Betrayal (17 page)

After McVernon's first meeting with Daily in the early 1990s, he said he told Daily about the priest's conduct three more times. “Every year, I would tell him the same story,” he said. “Nothing happened.” Daily's spokesman said the priest was placed on administrative leave after his arrest. And he remains there today.

The
New York Times
supplied still further details about Daily's loose attention to allegations of clergy sexual abuse. The newspaper reported that in 1991 Daily had provided a bishop in Venezuela a glowing recommendation for Rev. Enrique Diaz Jimenez even as a sixty-count indictment was pending against Diaz in Queens on child abuse charges. Daily wrote that Diaz was “experiencing a very difficult situation” in New York because of the criminal case against him, but played down the priest's trouble with sexual abuse. A spokesman for Daily said that the bishop correctly praised Diaz's work as a priest during his official three-year assignment in New York, and said it was not fair to make a connection between the recommendation and “accusations that came out about his behavior years later.” Later that year, after pleading guilty to three counts of sexual abuse in the case, Father Diaz was deported to Venezuela. There he was later accused of sexually abusing eighteen boys preparing for their first Holy Communion.

By the spring Daily could no longer dig in his heels against prosecutors. The Diocese of Brooklyn announced in mid-April that it would give prosecutors the names of priests accused of sexual abuse going back twenty years and also report any future accusations to authorities. “As in the past, we will cooperate with them in any investigations they may wish to pursue” Daily said. It was the kind of spin that the man from Belmont had learned at the Archdiocese of Boston — the kind of skills that were appreciated by those he had left behind there. When
The Tablet,
the official newspaper of the Brooklyn diocese, printed a special edition commemorating Daily's twenty-five years as bishop in early 2000, it had solicited a greeting from Boston. Law, Daily's old boss, had kind words for his former chief lieutenant. “As a proud native Bostonian, he was invaluable to me. He not only knew the territory inside out, but, more importantly, he knew the ‘players,’” Law wrote.

Thomas Daily was not the only New York prelate haunted by his past work in the parishes of New England.

Installed as the twelfth leader of the Archdiocese of New York in 2000, Cardinal Edward M. Egan succeeded Cardinal John J. O'Connor, who died of brain cancer after sixteen years as the nation's most high-profile prelate. By the time Egan left Connecticut for his new home on Madison Avenue, where he is spiritual leader of 2.4 million Roman Catholics — the nation's third-largest diocese — he had acquired a reputation as a conservative bishop who hewed closely to the Church's teachings against abortion and birth control.

The Chicago native seemed perfectly suited for his new job in New York. As a canon lawyer, he spent two decades at the Vatican advising Popes Paul VI and John Paul II. He spent two years as an auxiliary bishop overseeing Catholic schools in New York. Like O'Connor, who had come to New York from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Egan had gained the bulk of his experience in a relatively small and obscure see. “I don't feel like a boss,” he said on the eve of his installation at St. Patrick's Cathedral. “But give me a little time and I will.”

On March 17, 2002, Egan was buffeted by a
Hartford Courant
report that when he served as the bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut, he allowed priests who faced accusations of molesting children to remain in their positions for years. One of those priests admitted that in order to prevent ejaculation, he once bit his teenage victim while performing oral sex on him. Egan initially greeted the allegations with a stony silence. Within days, he denounced the actions of pedophile priests as an “abomination.” He urged victims to report their attacks to authorities. He insisted that he had acted appropriately. But the cardinal stubbornly resisted making any promise that the Church would report every case of sexual misconduct.

Like Cardinal Law, his colleague in Boston, Egan endured withering criticism from those who said he sacrificed the safety of children to the Church's desperate desire to avert scandal. “Egan, among the highest-ranking cardinals in America, did not act decisively in Diocese of Bridgeport cases,” the
Connecticut Post
said in an editorial. “These were crimes that should have been brought to the attention of law enforcement officials and prosecutors.” The paper called for Egan to resign, while the Diocese of Bridgeport began a review of the personnel files of priests dating back to the founding of the archdiocese nearly half a century ago.

The
Hartford Courant's
scathing piece was based on sealed court records, transcripts of pretrial depositions, personnel files, and internal Church memos that portrayed Egan as a laissez-faire administrator, slow to investigate charges of abuse and quick to dismiss those who accused his priests of assault. In a previously undisclosed 1999 deposition, for example, Egan suggested that twelve former altar boys and parishioners who charged they had been molested, raped, or beaten by the same priest may have been making it all up. “Allegations are allegations,” Egan had said, and regarding the complaints against priests he concluded, “Very few have even come close to having anyone prove anything.”

In his deposition, obtained by the
Courant,
Egan appeared feisty and dismissive about the accusations against diocesan priests. In one exchange with a lawyer, regarding sexual abuse by Rev. Laurence Brett, a Bridgeport priest who admitted attacking children across the nation in the 1960s, Egan displayed little sympathy for the victims of abuse. In 1991, after checking into the priest's history, Egan had decided that Brett, by then a school chaplain in Baltimore, could remain under the auspices of the Bridgeport diocese. Egan said the priest had “made a good impression” on him.

The lawyers had questions about how Egan handled Brett's case. Egan parsed the lawyers’ words closely:

Q: “[Brett] admits apparently that he had oral sex with this young boy and that he actually bit his penis and advised the boy to go to confession elsewhere?”

Egan: “Well, I think you're not exactly right…. It seemed to me that the gentleman in question was an eighteen-year-old student at Sacred Heart University.”

Q: “Are you aware of the fact that in December of 1964 an individual under twenty-one years of age was a minor in the state of Connecticut?”

Egan: “My problem, my clarification, had to do with the expression ‘a young boy’ about an eighteen-year-old.

Q: “A young — all right, a minor, is that better then?”

Egan: “Fine.”

Within days of the
Courant's
report, Egan defended his actions in Connecticut as appropriate, He said he had routinely referred priests accused of assault for inpatient psychiatric care. “If the conclusions were favorable, he was returned to ministry, in some cases with restrictions, so as to be doubly careful. If they were not favorable, he was not allowed to function as a priest,” he said.

As had been its practice elsewhere, the Church had successfully fought to keep the records of the largest clergy sexual abuse scandal in Connecticut history from public view. But once exposed, the Bridgeport details became essential reading by parishioners just an hour away in New York City. For example, a 1990 memo showed that one diocesan official worried about “a developing pattern of accusations” against a Norwalk priest who allegedly fondled young boys, but Egan did not suspend or dismiss the priest, Rev. Charles Carr. Five years later a lawsuit was filed and Egan finally acted, removing Carr, only to reinstate him in 1999 as a part-time nursing home chaplain in Danbury. (Carr would ultimately be defrocked by Egan's successor in Connecticut, Bishop William E. Lori.)

Egan's belief that it should be left up to the Church to determine which allegations of abuse should be forwarded to authorities did not sit well with Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau. “Responsible officials in all religious institutions who have information about child abuse should make certain that information is brought to the attention of law enforcement,” the prosecutor said. “I would expect the Archdiocese of New York to make available to my office all allegations of child abuse, including past allegations.”

As pressure on Egan increased, his hand was finally forced. Within a few weeks, Egan gave Morgenthau a list of cases involving priests accused of sexual misconduct over the past thirty-five years, and the cardinal later removed six of his diocesan priests because of past allegations of abuse. Still, additional, fresh reports arrived from Connecticut about priest sexual abuse that occurred on Egan's watch. The seventy-year-old cardinal — a press-wary man who displayed little of the warm showmanship of his predecessor — was content for a time to let his words from the pulpit suffice. “With war and terrorism and sexual abuse on our mind, we all know that we are all sinners and we are all expected by our God to do penance,” he said in his 2002 Palm Sunday sermon. “Acts have been committed against our children by those who were chosen and ordained to care for all with total self-sacrifice and the utmost of respect. The cry that comes from all of our hearts is that we never want to even think again that such a horror may be visited upon any of our young people, their parents, their loved ones, through the body of Jesus Christ, his Church. That cry goes from my heart as well.”

But on April 20, the day before he departed to meet Pope John Paul II in Rome to discuss the sexual abuse crisis with the other American cardinals, Egan offered an apology that was decidedly conditional. “Over the past fifteen years, in both Bridgeport and New York, I consistently sought and acted upon the best independent advice available to me from medical experts and behavioral scientists,” the cardinal said in a letter read throughout his archdiocese. “It is clear that today we have a much better understanding of this problem. If in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.” Egan promised to “do everything in my power to ensure, as much as is humanly possible, that such abuse by clergy will never happen again. You should expect nothing less of me, and the other leaders of our Church.”

Even before Pope John Paul II summoned American cardinals to the Vatican in the spring of 2002 for an emergency meeting on the sex scandal, the crisis had spread throughout the United States and overseas. The criticism that it provoked was remarkably free of accusations of Catholic bashing.

“We spend our time monitoring and fighting anti-Catholicism wherever it exists in American society, but I have always had a disdain for intellectual dishonesty, and if I sat on the sidelines, I'd have to be accused of that myself” said William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. “I don't know of a single Catholic priest or layman who isn't furious about the sex abuse scandal in terms of the tolerance they [the hierarchy] have had for intolerable behavior, and the way they've played musical chairs with these miscreant priests. I've never seen such anger.” That anger, it seemed, was everywhere. In city after city, as officials reviewed personnel files and rewrote policies regarding sexual abuse by clergy, more priests stood accused. Scores were removed,

It happened first in Philadelphia, where in February the seventh-largest archdiocese in the nation, with 1.4 million Catholics, said it had found “credible evidence” that thirty-five priests sexually abused about fifty children dating back to 1950. Several priests still in their jobs were dismissed after Church leaders looked at personnel records. “In light of what happened in Boston, we reviewed our files and allegations from the past. We want to do better,” an archdiocesan spokeswoman said. Within days, some prosecutors urged Philadelphia Church leaders to hand over the names of priests who had assaulted kids. The archdiocese balked. It noted that the statute of limitations for all the alleged abuses had expired and said it would withhold the names. By late April, District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham announced that she was convening a grand jury to investigate. She said Philadelphia would probe “all allegations involving priests, whether they are dead, dismissed, or retired.”

In Cleveland, when Rev. Donald Rooney was called by his superiors at the archdiocese in early April to discuss allegations that he had sexually abused a young girl in 1980, he never showed up for the meeting. Instead, authorities said the forty-eight-year-old priest drove to a drugstore parking lot and shot himself in the head with a 9 mm handgun. Rooney left behind a one-sentence note. It instructed those who found his body on how to locate his sister.

On Long Island, just east of New York City, Thomas J. Spota, the Suffolk County district attorney, announced in mid-April that he was convening a special grand jury to look into abuse accusations. Spota suggested the Church was covering up cases.

In Cincinnati, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk became the first American prelate to receive a grand jury subpoena in a battle over Church records about child molestation complaints. Prosecutors subpoenaed Pilarczyk in late April, but he was spared from testifying after the Church released the requested information. Hamilton County prosecutor Michael K. Allen, a Catholic, did not say what the Church's information entailed, but he noted that he was keeping Pilarczyk's summons active. That meant, he said, that the archbishop could face the grand jury at a later time.

In Washington, D.C., Rev. Percival D'Silva, associate pastor of an influential Roman Catholic church in the nation's capital, looked northward to Boston and said from the pulpit: “Cardinal Law is not above the law…. I must be honest…. He should have the common sense and even the guts to say, ‘I resign.’ He has to go.” His words were greeted by a standing ovation.

In Detroit, Church officials acknowledged that about a dozen priests in the metropolitan area had been removed from active ministry in the past fourteen years because of credible allegations of sex molestation against minors. Two priests left parishes in the spring of 2002. The archdiocese has been criticized for failing in the past to turn over accused priests to prosecutors. Cardinal Adam Maida asked his congregation's forgiveness.