Losing My Religion (18 page)

Christians often talk about Pascal’s Wager, which argues that it’s a good bet to believe in Christ. If you’re right, you’ll spend eternity in heaven. If you’re wrong, you’ll just be dead like everyone else. But it seems to me that to indulge in Pascal’s Wager, you actually have to believe in Christ. The Lord would know if you were faking. I could no longer fake it. It was time to be honest about where I was in my faith.

As principles go, Occam’s Razor seemed like a better bet. It basically says that all things being equal, the simplest solution is most likely the correct one. It was becoming harder and harder for me to fit my idea of a loving, personal God into the reality of the world in which I lived. The simplest explanation kept boomeranging back to me: there was no God.

Let those who love the LORD hate evil,

for he guards the lives of his faithful ones

and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.

—
PSALM
97:10

 

I
F YOU ARE
having doubts about God, you don’t want to find yourself on St. Michael Island, Alaska, where a single Catholic missionary raped an entire generation of Alaska Native boys. Unless you meet Peter “Packy” Kobuk, one of the victims who, despite it all, remains a believer himself. My encounter with him would show me the limits of my faith, measured against the stubbornness of his.

I first heard about the story from John Manly, the Newport Beach attorney who had represented Ryan DiMaria and hundreds of victims of clergy sexual abuse since 2001. Manly had just returned from a trip to the Alaskan island when I sat down for lunch with him. Since we both had been engulfed in the lives of sexual abuse victims, we usually used gallows humor to deal with the heartache and tragedy we saw. But at lunch, John wasn’t in a joking mood. In fact, he looked like someone close to him had died.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“Dude, you wouldn’t believe what I saw in this Eskimo village,” John said, his eyes staring vacantly ahead. “I can’t even put it into words.”

Already a prosperous real-estate attorney, Manly stumbled into the field of clergy sexual abuse litigation with the Ryan DiMaria case—despite the fact that many of his colleagues and friends advised him and his then partner, Katherine K. Freberg, not to take it. Whether it was providence, fate or just coincidence, Manly had an advantage working the case because he was a cradle Catholic, a former altar boy and the product of parochial schools. He knew better than most the Catholic system and Catholic thinking. Over the next few years, he expanded on that expertise by hiring former Catholic insiders to do battle against the church’s hierarchy.

He brought onboard Patrick Wall, a former Benedictine monk who had heard Manly interviewed on the radio and called to volunteer his expertise. Wall, a former lineman for the St. John’s University football team in Collegeville, Minnesota, had gained a reputation as a fix-it priest for the Catholic Church. His first four assignments out of the seminary were to straighten out parishes tainted by molestation and financial scandal. In 1999, a half-dozen years into his vocation, he walked away from the priesthood—largely because he had grown weary of watching the church hierarchy put its desire to avoid scandal ahead of the needs of sexual abuse victims. He had grown tired of seeing innocent people run over by what he described as “the Roman machine coming down the tracks in all its glory.”

Wall still saw himself as a fix-it man for the Catholic Church—only now he worked for the good guys. As Manly’s expert in church, or canon, law and church practices, Wall—in his late 30s—helped the lawyers interpret church documents and understand church structure, finances and culture. He had firsthand experience in how the church hierarchy processes molestation claims. He knew where critical information was hidden. He thought like the bishops thought. He could read Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Italian—the latter two languages essential to understanding documents produced by the Vatican and not meant for plaintiff’s attorneys.

“We’re now on equal footing with the church,” Wall told me, “and we can deal with the cases on their merits.” He added that the job with Manly served as a way to redeem his shortcomings as a priest. “The biggest thing I failed in doing [as a priest] was to stand up to our leaders. We all maintained the silence. This is something I can concretely do—helping the church refocus on the poorest and weakest among us. That’s who the victims are.”

Manly also hired his former client Ryan DiMaria, who passed the California bar exam after being awarded a $5.2 million clergy sexual abuse settlement. DiMaria brought a survivor’s point of view to the law firm, giving him instant rapport with other victims. He also brought a thirst for justice that only a victim of abuse could have.

“I’m really grateful for what my attorneys did for me in my case,” DiMaria told me. “My fate was in their hands. It made me want to work on these kinds of cases and do the same for other people.”

Victims of clergy sexual abuse loved having DiMaria for their attorney. As one told me: “He’s not just a lawyer trying to get money. He’s a lawyer trying to make things right. He has a cause. He’s been through it. He understands.”

Manly also regularly consulted with Richard Sipe, who had spent 18 years as a monk in a Benedictine monastery before becoming a psychotherapist specializing in counseling clergy. Sipe, author of several books on sexuality and the priesthood, believes mandatory celibacy has failed spectacularly. He estimates about 50 percent of the clergy have sexual partners at any one time, and 80 to 90 percent of them masturbate—a violation of the vow of celibacy. His research shows about 6 percent of Catholic priests molest minors. (His 6 percent estimate had been dismissed as preposterous by church officials until the sex scandal broke in 2002.) Manly’s other insider was Tom Doyle, the priest who warned bishops in the United States in 1985 that a Catholic sex scandal could sweep the nation—and cost the church $1 billion (a low estimate, it turned out)—if the problem wasn’t addressed.

All in all, Manly had brought together a law firm’s version of Murderer’s Row to take on the Catholic Church. It was a lineup that Catholic officials feared. The story was probably apocryphal, but one church official told me that “Mad Dog Manly” was the attorney’s nickname inside the Diocese of Orange. You could see the meaning of that name by reviewing some of Manly’s depositions of church officials. Often, his rage and contempt at how bishops and their lieutenants failed to protect children from pedophile priests spilled out in his questions. (Manly’s masterful deposition of serial child rapist Father Oliver O’Grady was the basis for
Deliver Us From Evil
, a 2007 Academy Award–nominated documentary by Amy Berg.)

For instance, in the Alaska cases, Manly talked about the Jesuit order’s “Manifestation of Conscience” tradition, where a priest gives an accounting of his spiritual journey of the past year. Jesuit superiors had taken the legal position that the Manifestation of Conscience was privileged communication—like a confession—that needn’t be revealed to outside authorities. Manly and others—including some Jesuits—say the Manifestation of Conscience was used as a human resources tool, and not a sacred communication between a priest and his superior. In this 2005 deposition of Father Frank Case, a top-ranking Jesuit in North America, Manly explored the issue:

MANLY
:
Now, if somebody manifested to you that they had chopped off the head of an eight-year-old little girl, raped her, and buried her body and you knew, Father, that the parents were out looking for that child’s body, would you tell anybody?

CASE
:
I would be obligated with the same level of confidentiality as I would have in confessional.

MANLY
:
So, is it your testimony, Father, that you wouldn’t tell anyone?

CASE
:
I wouldn’t tell anyone.

 

Father Stephen Sundborg, former chief of the Oregon Province, expressed a similar view in his 2005 deposition with Manly:

MANLY
:
If a priest, while you were provincial, manifested to you that he had raped a seven-or eight-year-old little girl on the day of her First Communion, he chopped her head off after the rape, buried her body, had sex with her body after he chopped her head off and was hiding it, and you knew that the parents and the police were looking for that child, would you alert the authorities?

SUNDBORG
:
Okay. There is nothing that is said or that I would learn in a Manifestation of Conscience that I would reveal to another person.

MANLY
:
So you wouldn’t tell the police in that situation?

SUNDBORG
:
I would not.

 

Seattle University, also told Manly that he would not report crimes of rape perpetrated against students at the university if he had learned of them during a Manifestation of Conscience.

MANLY
:
If a priest at Seattle U manifested to you that he was serially raping students…, would you have alerted the head of security at Seattle University?

SUNDBORG
:
I would have immediately removed him from Seattle University and restricted him from all ministry.

MANLY
:
Okay. Would you have alerted the authorities, either at Seattle University or the Seattle police department?

SUNDBORG
:
No.

 

In a later deposition with Sundborg that touched on Manifestation of Conscience, Manly finally lost it. “It is beyond me that you would take a beautiful thing like Ignatius’s order and the spiritual exercises and pervert it to hide perverts,” Manly said.

In a deposition of Father William “Lom” Loyens, former head of the Jesuits in Alaska, you can sense Manly’s anger. Loyens testified that childhood sexual abuse didn’t affect Eskimos as badly as others because of the Alaska natives’ “loose” sexual mores.

MANLY
:
I’m interested in your observations as somebody who understands native people as to the impact being molested by a priest would have on one of those men, those boys. Can you address that for me?

LOYENS
:
Well, in the Athabascan culture, they were fairly loose on sexual matters. And let’s say, generally speaking, American culture, being very heavily influenced by Protestantism, was much more uptight over all these things than the native people were; in this case, the Athabascans. So—I give you an example. I have spoken a number of times with ladies that talk to me on the path, or whatever, that had a baby, a male baby, in one arm while they were playing with his testicles and the little boy was enjoying this immensely. There was a different attitude for sexual matters, in terms of older boys breaking in younger girls and older girls breaking in younger boys, and so forth. It’s just considerably different. And we could say “loose,” but as an anthropologist, I say that is just the culture.

MANLY
:
I guess what I’m asking you, Father, is do you have a personal opinion, either as a priest or an anthropologist, of the impact, whether positive or negative, of Father Convert molesting these boys would have had generally?

LOYENS
:
Well, see, the word “molesting,” what are we talking about?

MANLY
:
I’ll tell you what we’re talking about. “Come and spend the night. You’re going to serve Mass in the morning. I’m going to stick my hands in your pants, grab your testicles and your penis, possibly make you ejaculate when you’re ten years old or eight years old or six years old or twelve years old; making you take a bath the night before while I bathe you as a priest feeling the priest’s erection in your back as you’re an eight-or ten-year-old little boy.” That’s what I’m talking about, Father.

LOYENS
:
Okay. Well, now at least we know what we’re talking about because till now—

MANLY
:
I’m happy to share it with you in all its glorious detail. So what do you think the impact of that would be?

LOYENS
:
In the Athabascan culture 40 years ago or 30 years ago, whenever it was, since there are no years attached to it here, that would be less impressive than it would be for, say, somebody in Fairbanks or Spokane.

 

The passion of Manly—along with the team of experts he assembled—earned survivors of clergy sexual abuse and his law firm millions of dollars in settlements. But the price for Manly has been high.

“Imagine every day your job is to go and pick up intestines that have spilled out of people’s guts,” Manly says. “You stuff them back in, and sew them up and try to find the person with the knife who did this. The clergy sexual abuse cases are like that, except it’s emotional guts you’re dealing with and you’re trying to put these people back together. Though they are adults, you’re really dealing with that child who got hurt.

“In my personal life, I was spiraling downward, and I kept thinking, how can the priest and bishops go on with their lives as if nothing happened? The priest wielded the knife, and the bishops cleaned it off and put it back where the priest could find it again—and you have to be one depraved motherfucker to do that. They are cold and calculating. How can these guys not do anything about it? And at the moment of consecration [during the Eucharist], these people are supposed to be
in persona Christi,
or ‘in the person of Christ’?”

During first five years of the new millennium, Manly’s blood pressure rose to dangerous levels, and he packed on more than 75 pounds to his six-foot frame. When he couldn’t sleep late at night, he’d sit down with his “old friend, Jack Daniels.” Manly’s seething anger and depression nearly ruined his seemingly idyllic family life in the seaside town of Corona del Mar. His stunning wife, a former college basketball player who knew several languages and used to work for the State Department, threatened divorce, and his relationship with his four children, especially his two older teenage girls, turned rocky.