urell replied. “We were all—we had been all friends and co-workers for many years, so yes.”

“Monsignor, can you see how this looks very, very bad?” Manly asked. “Can you see where someone would look at this and say, ‘You have…the person who is investigating the matter going to a dinner with him, who is an accused child molester?’ Can you see how people would perceive this as—I mean no disrespect—but duplicitous?”

“Yes, I can,” Urell admitted.

As each duplicitous move by the diocese was revealed, I cheered a little. It meant the story was getting even better. For the moment, the case of Michael Harris had nothing to do with my faith. What I was experiencing was just a pure, journalistic adrenaline rush. Each time I thought there was no way church officials could act any worse, they did. I greedily gathered the information that this rare peek inside the Catholic hierarchy provided. I felt that the gods of journalism were looking after me. I did have some sense of bewilderment that an entire diocesan team could act so contrary to the Gospel, but those feelings were simply overwhelmed by the thrill of the hunt.

In September 1994, David Price became the first person to publicly accuse Harris of molestation, filing suit against the priest and the diocese. The former Mater Dei student had first met privately with church officials and told them that Harris molested him repeatedly when he sought counseling after his father’s death in 1979. Price said he had remembered the episodes during a series of therapy sessions years later. Church officials did nothing. “Instead of apologizing that day, Monsignor Urell lied to me,” wrote Price in his self-published memoir,
Altar Boy, Altered Life
.

“The truth was that he and the church knew at this time exactly who Monsignor Harris was and what they were dealing with…But nobody at the diocese offered to help me, or offered any hint of an apology.

“I was told by Monsignor Urell that, ‘First and foremost, the Catholic Church is a business, and secondly it’s a religion…The religion part is church on Sundays, but we’re not talking about church right now—we’re talking about business.’”

Two months later, after hearing nothing from church officials, Price filed suit. Larry Rehab and another victim also went public to bolster Price’s allegations. The documents revealed what kind of treatment the diocese gave Price and Rehab when they spoke out about their alleged abuse. First, an outraged Monsignor Lawrence Baird, the spokesman for the diocese, told an
Orange County Register
reporter that Harris was “an icon of the priesthood.”

Next, Harris’s top defense attorney, John Barnett, savaged the three accusers in the press. He called the alleged victims “liars” and “sick individuals” who were just after money. Barnett compared the allegations to those at “the Salem witch trials of 1692, in which 29 people were executed in Massachusetts after being falsely accused of being witches.” Again, no one within the diocese stepped forward to defend the victims or simply to tell the truth about Harris.

In November 1994, more than 350 Santa Margarita High School students and their parents held a rally for Harris at a park near the school. Among them were the parents of Ryan DiMaria, who, unbeknownst to them, had been molested by Harris. The crowd sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” At one point during the 45-minute gathering, an airplane flew overhead with a banner that read: “We Love Father Harris.” Several prominent Orange County leaders spoke in an impassioned defense of Harris’s innocence.