Losing My Religion (8 page)

“My heart is still pounding,” Ybarra told me afterward. “Things just flowed out. He told me God loves me no matter what I’ve done. Something just came over me—a peace.

“The feeling is a better high than any drugs I’ve had. It was quite a surprise. This service is the best thing that’s happened to my life so far.”

The services took place in a stark chapel. White plastic chairs served as pews. Four sheriff’s deputies took the place of ushers. In between squawks on the deputies’ radios, the prisoners sang, took Communion, joined hands and got down on their knees on the polished cement floors to pray. And they cried—often.

“This is a wonderful moment,” McFarland had told the 28 inmates in orange jumpsuits gathered for one of two afternoon Masses. “There are very few times in our lives where we can say we’re doing exactly what God wants us to do.”

McFarland’s interest in the inmates at Theo Lacy began three years earlier, when the bishop faced a life-threatening aneurysm. At the time, a jail chaplain had the prisoners write get-well letters to McFarland. The bishop could still recite by heart one of those 40 letters, which read in part:

Dear Bishop McFarland,

Hi there, Norman. I’m a prisoner here in Theo Lacy because of something I’ve done. You’re a prisoner because of your health.

 

The writer of the letter went on to tell the bishop that he was praying for him because he could identify with being helpless. The letters touched the bishop. He received hundreds of get-well cards, but saved only those from prisoners.

Soon after that, Bishop McFarland accepted an invitation to visit the inmates for the first time. Indeed, it was his first jail visit during his 11-year tenure as bishop of Orange. He gave a homily on Christ’s conversation with the two criminals who were crucified alongside him. The inmates gave the bishop a standing ovation.

Father McAndrew told me the story: “It was hard to tell at that moment who was more moved. Beginning with that experience, there was some sort of connection that spoke to some place inside of him that no one ever got access to.”

My story on the softer side of the bishop surprised many Catholics, creating a nice buzz. I’m sure it didn’t exactly hurt my standing with Father Vincent at Our Lady Queen of Angels, either. Shortly after that, I stumbled upon another Catholic-based story that became much talked about. In the lead of the story, I called it “Eight Weddings and a Fiesta,” the real-life drama of a pastor of an impoverished Latino parish eager to see his congregation’s couples married in the church.

For the eight brides and eight grooms who said “
Si, te acepto
” on a Saturday night when I visited Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Santa Ana, Father Bill Barman offered the deal of a lifetime: a wedding they otherwise couldn’t afford, along with a chance to get back in harmony with the Catholic Church. Unable to shoulder the financial burden of an expensive church wedding, many of the working-class couples already had tied the knot in civil ceremonies. But those weddings aren’t recognized as valid church unions. Father Bill’s weddings offered them an easy way back. He gave a Mass wedding, picking up the bill for the photographer, decorations, three-tiered cake, deejay and flowers. The brides and grooms needed to do only three things in return: attend a 12-week marriage class, find something to wear on the big day and have their families bring their favorite Mexican dishes to the reception.

Father Bill’s idea was so clever and the night so joyous that I didn’t think about the absurdity that underlined the story: that his parish’s married couples—devout Catholics—had been barred from the Lord’s table during Communion because they could afford only a civil marriage. As a journalist, it pains me to say that the thought never crossed my mind. It wouldn’t have changed what I had written, but I should have thought about it.

The absurdity didn’t bother most people. The story was picked up by
The Times
’s wire service and ran nationally. After reading about it, priests in other poor parishes in America started the multiple wedding concept. And the article raised my profile a little higher in my conversion class. I didn’t mind the minor celebrity status—at least not then, when my stories on the Catholic Church had a feel-good quality to them.

In August of 2001, Jean Pasco again stopped by my desk.

“Hey, you remember those legal documents I dropped off some months back about the Father Harris case?”

Crap. I had forgotten all about them. As Jean stood before me, I guiltily unearthed the papers from a pile on my desk.

“These?” I said. “I’m so sorry, Jean, but I haven’t looked at them yet.”

“Well, you better now. There’s a big press conference later today at the courthouse. They are going to announce a settlement in the case. We are the only ones who have all the documents, so we’ll have the best story.”

I immediately fished a yellow highlighter from my drawer and began to read.

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.

—1
PETER
4:12–13

 

W
ITH THE NEWS
conference starting in a few hours, I had
The Times
librarians pull all newspaper clips about Michael “Father Hollywood” Harris. Within minutes, a virtual stack of stories landed in my e-mail inbox. I printed the articles and started to read them in chronological order. They were mostly fawning. I learned about the Michael Harris most people knew, loved and even idolized.

“Father Hollywood” received his nickname from students because of his movie star–like presence. He was athletic and tall, with a mop of untamed brown hair, piercing blue eyes, a chiseled chin and a warm smile. His charisma, it was often noted, enabled him to dominate every room he entered.

In 1978, Harris was named principal of Mater Dei High School, advertised as the largest parochial school west of the Mississippi. He was all of 29. Under his guidance, Mater Dei reached national prominence in academics, athletics and the arts. He was ubiquitous on campus, attending nearly all extracurricular events and hugging students as they passed by.

Harris’s popularity with the students didn’t end at school. He outfitted his home with a state-of-the-art movie system and filled his bookcases with hundreds of films. The priest frequently invited students—a mix of athletes, drama club members and kids in the band—over for pizza, sodas and popcorn, where they watched movies or TV or played games. Oftentimes, Harris encouraged male students, especially those who were having trouble at home with their parents, to spend the night. His students devoted multiple pages in their yearbooks to photos of “Father Mike,” venerating him like a saint. Families of his students invited him on luxury vacations, thankful for the guidance he had shown their teenagers.

“To a man or woman, we all thought Mike Harris was as great as you’re going to get,” one parent told me later. “He was a Godlike presence on campus.”

For a time, Father Mike drove a white Corvette to school provided to him by a grateful Catholic—until his superiors told him it was too flashy. He became a sought-after guest on the Orange County social scene, even modeling in charity fashion shows. One year, he wore motorcycle leathers as one of “Heaven’s Angels.”

In the mid-1980s, the Diocese of Orange decided it needed to build a state-of-the-art high school in fast-growing South Orange County. But the church hierarchy was filled with mostly introverts and bureaucrats who had limited ability to raise the needed $26 million for the school. So Harris, quite content at his Mater Dei post, was drafted—and basically sent out on his own to find the money. Trained in obedience, Harris followed orders and tapped into his strong friendships with local entrepreneurs and millionaires to raise the funds.

At the 1987 opening of Santa Margarita High School, Harris dramatically ripped open his black clerical shirt and revealed a T-shirt with the Superman logo on it. The crowd roared its approval. The “S” stood for Santa Margarita High School, but it sent another message: Father Harris was Superman. Three years after the school’s opening, Pope John Paul II made Harris a monsignor, an honorary title that translates to “My Lord.”

In 1991, Father Harris penned a commentary—in hindsight, one filled with Freudian projection—for
The Times
, urging parents to teach their children to abstain from sex.

“As an educator faced with the challenging task of helping teenagers develop values, it is time to confront the compulsive hedonism that plagues adolescents,” he wrote. “In order to accomplish anything of value, we need to learn to delay gratification.”

In January 1994, Superman unexpectedly hung up his cape. Harris shocked the community by announcing he was taking a leave of absence as principal of Santa Margarita because of “stress.”

“Although very difficult for me personally, there is a need to take some time for prayer, rest, retreat and restoration,” Harris, then 47, wrote to parents and students. “The impact of accumulated stress over the years has taken its toll.”

He resigned a month later.

In September 1995, a former student filed a lawsuit, accusing Harris of molesting him. Two other accusers stepped forward, but the diocese and community backed Harris. The lawsuit was thrown out because the statute of limitations had passed, and Harris—his reputation largely untarnished—faded from public view and reinvented himself as a developer specializing in low-income housing, a venture backed by his wealthy Catholic friends, among them a prominent retired judge, a land baron and a national homebuilder.

Nothing in the clips mentioned the lawsuit filed in 1996 by a young man named Ryan DiMaria against Harris and the dioceses of Los Angeles and Orange. The epic legal battle that would be the harbinger to the national Catholic sex scandal had taken place entirely under the media’s radar. I grabbed my coat and headed to the Orange County Courthouse for the press conference, wondering what else I would find out about Harris.

Attorney Katherine K. Freberg, a former Texas Tech basketball player who stood six-foot-one—and this Monday afternoon was even taller in two-inch heels—strode to the bouquet of microphones on the second floor of the Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana. In a large half-circle around her, about two dozen journalists stopped their casual talk and whipped out their notebooks, turned on their tape recorders and rolled their cameras. The word had leaked out that a historic settlement had been reached in the sexual abuse case against Harris.

I hated press conferences. They made me feel part of a wolf pack, waiting for someone to throw out scraps we would fight over. It was more satisfying to hunt for a story by myself. I kicked myself again for not looking into the Harris legal documents sooner. Not everything was lost, though. We had the papers, and no other journalist did. This would keep us ahead of the competition for months to come.

Unused to standing before the media, Freberg’s shaky voice was amplified by the microphones. Reading from a prepared statement, she told the journalists that the Roman Catholic dioceses of Los Angeles and Orange had agreed to pay her client, Ryan DiMaria, a record $5.2 million to settle the case he brought against the dioceses and Harris five years earlier. Harris continued to deny he had molested Ryan, but agreed to leave the priesthood as part of the settlement. The news produced a buzz among the reporters—a record settlement and Harris’s high profile meant a big story and good play for their reports.

In addition to the money, Freberg continued, the Diocese of Orange had agreed to apologize to four other alleged victims of Harris. But most importantly, the dioceses of Los Angeles and Orange—formed from the southern section of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 1975—agreed to institute 11 changes in the way they handled clergy sexual abuse claims. In hindsight, these reforms appear to be commonsensical, but the settlement was reached five months before the Catholic sex scandal would erupt in Boston and then spread across the nation. In August 2001, DiMaria’s settlement was unprecedented within the Catholic Church.

Among the new procedures: Any priest with a credible allegation of molestation in his past would be removed from ministry. (Amazingly, even in 2001, this wasn’t the case. Orange and Los Angeles dioceses had many prominent priests working in parishes who had admitted to molesting a minor—in Los Angeles, two clerics remained on the job despite being
convicted
child sex offenders.) The church also promised to assign alleged victims of clergy sexual abuse an independent advocate who would help with their claims. (In the Diocese of Orange, the bishop initially assigned a church attorney to be the “independent” advocate.) The dioceses agreed to set up a toll-free hotline and website for victims to use, anonymously if they preferred. Priests were barred from being alone in social settings with minors. Bad behavior by a priest could no longer be hidden in secret files that prosecutors and plaintiff attorneys didn’t know existed. And the dioceses pledged to enact an educational program on sexual molestation prevention.

The Catholic Church didn’t start out to create an institution that protected pedophiles. The clergy had been trained in a hierarchical culture that valued obedience and loyalty and disdained scandal and secular interference. The priests also had been taught about the power of redemption. So when faced with a priest who had raped a boy, anyone with knowledge of the incident knew to keep quiet. The victim and his family were dealt with in a manner that would avoid scandal—sometimes they were lied to, and other times shamed or threatened into silence. If those tactics didn’t work, a secret financial settlement was offered. Never did the church officials voluntarily report the crime to civil authorities. Sometimes, they transferred the offending priest to an unsuspecting parish, relying on his word that he had repented and wouldn’t sin again. Other times, the priest was sent secretly to a Catholic treatment center, where psychiatrists and psychologists would eventually assure the priest’s bishop that the pedophile was no longer a danger to children. Then the cleric would be quietly put back in ministry. From the bishops’ worldview, they were taking care of a delicate problem by providing a cure for the priest—through the power of God, psychiatry or psychology—and avoiding tarnishing the church. Justice or help for the child who had been raped or sodomized didn’t figure into the equation, because it wasn’t part of the culture of the Catholic clergy when faced with a scandal. This didn’t happen in just a few dioceses across the country; it was standard procedure in nearly all of them.

Ryan DiMaria said that’s why he pushed for reform. He told me, “The lawsuit was always about making a change and slowing [clergy sexual abuse] down or stopping it.”

I wanted to believe Ryan, who was then 28 and fresh out of law school. A slight man with some leftover adolescent acne, he seemed sincere, and everyone I talked with said he pushed hard for the 11 changes in the church’s policy despite stubborn opposition from the dioceses. The judge confirmed that Ryan took less money in exchange for those reforms. But the size of the $5.2 million payout bothered me. I knew from the lawsuit that Ryan claimed to have been sexually abused twice by Harris, about a decade earlier. I didn’t see how that, as bad as it was, equated to $5.2 million. Why spend so much energy going after the church and its money for a ten-year-old incident? Wouldn’t it have been healthier for Ryan to focus on getting over it and then moving on with his life?

Back in the newsroom, I called Mary Grant, who founded the Southern California chapter of the Survivors Networks for those Abused by Priests (SNAP), for a little perspective. In 1991, she received a $25,000 settlement from the Diocese of Orange after Father John Lenihan, a dynamic Irish-born priest, admitted to having sex with Mary, then a teenager, for four years. Mary had been one of the few tireless voices for reform of clergy sexual abuse policies within the Catholic Church. One of her goals was to get her abuser removed from ministry, but church officials refused. Lenihan’s career continued to thrive despite his confession, and in the fall of 2001, he was the beloved pastor at an affluent parish in Dana Point overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Mary and other advocates like her couldn’t get any traction. Civil authorities, perhaps reluctant to take on the church, had let the statute of limitations pass in Mary’s case. The media locally and nationally were generally unresponsive as well, with a few notable exceptions. But now, she told me, Ryan had finally found a way to force change on the church. Finally, a victory.

I wrote down her quotes and then asked, “But Mary, what about the money? Does $5.2 million seem like the right amount for what happened to Ryan?”

She immediately knew what I was getting at. She asked gently, “Have you ever been to a survivors’ meeting?”

I said I hadn’t.

“There’s one this week in Long Beach. Why don’t you come and sit in? I think you’ll better understand this whole story if you do.”

I agreed to meet her there later that week.

The news of the settlement—my story ran on the front page of
The Times
—rocked the Catholic community. Among the clergy, the new reforms were a bombshell. Catholic leaders soon would be combing their files to find credible allegations of sexual abuse. What constituted “credible”? What if a crackpot had falsely accused them of molestation years ago? Who would make the decision? Who would be kicked out of ministry? Where were the protections for the good priests when an anonymous caller could phone in a complaint on the victims’ hotline?

I received many angry calls from readers who yelled at me for ruining the reputation of Father Mike. They couldn’t believe the allegations, despite the record payout, apologies, reforms and Bishop of Orange Tod D. Brown’s statement that he had “grave doubts about [Harris’s] innocence in these matters, taking into consideration the number of complaints made against him, the similarity of those complaints and the apparent sincerity of the persons making these statements.”

Harris’s supporters clung to a statement issued by his attorney that said he had done nothing wrong and that the diocese settled for “business reasons.”

“Monsignor Harris is extremely proud of his work with high school students and counts hundreds of them close friends and supporters,” the statement read.

The Harris fans were the Catholic version of the O. J. Simpson jury; they refused to acknowledge the mountain of evidence against their priest. At first, I tried to argue with the callers. Nothing I said would change their mind. Eventually, I stopped arguing and just listened to them vent. There was desperateness to their outrage. It was as if their carefully constructed world of faith would come tumbling down if Harris had molested boys. As a Catholic in training, the truth about Harris didn’t threaten my faith. I knew about the sinfulness of man. It was the whole reason Christianity was necessary—to bridge the yawning gap between God and his perpetually misbehaving children. Every faith has its Monsignor Harrises, but that doesn’t disprove God, nor even necessarily taint organized religion. I saw exposing what Harris did as cleaning up, not hurting, Catholicism.