Losing My Religion (11 page)

I had come to expect this kind of devotion to faith and family from Mormons. I could often spot a Mormon among other strangers in any given setting. They tended to be clean-cut, bright-eyed, conservatively dressed and surrounded by young children. And they just gave off a Mormon vibe, a Boy or Girl Scout goodness that made you feel at ease in their presence. That’s how I longed to live my faith—with so much integrity that everyone would instantly recognize me as a religious man.

My story of the Mormon wagon train sparked an e-mail invitation to the inaugural Ex-Mormon General Conference in Salt Lake City the following month to see a different side of the Latter-day Saints. The conference was designed to run parallel to the Mormon General Conference, a semiannual meeting that draws more than 30,000 Latter-day Saints to Utah from around the world.

Before heading to the hotel headquarters of the ex-Mormons, I walked through historic Temple Square, the Vatican of the Mormon faith. The General Conference attendees swamped the ten-acre parcel that is home to Salt Lake Temple (built under the watch of Brigham Young) and the Tabernacle (home to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir). I also passed by the church’s conference center, a granite fortress of a facility with a capacity of 21,000.

A block away, I found about 60 ex-Mormons gathered in a small, dingy meeting room at a second-rate hotel. These people lived mostly in the Mormon “Jell-O belt”—Utah, Idaho and Arizona—so-named because of the plates of Jell-O that inevitably appear at Mormon gatherings. They would spend the next three days trying to answer one question: How can a former Latter-day Saint carve out an acceptable life within the immense shadow of the clannish Mormon church, which claims roughly 70 percent of Utah residents as members?

“In Utah, the church has created an almost impossible box to climb out of,” said Sue Emmett, then 60, a great-great-granddaughter of Brigham Young who left the church in 1999.

Over the next few days, I saw something familiar at that hotel room: the tremendous pain that had been inflicted on people’s souls by men and women of faith. This time, the victims hadn’t been raped by priests and kicked around by church leaders; they had simply admitted that they didn’t believe in their faith anymore. Their punishment came from the laypeople: rejection by Mormon spouses, children and relatives; the disappearance of Mormon friends; the end of a social life; and sidetracked careers.

Mormons who openly abandon their faith are relatively few. Most Mormons who fall out of belief don’t admit it. Called “Jack Mormons,” these people are believed, by some estimates, to represent about 25 percent of Mormon rolls, but they don’t dare come out of the closet because of the anticipated backlash. It took 16 months for Suzy Colver—another attendee at the ex-Mormon conference—and her husband to work up the courage to quit the Mormon church officially. They worried about what would befall them once word of their defection spread through their Mormon-dominated town of Ogden, Utah.

They didn’t have to wait long. Colver told me that her family instantly became the neighborhood pariahs. She lost every one of her Mormon friends, even though she’d been a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ local Relief Society. She wasn’t asked to volunteer at her kids’ elementary school anymore. Her decision was so unspeakable, she said, that when her brother-in-law visited he was afraid to even acknowledge it, despite the visual taboos: the coffeemaker on the counter and the bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator.

“If Mormons associate with you, they think they will somehow become contaminated and lose their faith too,” Colver said. “It’s almost as if people who leave the church don’t exist.”

The people at the ex-Mormon conference were an eclectic bunch: novelists and stay-at-home moms, entrepreneurs and cartoonists, sex addicts and alcoholics. Some were depressed, others angry, and only a few had successfully moved on. But they shared a common thread: They wanted to be honest about their lack of faith and yet continue to be loved by family and friends. In most pockets of Mormon culture, that wasn’t going to happen.

The ex-Mormons warmly welcomed me, as had the victims of clergy sexual abuse. They were thankful that someone—even a stranger, even a journalist—would listen to them. They didn’t have many friendly ears to bend on most days. Over the three days, we talked. And talked. We had a few drinks and talked some more. They wanted me to know the hardships they had experienced simply because their faith had evaporated.

One expressed relief after moving out of state to a non-Mormon neighborhood: “It was so nice to go to the grocery store and know no one’s going to look down on you.”

Another told of the pain she felt from the response of her grown children, who believe she’s been influenced by the devil: “They see me as an enemy, as a heretic and as a threat to their children.”

A third—someone who was having problems in her marriage—told me that she quit going to bed with her husband because he refused to stop wearing his sacred Mormon undergarments, worn day and night by the devout. She wanted a respite from symbolism.

“That church was right there in the bed with us,” she complained. Eventually, he quit wearing the underwear to bed, and she stopped wearing her “Have You Hugged an Apostate Today?” T-shirt.

Though it was often covered by laughter and gallows humor, a deep sadness filled the conference. Part of what drew me to Christianity were the radical teachings of Jesus—to love your enemy, to protect the vulnerable and to go to any length to lovingly bring lost sheep back into the fold. As I reported the story from Salt Lake City, I wondered how faithful Mormons could embrace so many of Christ’s teachings but miss so badly on one of His primary lessons: to love your neighbor—even an ex-Mormon—as yourself. The lost faces of former Mormons and the callous treatment they suffered stuck with me. Their tormenters were not conspirators; the church did not need to order anyone to freeze them out. Surely the remarkably harsh and widespread reaction against them was a sign of insecurity: declaring Mormon belief a house of cards was a serious threat that evoked defensive hostility.

At the time, I didn’t analyze it; I just instinctively felt for the victims. I did the only thing I thought I could do at the time: I prayed for the former Mormons and I prayed for Mormons who caused them such pain. I prayed for understanding and reconciliation. I asked for God’s intervention to bring love, understanding and healing to the people involved.

When translated into English, the shortest sentence in the Bible is “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). He cried in front of the tomb of his friend Lazarus, whom he would soon raise from the dead. Evangelicals love the brevity of the sentence because it underscores the tenderness and human empathy of Jesus. After my trip to Utah, I imagined Jesus weeping over the treatment of the former Mormons I had met. And I was right there crying with Him.

“But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

—
MATTHEW
18:6

 

F
ORMER
M
ORMONS LET
down by their church, family and peers was one thing. Catholics let down by a church that covered up sexual abuse was much worse, and it involved criminal acts on a national scale. Little more than a month after my ex-Mormon story, on January 6, 2002, the
Boston Globe
published the first of a two-part series that described in devastating detail the extent of the clergy sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. This would permanently change the arc of my religion-writing career—and my spiritual journey. I was just a few months away from converting to Catholicism. Those weeks would raise a deep question: If an institution is corrupt, does that have any bearing on God? At the time, I thought the answer was obviously negative. But now I think I was wrong.

Globe
reporters, who would win a Pulitzer for their body of work, highlighted the case of Father John Geoghan, a priest who had been accused of molesting at least 130 boys, most of them in grammar school. The youngest was four years old. What made the story even more appalling was that Cardinal Bernard Law had known that Geoghan was a sexual predator in 1984, his first year as archbishop of Boston, but did nothing to stop him. (Geoghan had begun molesting boys in his first assignment after his 1962 ordination.) In fact, Law moved him to new parishes where the priest sexually assaulted new crops of boys, their parents unaware of the serial child rapist in their midst. It took the cardinal 14 years and an untold number of victims before he sought to remove Geoghan from the priesthood.

Law hadn’t acted differently than other Catholic bishops. He had done as he was trained to do: deal with scandals in-house and keep them, at any cost, out of the public eye. What he didn’t realize was that by 2002, modernity had caught up to the Catholic Church. No longer could the civil authorities be influenced into inaction and the media bullied or ignored. For once, the story wasn’t going to flare up for a moment and then go quietly away. When the
Globe
attempted to get a comment from Law for the Geoghan story, his spokeswoman not only declined comment but said the archdiocese “had no interest in knowing what the
Globe
’s questions would be.” They thought the controversy would blow over, as it had done many times before.

The newspaper’s initial series in January 2002 was a remarkable piece of reporting in part because it cracked open the wall of secrecy that church officials had hid behind for decades.
Globe
reporters combed the 84 civil lawsuits still pending against Geoghan for any facts they could use to construct the story, though they couldn’t gain access to the evidence gathered in those suits because church attorneys got a judge to seal it. (After a motion by the
Globe
, a judge finally ordered the records unsealed on January 26, 2002.) Still, the bare facts of the cases, supplemented by moving interviews with Geoghan’s now-grown victims, allowed the journalists to put together a chilling tale.

Knowing the
Globe
was working on a major investigation, Cardinal Law tried to do everything in his power to stop the story. His lawyer threatened legal sanctions against the
Globe
if it published any information taken from confidential records in the lawsuits. The newspaper also reported that Law’s attorney “warned that he would seek court-imposed sanctions even if
Globe
reporters asked questions of clergy involved in the case.”

The
Globe
stories were a pumped-up version of our own “Father Hollywood” story: they detailed how the Catholic Church protected a predatory priest and ignored his victims. My convenient theory—that Harris was an isolated case—started to crumble.

I was a member of the Religion Newswriters Association, a group of professional journalists who cover the faith beat for media outlets across the United States. As soon as the
Globe
published the first of its stories, a buzz swirled among religion reporters. We recognized that the story had the potential to leap across the fire line of the Archdiocese of Boston and spread to other dioceses. And sure enough, when a Boston judge released 30,000 pages of internal church documents later in the month, the scandal broke wide open.

The Boston church file—spanning the decades of the late 20th century—revealed the pattern for how the church handled nearly every case of clergy sexual abuse: first, move the offending priest to a new, unsuspecting parish or, in extreme cases, another diocese or country; second, lie or intimidate the victims and their families. The police were never called to investigate these felonies; no one in the new parishes was warned of a potential problem.

Notes from Law and his aides turned the stomachs of Boston parishioners and Catholics across the country. They included a warm note from Law to Geoghan in 1996 after the priest was forced to step down.

“Yours has been an effective life of ministry, sadly impaired by illness,” the cardinal wrote. “On behalf of those you have served well, and in my own name, I would like to thank you. I understand yours is a painful situation. The Passion we share can indeed seem unbearable and unrelenting.”

In referencing the Passion, Law apparently saw a parallel between the suffering experienced by Christ on the cross with Geoghan’s compulsion to rape children.

The cardinal sent a similar letter of appreciation when Father Robert M. Burns, another serial molester, was forced out of ministry in 1991. “It would have been better were things to have ended differently, but such was not the case,” Law wrote. “Nevertheless I still feel that it is important to express my gratitude to you for the care you have given to the people of the Archdiocese of Boston…I am certain that during this time you have been a generous instrument of the Lord’s love in the lives of most people you served.”

In the documents, the cardinal euphemistically labeled the molestations “inappropriate activity,” “boundary violations” and “inappropriate affection.” Inappropriate affection? He gave a high recommendation to one particular priest who was being considered for a new assignment in California, even though the cleric had
publicly
advocated for man–boy sexual relations.

Similar stories, including Father Hollywood’s, had arisen occasionally during the previous two decades, but they hadn’t jumped the local firewalls. Yet in 2002, the church could no longer contain the controversy. Church officials had always relied on Catholic-friendly police officers, district attorneys, judges and media to keep clergy sexual abuse out of the public eye, but this Old Boy’s Network had broken down. Credit for the new era of openness belonged to the advent of the Internet, which provided wide and instant dissemination of the news, sparking the media to launch similar investigations in other dioceses. The Internet also became a clearinghouse of information for abuse victims, allowing them to track their molesters, to find out whether they had been accused before and to gain strength from other survivors. For many, it was the first time they had realized they were not alone and that they had power. The Internet tore away the veil of secrecy the church hid behind, and the sins of the Archdiocese of Boston echoed across the country.

In just the first two months of the Catholic sex scandal, nearly 100 priests in 11 states were accused of molestation by previously silent victims or by reporters’ investigations. And that was just the start. It soon seemed the Catholic Church was projectile vomiting decades of cases of sexual abuse that had been covered up and had caused great sickness within the institution. In a report released by United States bishops in February 2004, they found that 4,392 priests—4 percent of all clerics—had allegedly abused as many as 10,000 minors since 1950. Because the bishops compiled the report themselves—and many victims never step forward—the numbers in the report, as large as they were, underreported the scope of the scandal. For me, the most revealing statistic was this: only
2 percent
of the molesting clerics had received prison sentences. It gives you some idea of the power of the church and the extent of the successful cover-up.

The priests and their bishops hadn’t taken Jesus at His word when He told His disciples, “But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6)

Though I continued to work other religion stories, my editors wanted my primary focus to be the Catholic sex scandal. I began to live a dual life. By day, I investigated the local dioceses, dug up documents in courthouses, talked with a seemingly endless string of victims and interviewed bishops, their aides, attorneys and priests. In my off-hours, I put in my final months of training to become a Catholic.

I learned a lot from my Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults classes. I knew that the Immaculate Conception referred to Mary herself being born without sin, not to her getting pregnant without intercourse. I could correct the misconceptions about the doctrine of papal infallibility, which had been invoked only once since it was established in 1870; Pope Pius XII declared it in 1950 to include the assumption of Mary as an article of faith. I liked knowing that embedded in most altars is a small box that holds a relic, or bone, of at least one saint, often the person after which the church is named. I discovered the beauty of walking through the 14 Stations of the Cross—reliefs or paintings in Catholic churches that depict the final hours of Jesus’ life. Mediating and praying in front of each piece of art allows you to be an eyewitness to the Passion, from the moment Jesus was condemned to death to when He rises from His tomb. I couldn’t wait to go through my last rite of initiation into the church on March 30, 2002—on Easter Vigil, or Easter eve—little more than two months away.

As I wrote about the clergy sexual abuse scandal during the day and went to church at night and on weekends, I had no idea that I had placed my Christian beliefs in mortal danger. I believed in Jesus and the church; the institution might be rotten, perhaps, but its purpose was pure.

One evening, Father Vincent addressed the scandal head-on. He warned us Catholics-to-be not to be poisoned by a relatively few bad clerics. He said the priests who molested children could be rightfully convicted of committing spiritual murder on their victims. But, Father Vincent warned, if we let their actions kill our faith, that would be spiritual suicide. His words resonated with me, and I vowed never to take that road.

Yet I would eventually find Father Vincent’s assumption wrong. Spiritual suicide infers that people make a conscious decision to abandon their faith. Yet it isn’t simply a matter of will. Many people want desperately to believe, but just can’t. They may feel tortured that their faith has evaporated, but they can’t will it back into existence. If an autopsy could be done on their spiritual life, the cause of death wouldn’t be murder or suicide. It would be natural causes—the organic death of a belief system that collapsed under the weight of experience and reason.

But in early 2002, I still felt that believing in God and in Jesus was a choice, and I had made mine. I loved the passage in the Hebrew Scriptures in which Joshua lays out his faith plainly for his fellow Jews, whose belief in one God was unsteady at best:

But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.

—
JOSHUA
24:15

 

I was with Joshua. I felt sad for those around me who didn’t choose to serve the Lord. It wasn’t because I thought they would end up in hell; I believed a loving God would be merciful to all His children, no matter how far they strayed. But I did think they were missing out on a deeper, more satisfying, more significant life—a life I had found and wasn’t going to give up. For someone with a faith as deep as mine, it would take more than corruption within the Catholic Church to turn me away from the Lord.

It was clear to me that the real story wasn’t about the molesting priests, but rather the bishops who covered up for them and caused thousands of additional children to be sodomized, orally copulated, raped and masturbated. Even today, most of these bishops are still in office; some have been promoted and all are revered by the faithful who deferentially call them “shepherds” and, in the case of a cardinal, “Your Eminence.” Cardinal Law, who was run out of Boston by his parishioners and priests, is now the archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome and celebrated one of Pope John Paul II’s funeral masses.

Pope Benedict XVI has said that less than 1 percent of priests are molesters and that the Catholic sex scandal in America was an “intentional, manipulated…desire to discredit the church” by the media.

Larry Drivon, an attorney from Northern California who represents victims of clergy sexual abuse, uses an analogy to explain why the scandal was about the bishops, not the priests or sex: If a man-eating tiger eats a zoo patron, is it the tiger’s fault or is the zookeeper who knowingly left open the cage responsible? These bishops knew they had predators working for them, but they let them continue to roam free.

When it comes to the sex scandal, there is, for now, an unbridgeable disconnect between the vast majority of the Catholic clergy and the rest of society. Because of their training and culture, transparency and sharing of authority are foreign concepts. For 2,000 years, the church has policed itself and rarely answered to anyone. Despite words crafted by the bishops’ public relations people, this mindset hasn’t changed overnight—and won’t for the foreseeable future. To many in the clergy, the public scrutiny during the sex scandal seemed like an attack on the church, which they believed was the sole possessor of the truth. I think that’s why the bishops and church’s attorneys attacked the victims who came forward in the past with disproportional viciousness. The victims threatened to bring scandal to the church, and therefore could diminish the holiness of Catholicism in the eyes of some. They weren’t just plaintiffs, but enemies who needed to be vanquished in such a way as to repel even the thought of future attacks. If a child fell down some stairs at a parish and became quadriplegic, church attorneys might argue that the church was not responsible for the fall, but they wouldn’t personally attack the kid in the wheelchair.