Losing My Religion (12 page)

Just as many in the clergy see the journalists’ reporting and the public’s outrage as basically Catholic bashing, most of society simply can’t comprehend how people of God failed to protect children in their care. The opening paragraphs of a 2005 Philadelphia Grand Jury (which included several practicing Catholics) summed it up succinctly:

This report contains the findings of the Grand Jury: how dozens of priests sexually abused hundreds of children; how Philadelphia Archdiocese officials—including Cardinal Bevilacqua and Cardinal Krol—excused and enabled the abuse; and how the law must be changed so that it doesn’t happen again. Some may be tempted to describe these events as tragic. Tragedies such as tidal waves, however, are outside human control. What we found were not acts of God, but of men who acted in His name and defiled it.

But the biggest crime of all this is: it worked. The abuser priests, by choosing children as targets and trafficking on their trust, were able to prevent or delay reports of their sexual assaults, to the point where applicable statutes of limitation expired. And Archdiocese officials, by burying those reports they did receive and covering up the conduct, similarly managed to outlast any statutes of limitation. As a result, these priests and officials will necessarily escape criminal prosecution. We surely would have charged them if we could have done so.

…Sexually abusive priests were either left quietly in place or “recycled” to unsuspecting new parishes—vastly expanding the number of children who were abused. It didn’t have to be this way. Prompt action and a climate of compassion for the child victims could have significantly limited the damage done.

 

Philadelphia’s lead investigator, a veteran assistant district attorney named Will Spade, would later tell the
National Catholic Reporter
that interviewing the scores of victims affected him like no other case in his career.

“It was like working in a factory,” Spade said. “And in this factory was a conveyer belt of damaged people. Every day it was another damaged person.

“There would be times when I would come home after a particularly bad day,” he continued, “and I would lie down on the couch with my head in my wife’s lap and cry, uncontrollably cry.”

As a reporter, the victims got to me, too. Nearly every day I heard from at least one more victim, and each story was simply heartbreaking. It made it worse that I was the father of four boys; I could easily imagine the devastation to our family if a trusted priest sodomized one or more of my kids. I couldn’t get the victims’ stories or the bishops’ lies—many of them written on their own stationery, undeniable and permanent—out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes and other violent crimes, senseless deaths and tragedies. But this was different—the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.

The only thing that quieted the victims’ voices for me was alcohol. Since my born-again turnaround I hadn’t been a big drinker, and it was rare when I had more than a beer on a weeknight, but now I found myself coming home and pouring several stiff drinks. I started to look forward to the end of the evening, usually after the kids had gone to bed, when I could feel the buzz of the tequila or rum working its magic to numb my emotions. It troubled me that I needed this self-medication; it wasn’t good for my health and I hadn’t earned the right to the pain. I had only listened to the stories of the real victims. I kept my pain and drinking a secret, except from my wife. With her, I shared the stories I had heard. This turned out to save our marriage. Our talks insured that we were traveling down the same spiritual path, no matter where it led.

Unbeknownst to us, it was leading toward skepticism. We would find, in fact, a deep connection between faith in the church and faith in God. The Catholic Church presents an extreme case of institutional deference, which helps explain the success of the cover-up of abuse for so many decades. Members of the laity aren’t supposed to question their “fathers.” This is more than just a simile to faith in God, which involves a leap beyond question. There’s a reason why atheists and agnostics used to be called free-thinkers.

I don’t think Greer and I could have lived happily in our marriage with one of us devoutly religious and the other a nonbeliever. The gap in worldviews would have been too large to bridge or ignore.

As I was collecting pain, many of the victims were shedding some of theirs. The scandal had given them a voice at last. It was liberating, freeing an explosion from below. I wrote about it on March 21, 2002:

After years of being disdained, dismissed or simply ignored, longtime crusaders against sexual abuse by priests suddenly have entered a kind of promised land. It’s an unfamiliar place where Catholic bishops apologize, prosecutors and politicians listen, and a friendly media army helps fight their battles.

And, perhaps most soothing to the victims’ scarred souls, people finally believe them.

“I’d never thought I’d see this day,” said David Clohessy, national director of the St. Louis–based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, one of the nation’s two largest such groups, with 3,500 members. “We’ve been crying from the rooftops for someone to notice what’s going on for so long.”

 

The sex scandal provided fertile ground for stories. The unfolding drama—with its secret documents, lies, tragedies, lawsuits, villains, heroes and million-dollar payouts—provided me with the raw material for many high-profile pieces of journalism that began to get national attention. I felt like a television reporter in the eye of a hurricane, speaking to the camera while tied to a palm tree. By March other
Times
reporters, who normally could care less about religion coverage, asked to be put on the team. They could smell the blood in the water.

I now was within a few weeks of my Catholic conversion. I still viewed the scandal as a necessary evil that would give the institution a badly needed cleansing. I believed my own reporting, in small part, would contribute to the movement that would force the United States bishops to enact reforms to protect the parishioners’ children and to bring back holiness to the Catholic Church. I saw the process as anything but anti-Catholic. The church was on a corrective course that would bring it much closer to the principles of Jesus than those of a corporation.

I studied my church history. Catholicism had strayed before from the path blazed by Jesus, only to be placed back on the straight and narrow by a reformer—someone who bucked the establishment, was hated for it, but usually ended up a saint. Many students of history know about the corruption of the Renaissance, when popes and their underlings fathered children and lived licentiously. But sexual abuse has an even older history. In the fourth century, St. Basil of Caesarea got so fed up with sexual abuse that he set up a detailed system of punishment to deal with clerics at his monastery who molested boys. Perpetrators were to be flogged and put in chains for six months; they were never again allowed unsupervised interaction with minors. In the 11th century, St. Peter Damian, a Benedictine monk, wrote a treatise called the
Book of Gomorrah
that he gave to Pope Leo IX circa 1050, pleading for him to get serious about stopping clergy sexual abuse, including the molestation of minors.

“Unless the [Catholic Church] intervenes as soon as possible, there is no doubt but that this unbridled wickedness, even though it should wish to be restrained, will be unable to stop on its headlong course,” St. Peter Damian wrote.

In a return letter, the pope praised Damian for addressing the subject and wrote that clerics would be removed from the priesthood if for a long period of time (or a short period of time with many) they “have defiled themselves by either of the two kinds of filthiness which you have described, or, which is horrible to hear or speak of, have sunk to the level of anal intercourse.”

Leo IX also warned: “For he who does not attack vice, but deals with it lightly, is rightly judged to be guilty of his death, along with the one who dies in sin.”

I and other reporters covering the story were called Catholic-bashers by some, including many in the clergy. Others—especially the hard-core believers on either end of the Catholic spectrum—called to encourage more reporting. They didn’t care whether the cost of the thousands of sexual abuse cases bankrupted the church. In the process, they thought that Catholicism would be purified.

Doubt. It seemed to have sneaked up on me. The closer I approached the rite of initiation into the church, the more I became aware of this new sensation. It had nothing to do with God (I thought), but I did begin to waver. Was this the right time to be accepted into the church? If I went through the rite, would it be a slap in the face to the survivors who had courageously stepped forward? Converting to the Catholic faith was something that I kept quiet. No victims would know that I had entered the church. But
I
would know. And it started to feel, deep in my gut, like it might be the wrong thing to do.

Still, I firmly believed the institution would emerge from the scandal reformed and humbled, and I took some advice from a friend who said, “Keep your eye on the person on the cross and not the men behind the altar.” This was God’s church, not man’s. And it was never going to be perfect, given the sinfulness of man. That the church was flawed shouldn’t stop me from joining other faithful Catholic for worship, Communion and a fulfilling spiritual life.

I sought solace in the belief that a church’s heart was in the pews, not the pulpits or its administrative offices. I loved the Catholics and soon-to-be Catholics in my conversion class. I’d rarely been around a nicer group of people. They had showered me with love and even gifts—CDs featuring Gregorian chant and rosary beads from Our Lady of Lourdes in France. I was certain that the people reading about the scandal would recoil and, in the end, recapture God’s house. I pushed aside my doubts about becoming a Catholic.

After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

—1
KINGS
19:12

 

O
N THE FIRST
weekend in March 2002, I received two great story tips. The first one: Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles had quietly dismissed somewhere between six and 12 priests with credible allegations of sexual abuse in their past. Included in the dismissals were two
convicted
child molesters still in ministry and another priest who had admitted to the cardinal some years earlier that he had molested two boys—and had gone on to abuse others.

The second: Bishop Tod D. Brown of Orange had ordered an admitted pedophile removed from ministry, and that priest, Michael Pecharich, would be announcing his resignation at Sunday services at San Francisco Solano Church in Rancho Santa Margarita. Diocesan officials told me that in the spirit of openness, I was welcome to attend a service and the “healing” session afterward with parishioners.

I had wrongly assumed that the dioceses of Los Angeles and Orange had no priests left in ministry who had sexually abused children. Cardinal Mahony and Bishop Brown had agreed to get rid of them more than six months earlier as part of the $5.2 million Ryan DiMaria settlement. My assumption was naïve. It was more than curious that the prelates had gotten around to dumping the molesting priests just as the national sex scandal arrived at the doorsteps of their dioceses. With more victims coming forward each day, the dioceses felt forced to clear out their rosters of any pedophiles before a survivor or journalist exposed them for violating the terms of their settlement by keeping a molester in ministry. I should have been more skeptical, something I’d unfortunately have to learn many times covering religion.

On March 3, 2002, a warm and sunny Southern California day, I drove to South Orange County to the elegant Spanish mission–style church in Rancho Santa Margarita to see how the Diocese of Orange would rid itself of Father Michael Pecharich.

In a packed sanctuary that held hundreds, Father Mike, as he was known, stood before the congregation he had led for a dozen years. Reading from a statement, he told them that 19 years ago he had “transgressed the personal boundaries of an adolescent.” (Only later would it emerge that the diocese knew he, in fact, had been accused of sexual misconduct with several other children.) With the diocese’s zero-tolerance policy now in place, he said he was being forced to step down. The tone of his statement made him sound like a martyr—someone who had been kicked out of ministry for a single mistake, a simple boundary violation—nearly two decades ago. As he read his short statement, the parishioners sat in stunned silence. Some women fished in their purses for tissues to wipe away their tears. As Father Mike walked out of the church, the congregation rose and gave him a standing ovation.

It took me a while to understand that these people had been victimized, too. Father Mike was their spiritual leader, someone who had presided over their confirmations, marriages, baptisms and funerals. He had counseled them and heard their confessions. They had invited him into their homes. And now, they couldn’t process the disconnect between the Father Mike they knew and the admitted child molester.

When the applause started, my first reaction was disbelief. A standing ovation? Though the language softened the act, I had just heard this priest admit that he had molested a minor. Diocesan officials had kept the information secret from the parishioners of San Francisco Solano, who until now would never have thought twice about leaving their children in the pastor’s charge. As a parent, my response was outrage and disgust. Imagine that a beloved schoolteacher who had taught your children had admitted to once sexually molesting a child but the school district never called the police, kicked him out or bothered to tell the parents. Would you rally around the teacher? Or would you be angry that a predator was left in a position of great trust with easy access to children—without your knowledge? I’d guess that the school superintendent would be forced to resign under pressure from parents—and face criminal charges for aiding and abetting a criminal.

After the service, I walked with church members to a newly completed parish hall, where diocesan officials held a “healing session” to answer questions and allow people to vent. I took a seat in the back. Some parishioners trembled with rage as they peppered the church officials with questions that centered around why their pastor was being penalized now for something he did 19 years ago and that church officials had known about since 1996. Their rage was aimed at his removal, not his sin. Some demanded to know how church officials even knew the sex crime had happened. The response: Father Mike had admitted it.

Soon, the conversation turned to finding a way to honor Father Mike. Someone hit upon the idea of naming the new parish hall after him. Others seconded the proposal. I scanned the room to see whether anyone aside from me thought this was crazy. My eyes locked on a man who stood near a side door. He had the muscular build and close-cropped haircut of a military man or a police officer. With his jaw tightened, he glared at the parishioners who were lobbying to christen the building the Father Michael Pecharich Parish Hall. I could see the veins start to stick out of his neck. He finally yelled, “Don’t put this man on a pedestal!” With the parishioners silenced, he explained in a biting tone that he worked as a sheriff’s deputy and handled many child molestation cases. These molesters, he said, almost never have just one victim. And why, he continued, wasn’t anyone else angry that they hadn’t been told about Father Mike’s past before now? He had left his children at church many times, unaware that a child molester was in charge. How dare the parents not be told! He ended his speech by asking why no one had said anything in support of the victim. Why all this compassion for the perpetrator of a crime? With that, he abruptly walked out.

I wanted to see whether he’d agree to be quoted for the newspaper, so I stuffed my notebook in my back pocket and started to rise. That’s when a woman in the front row stood up and bellowed, “There’s an even more important question here.” I thought, oh, boy, this just keeps getting better. I stood waiting for it. But then she turned around and pointed at me. “What’s an
L.A. Times
reporter doing in our midst?”

I had no idea how she knew I was there, but the entire angry mob of parishioners—with nowhere else to vent their feelings—turned on me, pointing fingers and snarling. I spoke quickly, saying that I’d be glad to tell them why I was here and who invited me, but first I needed to talk to the gentleman who’d just spoken. After that, I’d come back.

I walked briskly out the door and caught up with the deputy in the courtyard. He politely explained that he couldn’t talk to me because of his job. When I turned to go back inside the hall, I found my path blocked by a half-circle of fuming Catholics. They started screaming at me. I had no business being there, they spat; I told them the bishop had invited me. They yelled that this wasn’t a news story; I answered that this Catholic parish, with more than 4,000 families, was probably the largest and most influential organization in town, and Father Mike was one of the most recognized figures in Rancho Santa Margarita—it was news by any definition. They shouted that I would ruin Father Mike’s life if the story were published; I told them that Father Mike had ruined his own life when he molested a boy. They argued that they were positive that he had molested only once and he had lived an exemplary life for the past two decades.

“I believe that’s what makes us so passionate about the departure of Father Mike, the fact that the crime he is guilty of took place 19 years ago,” one parishioner told me. “In my eyes, he has done a noteworthy job of changing his life and becoming someone we could feel safe to have our children around.”

I said that I hoped she was right, but in my experience, molesters didn’t abuse just one child and I’d bet anyone that my phone would ring tomorrow after the story ran with another victim coming forward. That’s what usually occurs, I said. Indeed, it happened the next day.

We talked until everyone was talked out. By the time we were done, sadness—not anger—was the primary emotion. And I drove back to the office with a huge headache and many questions. How was the church ever going to reform if parishioners instinctively threw their allegiance behind molesting priests and not their victims? San Francisco Solano’s reaction was typical. I’ve talked with victims of clergy sexual abuse whose parents blamed them for “seducing” the priest. I’ve watched Catholics yell at and even spit on victims who picketed outside a parish. I’ve seen congregants offer molesting priests jobs and even raise their bail. I’ve read letters from parishioners and priests who wrote glowing testimonies to bishops and judges about a convicted priest sex offender, pleading for leniency.

A colleague of one priest convicted on 46 counts of sexual abuse wrote to a judge that “our work brings us into intimate contact with people’s lives. In a time when the exchange of simple affection within the most intimate of circles has become a rare commodity, our associations with others run the grave risk of being misunderstood by all parties including perhaps the priest himself.” Jaime Soto, the priest who penned the letter of support, is now bishop of Sacramento and a rising star in the Catholic Church.

The parishioners’ responses in these situations underscore how desperately we all crave spiritual leadership. We want to invest our trust in good men (and women, in most faiths) whom we can look up to—and even idolize. It is comforting to believe that there are people who are holier than ourselves, who we know and can follow. God is just the most extreme example. But viewed in the light of the scandal, this devotion appears sick.

With little more than a week before Easter, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had invested a year into becoming a Catholic. I was brimming with knowledge and love for the church. But could I join this church at this moment? After all the revelations? I probably should have discussed my doubts with Father Vincent or my sponsor, but I worried about disappointing them—and also casting a pall over what was the holiest week of the Christian year. Everyone in our class was gearing up for the big evening, which would include celebratory dinners, parties and gifts, and I didn’t want to throw a shadow over the group. Besides, I could predict their response—I was confusing man’s sinfulness with God’s church—and I had reached the point where that answer didn’t suffice. I just didn’t want to join an organization that was run by leaders so out of touch with the modern world that they never picked up the phone to turn in child rapists—something most of us would do automatically, even if the perpetrator were a member of our own family.

For counsel, I turned to a veteran reporter with the
National Catholic Reporter
, a weekly newspaper. I had admired his work as a journalist, and through his writings, I knew him to be a devout Catholic and gentle soul. I had exchanged some e-mails with him since I landed on the religion beat. With nowhere else to turn, I imposed on our fledgling friendship. I sent him an e-mail describing my feelings and thoughts while standing at the precipice of Catholicism amidst the buffeting winds of the scandal. I told him I didn’t know what to do and asked for his advice. The next day, he wrote back:

I’m sorry your heart was heavy.

Sometimes I wonder why the heck I bother with it all…All churches, but certainly this one, are magnets for good people who deserve protection from institutional corruptions—the standard corruptions that exist in every institution.

And if they are not being corrupted, then the people who [make up] the institution we call church, and who together form church, radiate little bits of good through themselves and their actions that somehow are anchored in what Jesus came from and God wants of us.

In pressing for reform, I occasionally liken us all in these generations to those generations of Quakers who fought against slavery and lived and died in the fight never knowing whether slavery would be abolished or not. It was sufficient to fight for it.

And I suppose that’s my basic tenet.

Christians aren’t asked to succeed. They’re only asked to “do.” The sin is not “doing.” Success is up to God.

…I realize that’s all terribly simplistic. But then I have a peasant’s faith rather than an intellectual’s!

Meanwhile, don’t worry about not doing anything at Easter, or future Easters. The things of your soul are sufficient to the day. And to God.

The rest is the joyous part of formality, and communion. And that will happen as and when it should.

 

His counsel put me at ease. I still had about a week to decide, and I would do what my heart told me was right. Whatever happened, there would be other Easters. On Good Friday, I decided I couldn’t go through with the conversion. Converting to Catholicism during the height of a horrific scandal felt like an endorsement of the establishment. Worse, it felt like at least symbolically that I was turning against the people who were victimized by the church—horribly wounded people who said, to the person, that the church’s betrayal was worse than what their priest did to them.

I had always imagined the rite of initiation to be a serious but joyous ceremony—like a wedding, which it basically was. If I was going to be married to the Catholic Church, I wanted to enter the relationship with no doubts or misgivings.

I told my wife. She said she understood. I called my sponsor and broke the news. He sounded disappointed but said he understood, too. I was a big admirer of his and hoped he didn’t feel as though he had somehow failed in bringing me into the church. I don’t think he did. I told him—and I really believed—that I would be back. I said that as soon as I felt excited again about the church, I’d become a member. Maybe during next year’s Easter vigil. But now, the timing was wrong, and my heart said no.