COMMENTARY
Clearing Some Smoke:
Church Officials vs. Survivors
Frank Douglas, NRC Region 13, VOTF AZ
Perhaps a better title for Mr. Maier’s article (published in the Los Angeles
diocesan publication The Tidings) would have been “Propaganda: How the
Bishops Continue to Blow Smoke.” Mr. Maier, the Denver, Colorado archdiocesan
chancellor, recently wrote the third article in a series of three entitled “Shakedown:
Ripped off in the name of justice.” I have responded below to particular points
made in the article. The article was published originally in Crisis magazine.
[Excerpted text from the Maier article appear in quotes. Frank’s comments are in italics.]
“Whatever the merit of these claims of clergy sexual abuse against a minor, the plaintiff's attorneys' goal is always the same: to overturn existing statutes of limitations for private (but not public) institutions. Once these safeguards go, the "legalized looting" --- to quote one angry Catholic parent --- can begin.”
This article by Mr. Maier is part of a major coordinated bishops’ campaign to discredit survivors and their attorneys in their struggle to reform outdated and unjust statutes of limitations (SOL) laws dealing with sex crimes against children and to introduce “window” legislation. A legislative window gives survivors access to the civil justice system in those cases where the statute of limitations has run and has thus precluded them from any chance at receiving justice.
The ultimate motivation for the bishops’ campaign is fear—fear of the truth that the discovery process of America law promises. Discovery is the pre-trial phase in a lawsuit in which each party can request documents and other evidence or can compel the production of evidence by using a subpoena, a deposition, or other discovery devices. Bishops fear lawsuits because the discovery process will expose how pervasive and how high up in the Church hierarchy the corruption of the cover-up of abusive priests goes. By championing the status quo of short, outdated, and unjust SOLs and keeping windows legislation at bay, bishops and their hirelings like Mr. Maier, who is the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Denver, hope to keep the lid on the extent of the corruption.
The bishops and their spokespersons, Mr. Maier prominent among them, use the not-so-gentle art of propaganda to attempt to re-frame issues. The real issues are sexual crimes by priests and bishops against minors; the attendant cover-up of these crimes at the highest levels of the Catholic Church; why and how the cover up occurred; and the finances associated with these activities.
We are players in a high-stakes poker game. The bishops and their spokespersons understand that what is ultimately at stake is the authority of the bishops. The bishops' goal is always the same: protecting their power base of authority. The real legalized looting Mr. Maier should be referring to is the looting by the bishops of the moral integrity of the Catholic Church by their cover-up of clerical sex crimes against children and their outrageous lobbying, using our money, against reforming outdated and unjust statutes of limitations laws for child sex abuse.
“ How can a church community defend itself when an alleged perpetrating priest is dead, and so is every other witness except the accuser? But this has happened again and again.”
Here Mr. Maier equates the church community with derelict bishops. We must remember: WE ARE THE CHURCH! Not the bishops alone. Our Church’s priority should not be on a no-holds-barred legal defense of the institutional Church’s financial interests, but justice for the survivors in accordance with gospel values.
“More than 1,000 new plaintiffs came forward in California during a 2003 suspension of the statute of limitations. So far, California Catholic dioceses and religious orders have paid out roughly $250 million to plaintiffs, and the bleeding continues.”
How much have California Catholic dioceses paid their attorneys to keep the lid on this whole sordid moral mess?
Note the use of the unsubstantiated word “bleeding.” The important bleeding is not financial; it is bleeding in the very moral fabric of the church. Propaganda clotting medicine and stop-gap legal tourniquets won’t stop this kind of bleeding. Bishop Tom Gumbleton has the remedy for this kind of moral disaster. Here’s what the good bishop says: “When every bishop in every diocese cooperates in bringing about a genuinely just resolution of every charge of sexual abuse, I believe we will once more be perceived as credible moral teachers. Thus, what is good for the victims will likewise be good for the Church.” Amen, Bishop Tom Gumbleton!
It's impossible to tell the extent of the financial "bleeding" because the bishops won't tell us how much their assets amount to (yes, friends, their assets--we gave it to them without any strings attached; check this out with your local canon or civil lawyer). For example, based on estimates of the market value of real estate holdings of the Tucson diocese and the Los Angeles archdiocese and on the $100 million payout to survivors by the Orange County, CA, diocese, for example, we are not talking about financial bleeding but about an annoying minor scratch that can be covered by a band-aid purchased by wealthy Catholics. What can’t be covered by a band-aid is the moral state of the hierarchy.
One of the many facts The Tidings won’t tell you is how much Cardinal Mahony spends on his attorneys each month to stonewall victim-survivors and keep the real issues out of the American court system and off the front page of the Los Angeles Times. I’d like to see this monthly legal cost figure published in the Los Angeles archdiocesan “newspaper.”
“It's a classic display of entrepreneurial skill --- the fruit of years of carefully cultivating victims' anger, media gloating, the hostility of some lawmakers toward the Church, confusion and guilt by Church leaders, and resentment among the faithful.”
This is a classic case of attacking the accuser, just like a defense lawyer tries to go after the reputation of a rape victim in front of a jury to save his client from jail time. The real classic display of entrepreneurial skill and world-class chutzpah, is by the bishops, with their years of fumbling attempts to cover up what happened to victims, bashing the media, calling their opponents in state legislatures anti-Catholic, and attempting to make the faithful feel guilty about their righteous anger.
” The effect on American Catholic life is catastrophic. “
The major catastrophic effect on American Catholic life is the disgust and loss of hope on the part of many Catholics caused by the disclosure of priests abusing children, many bishops covering it up, and much of the laity remaining silent about the whole sorry mess. The cover up continues by the bulk of bishops who won’t publicize the names of those priests against whom credible allegations of crimes have been made.
“There's no ‘Catholic Superfund’ to pay for these massive, retroactive sex-abuse settlements, no secret pile of ecclesial wealth.”
Sure, there's a pile of ecclesial wealth. But it’s no secret. Anyone following the diocesan bankruptcy proceedings in Spokane (WA) or Portland (OR) knows this. The pile of wealth is the real estate holdings of the institutional Church, your parish church (and school and so on) and mine. I’m not saying we should liquidate our parish churches and schools, but we all have been and are complicit by our silence in the sexual abuse by clergy. Many of us Catholics sat on our hands and did nothing about clerical sexual abuse of children until the Boston Globe shocked some of us into what has been, in toto, minimal action to date.
”Insurance, even in the best circumstances, covers only a modest portion of the total damages.”
Mr. Maier may have made an editorial, or perhaps, let’s hope, a Freudian slip. A good bishop defender would have said “the total damages demanded” rather than “total damages.” Some insurance companies won't pony up because they claim, and who can argue with them, that when bishops obstruct justice no insurance money should be paid.
“In some dioceses, insurance companies are suing the Church to avoid payment.”
Insurance companies are suing the bishops, not the church. Remember Vatican II said, that “we” are the church, not the bishops.
“In the end, the people who will pay the most for this crippling attorneys' scam are our families --- and our children.”
The real scam is much older than all of us – the decades-long abuse of children and the (ongoing) cover up by Church officials.
"’Retroactive liability’ has nothing to do with real healing for sexual abuse victims. It involves the financial and legal mugging of innocent Catholic families today, for alleged events that happened decades ago and in which they played no part. It amounts to punishing the innocent in the name of lost innocence.”
Are we Catholics innocent? I don’t think so. Remember there are sins of omission. We were silent, and many of us still remain silent, when we knew/know priests raped kids and bishops protected the abusers and transferred them into unknowing parishes. How many of us have stood up and asked for resignations of bishops (e.g., in Chicago and in Santa Rosa, CA) who are guilty of not complying with mandatory legal reporting requirements when they first learn of a priest under their supervision having credible allegations of sexual abuse against a minor? Jesus wasn’t silent about injustice in his day, nor should we be silent about injustice in ours.
“The priests I knew growing up were good men --- men I wanted to emulate without exception. But I also have two friends, and probably a third, whose sons were sexually abused by priests in decades past. They've struggled with that traumatic experience ever since. Like all Catholic parents in the last four years, my wife and I have listened to stories of clergy sexual abuse with a mixture of pain, disgust, and frustration. We look at our own four children --- especially Dan, who has Down syndrome --- and we try to imagine what our attitude toward God, or the Church, might be today if they'd been hurt. More importantly, we've tried to pray ourselves into a deeper understanding of the wounds in the lives of young people damaged by sexual abuse.”
Prayer helps, but I suggest that the best way to get a deep understanding of the wounds in the lives of young, middle-aged, and older people damaged as children by sexual abuse by priests is to listen to abuse survivors through attendance at SNAP meetings or at legislative hearings to reform outdated and unjust SOL laws in your own state of Colorado.
”Of course, we'll never fully understand that pain, any more than an outsider can fully understand the experience of raising a disabled child. But as a parent, I also know that real justice is not served by creating a new class of victims --- innocent Catholic families and communities today --- in the name of helping other victims.”
As I said above, we, the laity, are not innocent. We, all of us, are the Church, a Church in which lay people have had little to nothing to say about Church governance, because popes and bishops have gathered, especially over the last 150 years, imperial power unto themselves. Many of us have been unaware of, or silently complicit in this slow, painful, destructive historical process. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That principle has been demonstrated blatantly by the way the bishops have handled the sex abuse crisis.
”Changing the civil liability rules after the fact is not justice, nor is bankrupting Catholic parishes and dioceses.”
Changing the civil liability rules, both before and after the fact, for childhood sex abuse victims is precisely that—justice. Didn’t we pay retribution to Japanese-Americans who were unjustly interred during World War II? Aren’t there affirmative action programs in place to address past racial discrimination?
“Bankruptcy” is a scare word that bishops use. How can a bishop claim bankruptcy without making public a consolidating balance sheet of all diocesan assets, including every parish’s financial and real estate holdings? The answer is simple: Combine world-class chutzpah and P.T. Barnum’s aphorism that a sucker is born every minute with a large group of deferential, passive Catholics who buy the bishops’ party line without employing some common sense, some critical thinking.
“It's [bankruptcy] a form of financial and legal violence that will continue until the money's gone --- or we force it to stop.”
When a priest slams a 12-year-old boy face down on the floor of a Church sacristy and rams his erect penis up the boy’s anus, that’s real violence. That’s the kind of crime we’re dealing with. That 12-year-old boy, those closest to him, and the entire Body of Christ must deal with that rape and its aftermath for decades. Part of dealing with that crime is to provide the best therapy we can and to compensate adequately that boy and his loved ones for their pain and suffering.
“As a Catholic, I believe I have a duty to help sexual abuse victims heal. And I have an equal obligation to the Catholics who came before me, and the ones who will come after me, to pass along the Faith and the resources with which I was entrusted. They're not mine to throw away.””
The obligations are no where near equal. The most important resources are the moral ones, not the financial ones. The bishops have squandered and continue to squander their moral resources, their moral authority. The bishops are throwing away, squandering, their moral resources by sponsoring the writing of grossly misleading articles like this one.
“It's revealing that, in Colorado and elsewhere, some of the biggest supporters of ‘retroactive liability’ are disaffected, angry, self-described Catholics who resent the Church for her teaching on abortion, "emergency" contraception, embryonic stem-cell research, the death penalty, immigration, Iraq --- the list of complaints is endless. Too often, Catholics of my generation seem to be diving headlong into an assimilation gone perverse, moved by a spirit of revenge against the Church for simply daring to be herself and not a theater prop for their own egos. And nothing serves her enemies --- including the sex-abuse litigation machine --- better than when the Church's own children join in tearing her down.
When you can’t fight the message, attack the messenger. It’s as if we have been raped and you, the win-at-any-cost defense attorney, is going after the rape victim in the court of public opinion. Here again Mr. Maier portrays those seeking justice for survivors and reform to help future children as the bad guys. The real issue is the duplicity of the bishops. In real estate, it’s location, location, location. With the bishops, it’s deflection, deflection, deflection. Survivors and Church reformers are not tearing the Church down; the bishops have been doing that—and unfortunately doing an effective job—since the sex abuse crisis began, by applying their culture of silence, denial, and deceit. We’re not the bad guys in all of this; the bishops are.
If reform-minded Catholics were looking to tear the Church down, we would do so from outside our faith communities; but we’re not leaving. We are staying the course and working at repairing the unthinkable damage that has been done.
“American Catholics today are like sleepwalkers who dream they're awake --- who think they're engaged with and accepted by their surrounding secular culture. In reality, we're getting robbed of our identity and resources while we slumber. It's time to wake up. ”
These are words that grow out of the numbing, closed culture of the institutional Church. Our identity is as followers of Jesus who stood up for the oppressed. I say again: Our major resources are moral ones, not financial ones. I agree that it is time for all Catholics to wake up–to the vicious campaign by the bishops and their employees against sorely needed reform of unjust statutes of limitations laws and windows legislation.
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