Render Unto Rome (50 page)

Anderson entered outpatient treatment and began attending AA meetings. As the rescuer peered into the wreckage of his drinking, he felt fear at the specter of something he could not control. The spirituality that kept all those Catholics glued to their church had a million forms, he realized;
he
wanted a spiritual base to overcome the lovelessness that drove his compulsive drinking. How does an agnostic find a higher power? His wife and AA allies helped, but it was a Catholic priest who really got him grounded.

BROTHERS IN BATTLE

Father Tom Doyle, the canon lawyer at the Vatican embassy, had lost his job, and a sure bet to become a bishop, because of the 1985 report he coauthored that warned the hierarchy of the abuse crisis. Doyle was a Dominican, and Dominicans are known for preaching; when reporters called, Doyle spoke his mind about the bishops’ inaction, his candor quotient rising like a critical mass. The cleric who had worn French cuffs at embassy functions and gone to White House lunches joined the air force as a Catholic chaplain. In 1988 he had unpacked his books in a cottage on an Indiana air base when a lawyer named Jeff Anderson telephoned. Doyle let him talk. A few days later he sent Anderson the ninety-three-page report he had written with lawyer F. Ray Mouton and psychiatrist Father Michael Peterson, which had gone to every bishop in America. The document was a smoking gun at that juncture for Anderson’s lawsuits.

A disillusioned soldier of orthodoxy, Tom Doyle was on his own crash landing from alcohol. After hitting bottom, Doyle never blamed the Vatican or bishops; he accepted his powerlessness over drinking and refocused his spiritual life on the daily path of recovery. He accepted himself as a wounded healer. With a pilot’s license and membership in the National Rifle Association, Doyle was as conservative as Anderson was liberal. Tom Doyle became the brother Jeff Anderson never had, bonded in the
struggle to live clean and take the battle forward. Doyle had become a priest to achieve closeness with God. Appalled by the hierarchy he had once served, Father Doyle counseled abuse survivors via phone calls and e-mail. Doyle’s reflections on spiritual integrity had a huge impact on the attorney, who had never had a confessor. Anderson, in turn, gave the rebel priest a new kind of power: as an expert witness in lawsuits he could use his knowledge to throttle the hierarchy for its transgressions of canon law—and moral values. Doyle considered the power structure toxic: prelates addicted to power, sheltering the guilty. Doyle was radical, from the Greek
redux
, meaning roots, first things. Sober as a judge, protected by his air force status from sanctions that diocesan bishops might take, he gave testimony in cases for Anderson and other lawyers as time allowed. In 2002 he received the Priest of Integrity Award from Voice of the Faithful, an upstart reform group. In 2003 the chief military archbishop, Edwin O’Brien, engineered his dismissal as a chaplain for an obscure technicality in canon law over which the air force had no control.
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In reality, it was payback. Doyle was forced out of the military chaplaincy, after nineteen years—one year short of qualifying for a pension.

What the retribution against Tom Doyle signified in pettiness it made up for in shortsightedness: Doyle was a sure bet to fight back. He settled in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and began full-time work as an expert witness in clergy abuse cases. For that he was much in demand. Doyle was on a leave of absence from priestly ministry in 2010.

Anderson’s turning point came when two brothers, James and Joh Howard, asked him to take their case against the diocese of Stockton, California. In the early 1980s, an Irish-born priest named Oliver O’Grady had ingratiated himself with the Howard family and molested four of the seven siblings. O’Grady also befriended a woman whose nine-month-old daughter suffered vaginal scarring from his abuse. In 1984 another family reported O’Grady to police. A church attorney told police O’Grady would have no more contact with children. Stockton bishop Roger Mahony sent him to a psychiatrist. O’Grady discussed his sexual attraction to boys. O’Grady had a “severe defect in maturation,” the psychiatrist wrote. “Perhaps Oliver is not truly called to the priesthood.”

At Christmas 1985 Bishop Mahony sent O’Grady to a rural church, with parishioners unaware that the priest was a child molester. In 1993 O’Grady was convicted of lewd conduct with the younger Howard, Joh,
who was then fifteen. O’Grady was in prison when the brothers contacted Anderson. The Minnesota lawyer needed a California cocounsel in order to function in the state court. He found his ally in Larry Drivon of Stockton, a highly regarded trial attorney from a prominent legal family. Drivon accepted the expensive, time-intensive preparation for a trial of this sort. Knowing that Jeff Anderson was in recovery, Drivon’s wife and sympatico friends helped him find noontime AA meetings during the trial.

Roger Mahony was by then the cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles. He traveled the 9,058-square-mile expanse of his archdiocese in a $400,000 helicopter donated by Richard Riordan, a wealthy businessman and future mayor. Los Angeles was the most populous U.S. archdiocese and the wealthiest.
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John Paul II teased Mahony gently by calling him “Hollywood,” but the needling carried a message: the pope made him give up the helicopter.

In the 1960s, as a priest in Stockton, Mahony befriended César Chávez of the United Farm Workers. He had served as the first chairman of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, a pro-labor state agency launched under Governor Jerry Brown in 1975. But Mahony’s political liberalism regarding Latinos and immigration issues never translated into theological liberalism, and his social awareness was tempered by a fealty to the church’s bottom line. As archbishop in the 1990s he scuttled an effort by the predominantly Latino gravediggers in Catholic cemeteries to organize themselves as a union. “Western Sequoia Corp., the commercial firm responsible for cemetery-plot sales that were once handled in-house by employees of the archdiocese, employs people on an ‘at will’ basis, meaning they may be terminated for any reason,” Ron Russell reported.
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Speaking out against the death penalty and abortion, Mahony championed the rights of immigrants, while raising funds from some of California’s richest Republicans. In 1996 Mahony purchased a five-acre parking lot off the Hollywood Freeway for $10.85 million, the site for a new cathedral.
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His ability to bounce back from criticism or bad press bestirred
Los Angeles Times
columnist Steve Lopez to call him “the Teflon Cardinal.”
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Mahony, at six and a half feet, towered over Anderson at the 1998 trial in Stockton. Six months into recovery, the attorney felt raw, working late in preparing for each day in court. On the phone at night he drew comfort from Doyle’s words:
You can do it. You’re not alone. A day at a time. Keep it simple
.

A 1976 letter in which O’Grady admitted to molesting a girl was in his
personnel file. “I was not aware of that letter,” Cardinal Mahony told the jury.

“Cardinal, if you had known that he admitted [to an earlier therapist] to touching a 9-year-old boy, would you have committed to him the full care of souls at the church at St. Andrew’s parish?” asked Anderson.

“It’s a bit speculative,” answered Mahony. “In any and all cases we—if there’s a suspicion or problem—we refer to competent professionals to assist in making the recommendations. And if the competent professionals do not raise any flag or cautions or concerns, then we act according to their judgment.”
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When the judge called a recess, the cardinal spoke with reporters in the hall. The proceedings resumed. “Cardinal,” began Anderson, “you were just out there speaking to the media. And you told the media, did you not, the following: ‘I thought when we placed O’Grady in the parish we did everything we humanly could have done to make sure there was no problem there.’ ”

“Well I’m not sure that’s the exact words, but something similar … yes.”

“At the time, Cardinal, did you talk to the police?”

“No.”

“You could have.”

“Well, I’m not sure I could have. But—”

“What was restraining you from calling the police and asking them about your priest?”

“When I was told that an allegation had been made, thoroughly investigated, found to be wanting and dismissed, I had no reason to call the police.”

“You could have sent Father O’Grady to a specialist, that is a doctor who specializes in the treatment and assessment of suspected offenders, correct?”

“At that time I was really unaware that there were such specialists.”

“You have an education in social work, correct?”

“Yes,” said Mahony, who had a master’s from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

“When you sent him to that parish you could have gone to the priest file and looked at what was in there about Father O’Grady, could you not?”

“Yes.”
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The jury returned a verdict of $30 million, $24 million of which was punitive damages against the church. A judge later reduced the award to $7.65 million, the largest on record for clergy abuse in a California trial.

HOW THE LOS ANGELES ARCHDIOCESE GREW

Born in 1936, Roger M. Mahony grew up in North Hollywood when it still had open fields. His father was an electrician with a poultry farm; the boy mingled with Mexican workers, picking up bits of Spanish, becoming bilingual as a young man. He entered the seminary at fourteen, advancing to the college level at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, set on a gorgeous estate sixty miles northwest of the city in Ventura County. “In seminary Roger was focused on Mexicans and wanted to work with them,” recalls a former classmate, Jerry Fallon, an ex-priest. “But he also had pretty thin skin when it came to criticism.”

The Camarillo seminary’s huge Spanish colonial library sat on a hilltop with a roof-level loggia. This was a gift of Estelle Doheny, the widow of Edward L. Doheny who had made a fortune in Mexico’s oil fields in the early 1900s.
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In 1921 Doheny gave $100,000 to Interior Secretary Albert Fall, who was imprisoned for bribery in the Teapot Dome scandal. Doheny avoided prison after a ten-year court battle. Irish-born archbishop John Cantwell cultivated Doheny. Doheny, who was second-generation Irish, became Cantwell’s largest donor. The American church was like a trunk of Ireland with branches spreading west.

But racial and cultural blending—and geopolitical maneuvering—shaped the great western city from its beginnings. The first official settlement, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles—City of Our Lady of Angels—was founded in 1781 by the Spanish crown to counteract the presumed territorial claims of Russia, which had trading posts and forts down the California coast with names such as Sebastapol. The Spanish governor recruited colonists to a pueblo along the Los Angeles River north of Mission San Gabriel—eleven families, who were headed by two Spaniards, four Indians, two blacks, and three men of mixed race. None of the wives was white; most of the twenty-two children were a mixture of Spanish, Indian, and African blood. In 1821, when Mexico won its independence from Spain, California and much of today’s Southwest fell
under Mexico City’s nominal control. After the U.S. defeated Mexico in 1848, America claimed all the land north of the Rio Grande, extending out to the Pacific Ocean.
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Flush with the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills, California became the thirty-first state in the Union, admitted as a nonslave state in 1850. California’s motto was Eureka—“I have found it.” People with gilded dreams came from every corner of America and Europe; after the Civil War, jobs building the railroads drew laborers from Canton Province in China to County Cork in Ireland. A century after the founding of the pueblo at Los Angeles, in the city to the north, San Francisco, some 27 percent of the voting-age populace was Irish-born. Long after the gold fields played out, the ethnic pilgrims kept arriving in Los Angeles. As the population grew, farms became subdivisions. L.A.’s population between 1910 and 1930 grew from 319,000 to 1.24 million, of whom 100,000 were Mexicans who had fled the Revolution of 1910, followed by refugees from the late 1920s Cristero Rebellion.
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Cantwell took in three dozen exiled bishops from Mexico and established fifty Hispanic parishes. The Cristero war so central to Maciel’s identity colored Los Angeles, too. In 1934, writes historian Mike Davis, “Cantwell organized the largest demonstration in Los Angeles history: a giant procession of 40,000 people, many of them Cristero refugees, chanting ‘Viva Cristo Rey’ and marching behind banners that denounced the ‘atheistic regimes in Mexico City and Moscow.’ ”
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In 1947, when Cantwell died, Cardinal Spellman of New York recommended his chancellor, James F. McIntyre, to the Vatican. “Lean and taciturn, with the neat gray hair and rimless glasses of a corporate chieftain, McIntyre was a gifted administrator and rock-hard conservative, who fit perfectly with the Los Angeles Protestant establishment,” writes Charles R. Morris. A brokerage executive before his call to ministry, Archbishop McIntyre faced frenetic postwar growth as white Catholics moved into greater Los Angeles at a rate of one thousand per week. Stopping plans for a new cathedral, McIntyre went on to open more than one hundred new parishes and nearly twice as many schools, a seminary, and half a dozen hospitals. This construction agenda stemmed from adroit decisions in real estate, scouting land before housing subdivisions were built, buying tracts and selling the excess to fund new parishes or schools.
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