Render Unto Rome (53 page)

In a 2004
Report to the People of God
, Mahony stated: “I acknowledge my own mistakes”—but he did not explain them. The report summarized charges against several of the 113 priests and 130 religious brothers, deacons, and seminarians accused over seventy years. It said that 16 priests, unnamed, had been falsely accused. “My goal as your Archbishop is to do all in my power to prevent sexual abuse by anyone serving our Archdiocese now and in the future. Moving the healing and reconciliation process forward requires the fullest possible disclosure.”
⁴⁰

The first survivors’ group, involving the Orange diocese, settled on December 3, 2004, with $100 million to eighty-seven victims. “We were up till two a.m. on December second, hashing it out on
not
settling for $99 million,” explained Steve Rubino. “Kathy Freberg, Ray Boucher, and I knew the $100 million mark was historical and it would drive up the value of the other cases. It took us four days to push the church and insurance lawyers to $1.2 million per case. It almost came to fisticuffs. We turned down $99,960,000 because it was $40,000 short. We wanted $100 million as a benchmark. We were in year three by then.”

“Mahony put huge pressure on [Orange bishop] Tod Brown not to settle,” Boucher told me at the time. “Mahony was trying to shut us down.”

But the Orange diocese, which had once been a part of the larger archdiocese of Los Angeles, had a $171 million investment portfolio and $23.4 million in cash to tap for the agreement. During the litigation Bishop Brown had suspended the fund-raising to build a new cathedral. A diocesan attorney announced that the sale of property, funds from cash reserves, and loans secured by church assets would raise the diocese’s portion of the settlement, shared with eight insurance companies. The Los Angeles archdiocese was still in negotiations with attorneys for 554 plaintiffs. Loyola of Los Angeles Law School professor Georgene Vairo remarked, “It’s like a market is being established for settlements and the price can go up or down.” Mahony’s lawyer, Hennigan, told the
Los Angeles Times
that some of the cases “will just break your heart,” and speculated that the fifty worst cases could reach jury verdicts of $5 million.
⁴¹

Those words were like a signal flare to the insurance lawyers. The only way to get insurance companies to settle was by proving it would cost
more
not
to settle—gambling on a trial. Insurance covered wrongful acts from early years of a given policy. Few carriers insured churches for clergy wrongdoing anymore. Catholic dioceses sank funds into self-insured risk pools, and prayed for no new perpetrators. Still, the Orange settlements left a key issue unresolved: disclosure of church files on the perpetrators. SNAP leaders were relentless in the media about demanding that the church post all of the relevant clergy documents.

In a complex agreement with the court, Mahony’s lawyers agreed to provide the plaintiffs with information summaries, called “proffers,” from the requested files. Soon afterward, the archdiocese filed a voluminous motion challenging the law under which the victims had sued. “We had a deal that they wouldn’t do that,” groused Boucher, sitting in his Beverly Hills office. “Hennigan is a consummate soldier. The guy will burn paper in his hands to show his loyalty. This is part of the appeasement of the insurance carriers.”

A GIFT FROM ROME

As Boucher locked horns with Hennigan in Los Angeles, Jeff Anderson was immersed in Bay Area preparations; the San Francisco archdiocese faced sixty cases. The strategy was to take the first few cases to trial, in hopes of inducing settlement negotiations. During the Easter week that Manny Vega protested at L.A.’s cathedral, SNAP members in San Francisco rallied outside Sts. Peter and Paul, the iconic church on Washington Square where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe posed for photographs after their 1954 wedding at City Hall.

The North Beach parish was run by the Salesians of Don Bosco, an order founded in Italy in the nineteenth century with a special focus on the care of young people. The young DiMaggio played sports at the Salesian Boys’ Club. Now, as reporters gathered, the abuse survivors railed about the Salesians and their associate pastor, Father Stephen Whelan, who were defendants in a civil case Anderson and Rick Simmons had brought for Joey Piscitelli. As a fourteen-year-old at Salesian High in nearby Richmond, Piscitelli had drawn pictures of Jesus regurgitating on the cross and a priest leering at boys in the shower stall. Joey Piscitelli was fifty now: short, bearded, with sledgehammer intensity. “Whelan, the priest who molested me, is in that rectory,” he kept saying.
⁴²

“It’s a spurious accusation,” Whelan told TV reporter Dan Noyes, who got a moment inside the rectory. The Salesians announced that Whelan had no contact with children, though he was still saying Mass. In the long buildup to the trial—which yielded a $600,000 verdict to him—Joey Piscitelli kept saying, “The priest who molested me is a block away from Bishop Levada, and he has left that priest in ministry with kids.”
⁴³

Born in 1936 in Long Beach, William Levada had gone through the Camarillo seminary with Roger Mahony. As a young theologian he worked for Cardinal Ratzinger at the CDF in the early eighties. Back home in 1985, boosted by Mahony, he became an auxiliary bishop. A man of compact build with receding gray hair, Archbishop Levada lived in the rectory of St. Mary’s Cathedral around the corner from the Salesian provincial headquarters, which housed a religious brother who had served time for child abuse and three priests, dripping guilt from civil cases, who were beyond the statutory reach for criminal charges. Religious orders serve at the discretion of a bishop.

Anderson had first encountered the Salesians in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2002, when he sued one of the religious brothers, who was promptly transferred to a Salesian house in New Jersey. Later that year, he sued the order in Chicago for a Mexican priest who faced accusations from four Latino youths; the priest was packed off to New Jersey, then Mexico. When Joey Piscitelli contacted him, Jeff Anderson engaged a Bay Area attorney, Rick Simmons, as cocounsel. After taking the depositions of Whelan and his superiors, Anderson saw the California Salesians, with sixteen perpetrators, as a hive of corruption. Levada’s passivity from that reality, while he lived around the corner from Salesian headquarters in the City by the Bay, weirdly made sense. Anderson had taken Levada’s deposition over his decisions as archbishop in Portland several years before. Levada had sent predators in therapy back to ministry. The archdiocesan attorney, Robert McMenamin, had advised Levada to tell church officials about their obligation to report predators to the police. Levada declined. McMenamin resigned; he later began representing abuse victims. The Oregon Supreme Court dismissed Levada’s petition to disqualify McMenamin from such cases as a conflict of interest. McMenamin wrote to his successor: “I have loyalty both to my religion and the confidences of former clients, but not to church officials who deny justice to victims.”

Stirring his powdered vitamins and liquid fruit, Jeff Anderson pondered
the mind-set that linked Levada, Mahony, and innumerable bishops he had deposed across two decades. Levada struck him as remote, affable, and clueless about what had been going on in his own diocese. But he fell right in line with the hierarchs, hiding the secrets of a celibate system that tolerated all kinds of behavior, the worst of which defiled innocent youth. Unlike AA members, they had no higher power to help them change their hypocritical ways. Popes received them with fraternal esteem. Their first responsibility was to a perverse chivalry that cloaked the sickest secrets. The splendor of Mass, the legacy of saints, the Eucharist as table of life had scant meaning for Anderson; he knew the rituals were vital to Catholics, but he had never known the spiritual dimension of the faith in such a way as to mourn its loss. But he saw how that loss tore at his clients. He was sensitive to the struggle of Tom Doyle and Pat Wall, who were regrounding themselves spiritually. He drew strength from their search, their learnedness, their tenacity in resisting the evil, in taking his battle however far he might.

Levada had gone to San Francisco in 1995. Since the 2002 scandal had broken, he had shoveled some of the muck. Among the clerics he had pulled from ministry for sexually abusing youth were a chaplain of the San Francisco 49ers football team, a former head of Catholic Charities, a rector of the cathedral, a head of the office of liturgy, a police department chaplain, and a former dean at the seminary who used the Internet to search for teenage sex partners.

Levada was unique among U.S. bishops for having been sued by a priest who blew the whistle on a cleric for making advances on a teenage boy.

Born in 1944, Jon Conley was an assistant U.S. attorney in Michigan who decided to become a priest in the late 1980s. Done with the bitter midwestern winters, Conley moved to San Francisco, went through the seminary, and was ordained. One night in 1997, as an assistant pastor, he entered his rectory to find the pastor, Father Gregory Aylward, crawling toward the back door. A flustered fourteen-year-old boy scrambled back to his post as phone receptionist. Suspecting the boy was too embarrassed to admit what had happened, Conley met with an auxiliary bishop who told him, “We usually keep these things in-house.” With Levada out of town, Conley decided to notify the San Mateo District Attorney’s Office. Frightened, the boy told investigators that he and Father Aylward had only been wrestling. No charges were filed.

Conley told the chancery he couldn’t live with a pedophile; he moved
into a hotel. A chancery priest told Conley not to say “pedophile” or mention the accusations to anyone. The boy quit his rectory job. Conley met the family. The mother wept, saying she couldn’t force her son to testify about Aylward’s history of sexual advances. When Conley met with Archbishop Levada and a chancery monsignor, he knew the archdiocese was circling the wagons around Aylward.

When I interviewed Conley in 2005 on a magazine assignment, he said that Levada had used the word “calumny” when discussing the accusations against Aylward. In that meeting a monsignor was taking notes; Conley pulled out a tape recorder to avoid being set up as a scapegoat. “You don’t trust me?” said Levada. He ordered Conley to turn off the tape recorder. Conley refused. Levada ordered him onto administrative leave, saying, “Think about obedience.”

They met again privately, no tape recorder; Levada wanted Conley to undergo psychological evaluation. Conley refused. When the
San Francisco Examiner
got wind of Conley’s predicament, an archdiocesan statement said that the church had “instructed him to report the incident to civil authorities, and strongly supports the reporting of all incidents of suspected child abuse or neglect. It was [Conley’s] behavior subsequent to the reporting which was unacceptable.” Conley fired off a letter to the
Examiner:
“Why does the archdiocese of San Francisco not have written policies and procedures in place for priests to deal with situations of abuse?” He sued Levada and the archdiocese for defamation and infliction of emotional distress. Conley wanted a public apology
and
procedures for handling abuse allegations to protect whistle-blowing priests like himself. Levada ordered him to withdraw the suit and seek “a program of remedial assistance … [or] I will have no alternative but to impose on you the censure of suspension forbidding your exercise of all rights, privileges and faculties associated with the priestly ministry.”

Conley’s lawsuit was dismissed as an intrachurch matter. The boy’s family sued the archdiocese. Aylward admitted in a deposition that he had gotten sexual gratification for years from wrestling with minors. The archdiocese agreed to a $750,000 settlement with the family. Aylward left the ministry. Conley’s attorney appealed his case. A California appellate court ruled that the law mandating that clergy report suspected abusers superseded the freedom of religion privilege. Conley had a bona fide defamation claim against Levada. Depositions began; Levada threw
in the towel. The church issued a statement praising Conley for reporting the incident. The archdiocese “prefunded” Conley’s retirement. How much, Conley would not say, but he had a nice apartment in the chic Noe Valley neighborhood with good views of the city. As we sat in his living room, watching TV coverage of Pope John Paul’s death, Conley, a stout, bearded chap with a keen sense of irony, murmured, “I do substitute work for priests on vacation. This church is a little crazy, you know?”

And then, as if by magic, several days after the white smoke heralded a new pope, Benedict XVI lowered a rope ladder that would lift Archbishop Levada out of the provincial muck, up and away to the Eternal City. Bill Levada would take Ratzinger’s place as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The new job assured him of a cardinal’s red hat.
Why Levada?
many people wondered. His credentials as a theologian were marginal. But Ratzinger realized that his office, backlogged with seven hundred cases of sex offenders, needed an American who understood the issue. Levada’s messy record in the swamps of scandal mattered little; he had proved his fidelity to the men of the apostolic succession.

By late summer 2005, four jury trials in northern California civil cases involving one priest had produced $5.8 million in judgments. Settlement negotiations yielded another $37.2 million to a plaintiffs’ group. Two of the survivors were women abused as girls by Father Greg Ingels, a canon lawyer who had advised Levada on abuse issues. On learning of the accusations against him, Levada let Ingels live quietly at a seminary with a retired archbishop, John Quinn. That move so outraged psychotherapist Jim Jenkins, chair of Levada’s clergy review board, that he resigned. A beaming Levada stood in the cathedral sanctuary for his farewell Mass when a process server handed him a subpoena to testify in a San Francisco case.