Render Unto Rome (52 page)

In 1996 Manly and Irvine attorney Katherine Freberg had taken the case of Ryan DiMaria, age twenty-one, who was battling alcoholism in the aftershocks of being molested by Father Michael Harris, a popular high school principal from whom he had sought counseling as a teenager, after a friend’s suicide. DiMaria told a priest how Harris had abused him: Father G. Patrick Ziemann, the scion of a prominent area family, and a seminary friend of Mahony’s. Mahony, in the meantime, arranged for Ziemann to become bishop of Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco. Ziemann squandered the diocesan treasury, left a $16 million debt, and resigned in 1998 when a priest sued him, alleging he coerced him to provide sex. To prevent Mahony from testifying in the DiMaria case, the Orange diocese settled for a whopping $5.2 million, and agreed to eleven demands made by DiMaria and his attorney, notably, a zero-tolerance policy on abusers. In time, Ryan DiMaria became an attorney representing victims. Harris, the perpetrator, left the priesthood but was never prosecuted.

John Manly’s firm had one hundred abuse clients. His chief researcher, Patrick Wall, was a brilliant canonist who had quit the Benedictine priesthood in Collegeville, Minnesota, after five parish assignments, each one replacing a pastor who had stolen money or abused children. Wall had recently moved to California when he saw Manly quoted in the press. He called in hopes of sharing a few things he knew. Manly hired him on the spot. Now married, with a child, Wall was a sleuth when it came to church documents—and had become an Episcopalian by 2003. Another expert witness, Richard Sipe of La Jolla, was a psychotherapist and former Benedictine priest who had written books on celibacy. In their overlapping research, Sipe, Wall, and Tom Doyle, with ten advanced degrees among them, formed a brain trust for Jeff Anderson and John Manly. The trio collaborated on
Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes
, a history of how church laws responded to systemic clergy sexual abuse and the hierarchy’s latter-day reliance on psychiatric treatment facilities.
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“In some dioceses,” said Manly, “if you’re not part of the sexual culture, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get choice assignments. No one can talk about it because the consequences for that person are catastrophic.”

The darkness John Manly felt cut a sharp contrast with Pat Wall’s wit. Both men had the heft of football players from their younger years. Wall was rewriting his idea of faith with intrigue over each new document. “Roger Mahony is crucial to the Vatican,” he told me in 2010, by which
time he had become a Buddhist. “He was one of the cardinals called to the Consistory for the Study of the Special Economic Problems of the Holy See”—a 1980 convocation under John Paul II to deal with Vatican deficits. “James Stafford, the archbishop of Denver, was on it; he’s in the Curia now. Cormac Murphy O’Connor of London was drawn in, and later Ed Egan from New York. These cardinals are some of the best money producers for Rome. Los Angeles pays the largest annual fee to Rome of any U.S. diocese. Factor in Peter’s Pence, and the special checks a cardinal takes on trips to Rome, there’s Roger.

“Mahony has a big contract with Stewart Enterprises for management of the Catholic cemeteries,” said Wall. “They give a cut to the archdiocese on every funeral they do. Stewart was a big supporter of the new cathedral.
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Burials are a business for the church. If you’re a pastor, as I was, you’re inundated in winter—that’s the burial season. Spring is big for baptisms, summer for weddings. It’s the flow of life, the rise and fall of the rivers and rains. You can bet Mahony is laying his groundwork in Rome to make these abuse cases go away.”

Mahony was indeed doing business in Rome, as several lawyers deduced from informal conversations with certain judges overseeing the negotiations. Of the three geographic groupings for the settlements—Clergy 1, in northern California; Clergy 2, in Los Angeles; and Clergy 3, in Orange, San Diego, and dioceses to the south—Clergy 2, with 554 cases, dwarfed the others. Mahony made presentations to the Third Office of the Congregation for the Clergy for the alienation of church property. Unlike Seán O’Malley, who had come empty-handed from Boston to Rome, Mahony dealt from a position of strength. The Vatican gave him great latitude on his handling of assets, for besides building the great cathedral, he had otherwise proved his mettle.

GIRDING FOR BATTLE

By spring 2003, eleven clerics had been indicted on criminal charges in Los Angeles. More than nine hundred civil claims were filed that year against California dioceses. The judges were pushing the settlement groups for mediation to avoid a system clogged with endless trials. These were not class action suits; still, coordinated proceedings with many clients move
slowly. Besides the forty or so plaintiff lawyers, Hennigan had a large firm billing long hours on the many issues; the insurance companies that held liability policies of the dioceses had their lawyers. Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Don Steier represented accused priests. Procedural delays were strategic. Mahony also retained a public relations firm (with Enron among its clients) to help with damage control.
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“The usual process in cases like this is to saddle up, start discovery, and get a trial date,” explained Steve Rubino, a New Jersey lawyer who had two decades’ experience in suing dioceses and religious orders. “Instead, we fought about what the discovery would be. The church claimed the priests’ files were off-limits because of freedom of religion. Then they challenged the state law under which we had filed the cases. It became a tsunami of paper.”

Raised in a blue-collar Catholic home and a law school graduate of Catholic University, Rubino had started out as a prosecutor. He began a civil practice; on taking his first case against the church, he was appalled at the unprosecuted criminal behavior. Through a friendship with Tom Doyle he “joined this strange force, out of the church,
into
the church,” he told me one afternoon on the Atlantic shore, a short walk from his home. Unlike Jeff Anderson, the conservative Rubino turned down many cases with time-statute problems.
The only thing I can get for you is money
, he told the clients he did take on.
What you’ve got to do is recover and learn to live well
.

“Mahony and Hennigan led certain of my esteemed colleagues to believe this would be paid by [insurance] carriers; we’ll settle all claims in six months,” bristled Rubino. “That played well with the judiciary. The judges didn’t want discovery in all of these cases: they wanted order and structure to the proceedings. When Mahony claimed First Amendment privilege, that foxed everything. We spent three years circling over whether we
had
a mediated package.”

Rubino was allied with Kathy Freberg, Manly’s former law partner, on 156 cases and 37 perpetrators. “We said this is it, we know our future’s on the line,
let’s do it,
” Rubino remembered. “The only way to get a job done is to deal from a position of strength. The defense had an advantage in sheer manpower. We had to borrow $2 million each, and when I say
we were in
, I mean, we were
deep
in, like with houses, pets, trailers. A lot of
lawyers are not willing to take those risks. I don’t begrudge them. The only thing the bishops respect is when you keep hitting them, all the time. You have to just stay in their faces.”

Manny Vega spent Holy Week of 2003 on a hunger strike outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels with a sleeping bag and picket sign that said “You Can’t Hide the Truth from God.” A lady entering church hissed, “You’re a shame and an embarrassment.” Father Silva had fled to Mexico. (When a TV reporter found him, Silva denied abusing any of the eight men.) Refusing to shave, shower, or eat, Vega occupied his slice of sidewalk. On Good Friday, he was asleep on the concrete when Mahony appeared. Light-headed from lack of food, Vega stood up and stumbled. The cardinal gave him a steadying hand. “You need to take some nutrients,” said Mahony helpfully.

“Would you have said that to César Chávez?” Vega shot back.

Mahony winced at the reference to the farm workers’ legendary hunger strikes, and withdrew.

Later, the cardinal came back, several times, to talk with Vega and a clutch of survivor-protesters. He apologized (though Silva’s abuses predated his time as archbishop); he gave them access to the cathedral restrooms. He offered rosary beads blessed by the pope, which Vega accepted, and later regretted, saying it made him feel bought off. Vega asked to meet one-on-one. Mahony said he could not, regretfully, for legal reasons.

In June 2003 the roof caved in on District Attorney Steve Cooley and the lead prosecutor, Bill Hodgman. The U.S. Supreme Court in
Stogner v. California
, on a 5–4 vote, reversed a California law that enabled prosecutors, in certain circumstances, to pursue people for sex crimes committed far back in time. “
Stogner
killed us,” said Hodgman. Among those set free, Michael Wempe had gone through the seminary with Mahony. Wempe’s indictment on forty-three counts of child molestation was thrown out. His backstory is instructive.

In May 1987 Wempe was accused of having sex with a youth. Mahony sent him to a clergy treatment center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, for six months. In 1988 he appointed Wempe a chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, confiding not a word on his background to hospital officials. Later that year, two young men complained to the archdiocese that Wempe had abused them as boys. He stayed on his job, undergoing
therapy. From 1990 to 1995, he molested a boy in his hospital office. In 2002 Wempe was finally fired after his older transgressions made the news. Less than a year after
Stogner
, Wempe was charged in a new case. Without releasing Wempe’s treatment files, Mahony blamed the Paracletes’ facility in New Mexico, which was driven out of business by litigation in the midnineties.

Mahony gave me a telephone interview on February 12, 2005, for a
National Catholic Reporter
profile. Hundreds of civil cases were grinding slowly forward. The cardinal insisted that the Paracletes’ “prognosis” was that if Wempe “continued his spiritual direction and counseling he was getting, that he would not reoffend. And they recommended that he serve in a limited capacity such as a chaplain to a hospital or a prison facility. At the time, I believed their prognosis to be accurate … It wasn’t until after he was taken out of ministry that someone made a report that has been subject to criminal prosecution.”
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Here was John Paul’s rationalization from the 2002 cardinals’ meeting, cemented into an alibi: the therapists are at fault, they gave us bad advice. What happened to moral standards for a religious life? Why were pedophiles recycled into ministries and church jobs with access to new victims? Mahony had unseemly proximity to several men like Wempe. Father Carl Sutphin lived in the same rectory with Mahony in two cathedrals over a span of seven years until a 2002 LAPD investigation of charges that Sutphin molested two sets of brothers, which caused the cardinal to force his retirement. Sutphin had been a classmate of Mahony’s at St. John’s Seminary on the hilly estate in Camarillo. In 1991 Mahony removed him from ministry when a Phoenix man said that Sutphin had abused him and his twin brother in the 1970s. Mahony sent Sutphin to St. Luke Institute in Suitland, Maryland, but did not report him to authorities; California at that time did not include clergy as “mandated reporters” of abuse. Sutphin came back to be chaplain in a retirement home. In 1995 Sutphin moved into the St. Vibiana rectory with Mahony, and on to Our Lady of Angels, until his 2002 removal.

“Father Sutphin was another example of someone whose prognosis was favorable,” Mahony told me calmly. “One of his ministries had been dealing with men in jail, so the old cathedral rectory, which is right downtown near the jail, seemed to be a good place for him to be in residence, and certainly under supervision … We have absolutely no report of any reoffense
on his part the whole time.” He seemed detached from the reality of what Sutphin had done.

Monsignor Richard A. Loomis had been vicar of clergy with the responsibility to investigate sex abuse allegations in the 1990s. He was himself accused in a civil case, as Mary Grant, a California SNAP leader, wrote in a February 23, 2004, letter to the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Office of Child and Youth Protection in Washington, D.C.

Although Msgr. Loomis was being sued for sexual molestation, the church deemed him innocent, largely because but a single accuser had come forward. On February 8 of this year, SNAP leafleted [Loomis’s] church, only to be mocked and scorned by parishioners. But the publicity from the event caused another victim of Msgr. Loomis to come forward, apparently with a story sufficiently credible to cause the removal of Msgr. Loomis from ministry on February 15, one week later.
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“The case proves that our procedures are working,” Mahony said in his mild, unruffled way. “If there’s sufficient credible evidence and the board decides to recommend that he be taken out of active ministry, and they did in this case, I obviously concurred in their recommendation.” As to why SNAP had to leaflet in the first place, Mahony said, “You know, I can’t remember the exact sequences. A lot of these problems with civil suits filed in 2002–2003 are because we did not have names of victims or any way to talk to them.”

“John Doe” names were routinely given to the church, attorneys told me.

The archdiocese cited expenses of $4,871,000 “related to legal fees, and other costs related to sexual abuse claims in fiscal year 2004. As of September 30, 2004, the Archdiocese has received $4,070,000 in reimbursements of legal fees and settlements” from insurance companies—leaving $801,000 presumably covered by church funds. The insurance companies were reimbursing the expenses for Michael Hennigan’s white-shoe firm as part of the policy coverage. In January 2005 three insurers asked the court to relieve them of responsibility, on grounds that the archdiocese had withheld documents. In November California superior court judge
Haley J. Fromholz, a yeoman figure in keeping the complex proceedings in motion, ruled for the archdiocese.