Render Unto Rome (14 page)

A survivor named Arthur Austin planted himself in front of the cathedral, day after day, like a Jew at the Wailing Wall, a media sensation as the Boston story sparked questions in other newsrooms about bishops hiding other priests. Law made the
Newsweek
cover on March 4 with the subtitle “80 Priests Accused of Child Abuse in Boston—and New Soul-Searching
Across America.” On those frigid days outside Holy Cross Cathedral downtown, Art Austin confided, “I felt like Sisyphus—being punished not for being bad but telling the truth.”
⁸

A sense of agony seeped into the marrow of Catholic Boston. At Mass, Bowers saw the anguish in people’s body language, the strained faces telegraphing betrayal. He began his sermon one Sunday by stating that
he
needed to hear from
them
. Words gushed out of people who were livid at the cardinal and bishops for sending predators to new places, fresh victims. “That
bastard
, Bernard Law!” thundered one man. People said
Shush!
Bowers let him vent.

A clamor rose in the media for Law’s resignation; he lumbered on.

In late April, Law flew to Rome to meet with Pope John Paul and seven other U.S. cardinals as the crisis made international headlines. Scores of reporters converged on Vatican City. Bowers followed the
Globe
and TV news.

John Paul was enfeebled by Parkinson’s. His face swollen, body bent, and voice slurred, the pope once so hale and charismatic now sadly seemed to personify a power structure weak and out of touch. In a shaky voice he read a paper calling the abuse “an appalling sin in the eyes of God.” But a few lines later he washed the hands of guilty bishops in saying that “a generalized lack of knowledge, and also at times the advice of the clinical experts led bishops to make [the wrong] decisions”—
blame the therapists
. As the church worked to “establish more reliable criteria,” he continued, they should not forget “the power of Christian conversion … that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God”—implying redemption of some kind for sex offender clerics.

The pope doesn’t get it
, thought Peter Borré, riveted to his TV set.

He wondered if anyone had a plan.

“People need to know that there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young,” declared John Paul.

But how did that square with “the power of Christian conversion”?
⁹
Would the pederasts be defrocked? How did Vatican courts enforce justice?

CARDINALS IN CRISIS

A world away from the daily lives of Bowers and countless priests, the cardinals and Curial members close to the pope retreated to a private caucus.
Law disappeared from the coverage. Borré shook his head.
If Law can’t make his stand at the Vatican, he’s finished
. The whole mess reminded him of Watergate.

The afternoon of April 23, 2002, at the closed meeting in the Apostolic Palace, beneath the ornate frescoes of Sala Bologna, Law apologized to the pope’s inner circle and his brother cardinals. Prior to that, the
Los Angeles Times
had quoted an unnamed cardinal saying Law should resign. Reporter Larry Stammer’s access to Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles fed speculation that the tall, lanky cardinal, who had said Frank Sinatra’s funeral Mass after persuading him to make confession, viewed Law as a liability for Princes of the Church.
¹⁰

Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos had his own view. A native of Colombia, Castrillón was a remarkable linguist whose persona radiated confidence; he slept in the bed of Pope Pius XII.
¹¹
Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, he had a classic Latin strain of the authoritarian, a religious version of the
caudillo
, or dictator. He bristled at the media’s anti-Catholic bias. In a press conference several weeks prior to the cardinals’ visit, Castrillón amazed reporters by calling the crisis a problem rooted in American society’s “pan-sexuality and sexual licentiousness.”
¹²
Besides monitoring the disposition of church property, Clergy oversaw the rights of priests, and in that sphere Castrillón had experience.

In 1992 Father Robert Trupia challenged the bishop of Tucson when he was suspended for transgressions with youths. A canonist, Trupia filed an appeal at Clergy charging that Bishop Manuel Moreno’s investigation was flawed—Moreno had prejudged him. Trupia wrote to Moreno, calling himself a “loose cannon,” threatening to reveal that he had had a sexual relationship with a deceased bishop, that the two of them and a third priest had had sex with a teenage drug addict. In exchange for his silence, Trupia, then forty-two, proposed to retire with a pension in good standing. Moreno asked him to enter a mental hospital. Under Castrillón’s predecessor, Clergy softened the bishop’s order to an administrative leave. Trupia appealed to the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican equivalent of the Supreme Court. Moreno hired a canonist in Rome to represent his position. As Clergy’s newly minted prefect, Castrillón (himself a canonist) asserted his authority in a December 13, 1996, letter to Moreno requesting that he “resolve this matter by means of a ‘reasonable solution.’ ”
¹³

We
strongly urge
Your Excellency to enter into meaningful dialogue with Monsignor Trupia regarding the terms of solution he has proposed. In so doing, Your Excellency would also be well advised … that the matter of damages is not outside of the purview of any subsequent decision which may be rendered.

Moreno wrote to Castrillón: “we consider [Trupia’s stance] damaging to the faithful as well as to his ‘victims’ of the past … we cannot let Monsignor Trupia ‘loose’ if we do not know whether he is respectful and faithful to the priesthood.” Castrillón replied on October 31, 1997: “Concerning damages arising from the imposition of an illegitimate decree, it is the mind of this [Congregation] that Your Excellency is liable for these from 2 June 1996 onwards. It would appear best that this matter … be resolved in an equitable fashion”—meaning Moreno should provide a package for Trupia to retire in good standing. Castrillón also wanted Moreno to reimburse Trupia’s legal expenses and suggested using him as a canon law consultant! Bishop Moreno in his return letter to Castrillón evinces an understandable frustration:

As I informed the Congregation last week, we have now been served with a lawsuit concerning actions of Msgr. Trupia in the mid 1970s concerning a then minor altar boy. These risks are not just imaginary, but real.

I am at a loss to deal with the finding of the Congregation concerning damages. I have paid Msgr. Trupia full salary plus his medical and car insurance at all times, as the Congregation was so informed. I have been given no details so that we can even defend what other damages may have arisen.

Msgr. Trupia has resigned his office and has no right to it.

I have deep respect for the works of the Congregation for the Clergy, however, I have appealed the decision to the Signatura in this matter.

“When I saw those documents,” recalls attorney Lynne Cadigan of Tucson, who had several clients abused by Trupia, “I thought,
This is a gold mine
. I know that sounds terrible, but within the confines of the clerical
world, Moreno was trying hard to prevent scandal and Castrillón showed the depth of the corruption.”
¹⁴
Trupia left Tucson with a tidy $1,475 monthly check and found a condo outside Washington, D.C. He landed consulting work as a canon lawyer for the Monterey, California, diocese—until the lawsuits in Arizona made him toxic. With Castrillón’s letter as a proverbial smoking gun, Cadigan bargained a $14 million settlement for Trupia’s victims. When, finally, the Vatican defrocked Trupia in 2004, the Tucson diocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the face of claims from thirty-three other victims, most of them from a second priest. The diocese eventually settled those for $22 million.
¹⁵

On the day of the 2002 emergency meeting in the Vatican, it is unlikely the other cardinals knew about Castrillón’s fiasco with Trupia. (Michael Rezendes’s
Boston Globe
report on Trupia would come four months later.) But Italians in the room knew that in America huge losses were looming. As the cardinals discussed what to say to a waiting world about the crisis, Castrillón drew a bead on the real issue:
dissent
. He and Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone of Genoa—a former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith canonist for Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—insisted that “ambiguous pastoral practices” must be addressed. Priests who failed to uphold church teachings contributed to a permissive climate in the priesthood. The motivations of bishops who recycled pedophiles were not an issue to these men.

Another Curia member echoed Castrillón and Bertone: Cardinal James Francis Stafford, the former archbishop of Denver. He wanted the press communiqué on the crisis to
endorse
the 1968 papal encyclical on birth control
¹⁶
—obedience to papal teaching was paramount. But international news had shown an ailing pope with a shaky voice, unable to account for an embedded culture of sexual deviants nor up to the task of commanding an investigation. The Vatican cardinals and archbishops washed their hands by shifting blame to the lower clergy. John Paul, so brilliant a moral force against dictatorships and Soviet Communism, had stood back from the escalating priest abuse cases in the 1990s when he was healthy. He failed to ask why a celibate culture tolerated such harm to children or to ask his cardinals what to do beyond apologies.

Italians dominated the Roman Curia. Their window on the world came from the press that gave textured coverage of the Vatican:
Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale
, the newsweekly
L’Espresso, La Repubblica
, among others. But Italy’s legal system had few of the surgical discovery procedures
available to attorneys in America, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, which shared the taproot of British common law. As judges ordered bishops to release their files on accused priests to victims’ lawyers, the depth charges from a clergy sexual underground rocked the English-language media. Italian journalists with few documents to cite found only scattered cases. The Curia and other cardinals saw “the scandal” as a product of America’s odd legal system and anti-Catholic news media.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did not share his thoughts about the 2002 cardinals’ meeting with reporters, as others that day did. Alone among the Curial cardinals gathered there, Ratzinger had set himself on a course to confront the crisis. The American bishops had been stymied in their early efforts to contain the damage. In 1989 the U.S. bishops had canonists seek permission from the Vatican to defrock priests proven to be severe abusers. That authority lay with the pope. And John Paul said no. As a cardinal in Poland he knew the Communist police tapped phones and targeted priests for blackmail. The Polish church was the opposition party. His sense of the priesthood as a beleaguered, heroic counterforce seeded a denial, as pope, on a criminal sexual subculture in the priesthood. Vatican canonists, meanwhile, took the U.S. bishops’ request as encroaching on their turf.

“In America the conference on bishops had a
machine
signing off on [marriage] dispensations,” a prominent canon lawyer in Rome—interviewed on background—told me with exasperation on a sunny autumn day in 2002. “This was highly criticized in Rome by various respondents in these [annulment] cases … That experience of dealing with American bishops set up a resistance to special norms for pedophiles.
We see what you’ve done with special norms on annulments. What are you going to do with these pedophilia cases?
” To this priest, it was all so clear. “The attitude here in 1989, at the Holy See, was that you have legal provisions.
Use them!
”
¹⁷
He meant that bishops should hold secret canonical trials of predators and send the results to the Vatican for a final decision. Church defense lawyers shrank from the idea of creating a documentary record of a church court, only to wait years to get permission to defrock the perpetrator.

The bishops also wanted the five-year statute of limitations on abuse of children, as stated in canon law, expanded—again, so they could kick out perpetrators. “Only after six years of discussion—in 1994—did Rome grant the U.S. bishops a longer statute: ten years after the victim turns
eighteen,” writes Nicholas P. Cafardi, a canon law scholar.
¹⁸
Had John Paul granted the 1989 request, and
if American bishops had used it
, defrocking men rather than cycling them through treatment facilities, the scandal’s scope and titanic losses might have been contained. Instead, for twelve years, bishops sent files on the worst offenders to an array of offices and congregations in Rome, among them Clergy, Doctrine of the Faith, the dicastery that oversaw religious orders, the Secretariat of State, and the Apostolic Signatura, or high court. Most of the files came from English-speaking countries, through the 1980s and ’90s, as “bishops who sought to penalize and dismiss abusive priests were daunted by a bewildering bureaucratic and canonical legal process, with contradicting laws and overlapping jurisdictions in Rome,” Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger later reported in the
New York Times
.
¹⁹
The system yielded grotesque ironies like Castrillón helping the pedophile Trupia find canon law work. In April 2000 bishops from the English-speaking world met with Vatican officials, pleading for help. In 2001 John Paul signed a document that Ratzinger all but drafted, which consolidated the responsibility on the explosive issue in his office.
²⁰