The plot is thickening. Last January, Bernard Cardinal Law was named in 25 lawsuits alleging that he could have prevented now-defrocked priest John Geoghan, who is accused of molesting at least 120 children, from committing his crimes -- but didn't. Since then, two more damning pieces of information have come to light: Law received a letter in September 1984 outlining allegations of Geoghan's alleged criminal behavior, and in 1985, as a member of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the cardinal was asked to review a groundbreaking report on the widespread problem of clergy sexual abuse within the American Catholic Church. (Court motions in Geoghan's criminal trial will be heard at Suffolk [MA] Superior Court on October 9; no date has been set for the civil lawsuits naming Law.)

It's difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of these new facts. How could Law have been briefed on the extent of clergy sexual abuse throughout the Church, yet choose to ignore a glaring instance of the problem in his own archdiocese? After all, it's not as if sexual abuse had been ignored by society at large. By the time Law received notice of Geoghan's alleged abuse, in 1984, child sexual assault had become a felony in all 50 states -- as had the failure to report suspected abuse (though in Massachusetts and 21 other states, members of the clergy are exempt from this requirement). The Church itself had, to some extent, been aware of the problem for generations. But ignoring this unpleasant subject seems to have been standard practice. (Only now, it seems, has the Church finally learned its lesson. It was reported this week that Law immediately dismissed priest Andrzej Sujka of South Boston's Our Lady of Czestochowa Church after a parishioner disclosed to the archdiocese that Sujka had once molested him.) The cardinal, through Boston archdiocese spokesperson John Walsh, did not respond to three phone calls seeking comment, or to a list of seven questions faxed to his office. Law's attorney, Wilson Rogers Jr., did not return a call seeking comment.

In fact, the silence surrounding this issue has been deafening. But a look at how the Catholic Church has responded historically to the problem of clergy sexual abuse sheds some light on Law's behavior.

BY ALL accounts, the Catholic Church has struggled with the seriousness and extent of pedophilia within its own ranks for much longer than any other American social or religious institution. As far back as the early 1970s, the Vatican had received warnings about potential trouble with pedophilic priests. At that time, Catholic treatment centers for priests with "psychosexual disorders" began popping up across the country, from Massachusetts to Maryland to New Mexico.

Illustrations by Mark Reusch

In fact, the Church has considered pedophilia not just a psychological problem but an "ecclesiastical crime" -- sexual contact with a minor is defined as such in the 1984 Code of Canon Law, the body of law that structures the Catholic Church's legal system. Father Thomas Doyle, a canonical lawyer who's testified on behalf of plaintiffs in some 200 sex-abuse lawsuits, traces the existing law back to the Middle Ages, when Irish monks published penitential books for use while hearing confessions. Several of the tomes, according to Doyle, refer to sexual crimes committed by clerics against boys and girls. One widely used volume, known as the Penitential of Bede, advises clerics who sodomize children to repent their sins by subsisting on nothing more than bread and water for anywhere from three to 12 years. "The reason sexual abuse of minors is in these books," says Doyle, "is because it was a problem."

Yet this vast institutional knowledge of the problem never resulted in changes on the diocesan level -- changes that might have prevented the molestation of thousands of children. Until the infamous 1984 case of Gilbert Gauthe, who was convicted of fondling and raping dozens of boys in Lafayette, Louisiana, the Church dealt with the issue quietly.

The Gauthe scandal, however, served as a tipping point. In that case, families of Gauthe's 50 victims took the unprecedented step of suing the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, for failing to follow up on complaints about the priest's sexual misconduct. News of the lawsuit spread from the pages of the National Catholic Reporter to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Time magazine. (This is all recounted in Jason Berry's best-selling 1992 book Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, which was reissued by the University of Illinois Press last year.) One year after the Gauthe case made headlines, 10 more lawsuits alleging child molestation by clergy were filed in courts across the country; that number soared to 400 by 1993. At that point, attorneys who had been following such cases stopped counting; today, no other group keeps track of such information. Conservative estimates put the number of victims at more than 10,000; in the meantime, an estimated 3000 priests have been indicted for sexually assaulting minors, according to victim-support groups.

Doyle, who worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, DC, in 1984, recalls that for many leaders of the Church, the feverish climate following the Gauthe case felt like "driving a Sherman tank through a minefield." "Reports of clergy sexual abuse were cropping up on a daily basis all over the place," he remembers. "This was a super-hot issue for the bishops. There was a lot of talk about what to do."

The furor prompted the creation of a definitive document, later used as evidence against the Church in hundreds of sex-abuse lawsuits: an internal 1985 report on the extent of pedophilia among the clergy. The 100-page proposal, known simply as "The Manual," was written by three esteemed Church insiders: Doyle; Father Michael Peterson, a now-deceased psychiatrist who treated pedophilic priests; and Ray Mouton, a former attorney who defended Gauthe in criminal proceedings. (Mouton, who now lives in Frankfurt, Germany, could not be reached for comment.) Doyle and his co-authors outlined the "growing problem" of clergy sexual abuse and warned that it would escalate if the Church failed to take certain steps. Most notably, they recommended that the Church establish a national "policy and planning group" to create mandatory, uniform procedures for all 188 US dioceses.

The report reads as though Doyle, Peterson, and Mouton were doling out friendly advice to bishops forced to contend with an unpleasant problem. For instance, the authors appeal to Church officials not to consider their effort an affront: "Please do not feel `preached to' or that your past views and ways of dealing with this disorder have been `wrong.' The purpose of this document . . . is to educate you as much as we can in our professional capacities and help keep you abreast of developments in this sensitive and devastating area of human behavior."

Throughout 1985, Doyle lobbied Church leaders to present the report to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), a canonical body that makes recommendations to the American Catholic hierarchy on pastoral practices, interreligious affairs, and government policy. Doyle recalls approaching Cardinal Law, who headed the NCCB Committee on Research and Pastoral Practices at the time, and asking for his support. Doyle had known the cardinal since the late 1960s, when Law served as bishop of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri. The Boston archbishop, Doyle believed, could be counted on as a sympathetic ear. "I told Bernie, `This is our report,' " Doyle recalls, " `These are our recommendations. We need to get the conference to study this.' " Law "was very supportive," says Doyle, and pledged to call for a special ad hoc committee to study the problem. Weeks later, at a June 1985 meeting at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, the NCCB was quietly briefed on the report's contents. But according to Doyle, the NCCB committee headed by Law never followed through on the promise to create an ad hoc committee.

Today, Doyle, now an Air Force chaplain stationed in Ramstein, Germany, characterizes the 1985 document as a product of good will. "We were card-carrying Catholics," he points out. "We just wanted to help the bishops deal responsibly with this." However well intentioned, though, the report went nowhere. The NCCB failed to adopt any of its recommendations, Doyle says. He adds that not one NCCB member ever discussed the report's contents with him, Mouton, or Peterson. Instead, it was "summarily shelved." And that's where it might have remained if not for the now-infamous 1997 trial of former priest Rudolph Kos, in which a Dallas jury awarded 11 plaintiffs $119.6 million after ruling that the Diocese of Dallas had concealed information about Kos's sexual abuse of children. (The judgment was later reduced by agreement to $23.4 million to spare the Dallas diocese from bankruptcy.) The 1985 report was part of a battery of evidence used in that trial -- making it a public document. Though diocesan officials in Dallas had denied ever receiving the report, Doyle testified at the Kos trial that he had sent copies to every US bishop. Diocesan officials later recanted. But for Doyle, their behavior epitomized the way the Church has responded to his effort all along: "The report was rejected. Somebody [at the NCCB] must have decided that it was too threatening or too controversial and it was dropped."

Church officials, however, insist that the report wasn't hushed up. Monsignor Francis Maniscalco, communications director for the NCCB since 1993, maintains that the body's 300 members never dismissed the manual. "We did not say, `Let's never talk about this report again,' " he says. "We're surprised that it's perceived as being ignored." The document, Maniscalco says, was distributed to the bishops by the authors; it was then forwarded to the NCCB Committee on Priest Life and Ministry, which often referred to the report when offering advice about clergy sexual abuse. Maniscalco admits that the NCCB failed to heed some of the report's recommendations: it did not establish a policy group, nor did it oblige dioceses to follow guidelines on how to respond to sexual-abuse allegations. But by the time the document was issued in 1985, he explains, "the bishops were already dealing with a lot of facets of the problem." He adds, "It wasn't seen as so widespread a problem that the bishops couldn't deal with it on an individual level."

In previous years, that is, bishops had handled sexual misconduct among clergy quietly, behind closed doors. Often, they simply transferred priests to other parishes, in other communities. The Gauthe case exposed what's been termed "a secret system" for dealing with priest perpetrators. As more and more people went public with their allegations, the Catholic hierarchy felt more and more pressure. Yet bishops managed to snuff out any criticisms through what Doyle describes as "denial responses and pious platitudes."

The problem became unavoidable, however, in 1992, when the dramatic story of former priest James Porter blew wide open. Porter was charged with assaulting 28 children in three parishes in Bristol County, Massachusetts; he pled guilty and was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison. The Porter story turned into a national scandal -- partly because of his jail sentence, which many thought too light, and partly because of his lengthy trail of abuse. Before leaving the priesthood in 1979, he had been shuffled from one parish to another in three states: Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Mexico. All told, he is suspected of abusing 200 victims. For the Church, the case marked what Maniscalco calls "a watershed" revealing how pervasive the problem had become. "The Porter case seemed particularly significant," Maniscalco says. "The Church felt perhaps the problem was sufficiently widespread, perhaps we needed to establish a national committee to speak directly to it."

The NCCB finally set up its ad hoc committee on sexual abuse in 1993 -- eight years after the idea was put forth by the 1985 report. The group, which consists of five bishops, has consulted mental-health experts about pedophilia and other psychosexual disorders. It has developed manuals explaining the nature of these illnesses, as well as guidelines on how to respond to charges of clergy sexual abuse. In 1992, the NCCB drafted a national plan outlining five principles for handling such abuse. Many of these principles -- such as investigating allegations that have merit, suspending accused priests during investigation, enrolling afflicted priests in medical treatment, and drafting a diocesan policy on sexual abuse of minors -- sound remarkably similar to those outlined in the 1985 document.

This raises an important question: would the Church have been able to stave off the crisis if it had acted on the 1985 report? Tom Economus, who heads Linkup, a Chicago-based advocacy group for victims of clergy sexual abuse, echoes the attitude among many observers when he says, "Oh! Absolutely!" That proposal "is very prophetic," he says. "Much of what it stated has come to fruition." Indeed. The report advised bishops to reach out to victims of clergy sexual abuse by offering to pay for counseling and to provide pastoral guidance. Otherwise, it warned, the Church would face mounting civil lawsuits -- it even projected losses in legal fees and settlements of about $1 billion by 1996. Economus and other informed observers estimate that these lawsuits have cost the Church at least that much in legal fees, settlements, and jury awards over the past decade.

But the Church had warnings that it could have acted on long before the problem captured the media spotlight -- years, even, before circulation of "The Manual" in 1985. In 1971, psychiatrist Conrad Baars traveled to the Vatican, where he presented the first of two studies about the US priesthood to the Synod of Bishops, an assembly of bishops from around the world. Baars based his research on 40 years' experience treating 1500 priests. He found that 20 to 25 percent of American clergy members had serious psychiatric problems, while 60 to 70 percent suffered emotional immaturity -- by which Baars meant "an insufficiently developed or distorted emotional life." According to his report, "The Role of the Church in the Causation, Treatment, and Prevention of the Crisis of the Priesthood," these priests often exhibited a "psychosexual immaturity expressed in hetero- or homosexual activity," as well as in "masturbation, sexual impotence or frigidity . . . or sexual exploits."

Twelve months later, Baars's findings were mirrored in an exhaustive study about the state of mind of American priests, "The Catholic Priest in the United States: Psychological Investigations," which the NCCB had commissioned in 1969. Eugene Kennedy, a former priest and psychologist, spearheaded the effort by interviewing 271 clergymen from different religious orders and dioceses nationwide. He came up with disturbing conclusions: as many as 66 percent of priests were "underdeveloped" psychologically and emotionally, while another eight percent were "maldeveloped." In a separate interview, Kennedy says his work pinpointed "priests with major psychosexual development problems." He adds: "That was clear."

To observers, Kennedy and Baars were sending an unambiguous message to the Catholic hierarchy: Too many of your priests suffer from mental illness, and must get medical treatment. In the words of Boston attorney Stephen Lyons, who has used the Baars study in clergy-sexual-abuse lawsuits, the documents are "a clarion call telling Church leaders, `Wake up. You have got a problem here.' "

Barbara Balboni concurs. As a Northeastern University doctoral candidate in the 1990s, she examined how the institutional Church has shaped bishops' awareness of what she calls "the abuse crisis." Her 1998 dissertation -- "Through the Lens of the Organizational Culture Perspective: A Descriptive Study of American Catholic Bishops' Understanding of Clergy Sexual Molestation and Abuse of Children and Adolescents" -- traces the earliest warning signs to the 1972 Kennedy study. Its description of an underdeveloped priest, Balboni discovered, matches the traits of clergymen who were convicted of molesting minors. Yet she found no official response to the study. Balboni, who now teaches criminology at Bridgewater State University, maintains that the crisis could have been curtailed if "the bishops had done right by their priests then." Rather than send problem priests to spiritual retreats, the bishops should have obtained psychiatric treatment for them. They should have used the clinical information in the study to recognize the red flags marking potentially pedophilic priests, as opposed to turning a blind eye to their conduct. "If the bishops had taken this study seriously," Balboni concludes, "many priest perpetrators would have been identified sooner, or weeded out. They could have nipped this in the bud."

Maniscalco counters that, although the two studies revealed the prevalence of psychosexual immaturity among priests, neither referred specifically to pedophilia. "Do the reports predict a breakout of pedophilia?" he asks, and then answers: "You cannot use them as evidence that trouble with clergy sexual abuse is building. I don't see any connection." Instead of signaling a wave of child molestation by clergy, he says, "the reports dealt with how to prevent priests from leaving the priesthood, and that's how they were considered."

It's true that neither report mentions the word "pedophilia" or the phrase "sexual abuse of minors." Yet such behavior, observers argue, can easily be inferred from their findings. Says Lyons, "The [Baars] study uses euphemisms for clergy sexual abuse. I don't think there's a question as to what it's referring." At the time, in fact, the term "psychosexual disorders" was understood within the psychological community to define what are now called "paraphilias" -- fetishism, bestiality, voyeurism, and pedophilia. (In the early '70s, that term would also have included homosexuality.) As Kennedy himself explains, "The things you now find listed under `paraphilias,' that's the behavior we found in priests with psychosexual conflicts."

In fact, the reports were released at a time when Church superiors had begun working behind the scenes to address sexual misconduct by clergy. By the early '70s, some Catholic treatment centers for priests offered psychiatric services, along with medical attention and spiritual counsel, according to A.W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and former monk who has counseled more than 1000 sexually disordered priests over the past three decades. Sipe has testified on behalf of plaintiffs in clergy-sex-abuse lawsuits. In 1996, as an expert witness in the Rudy Kos case, he drafted a report describing Church programs where bishops could place pedophilic priests "within a more exclusive and secret atmosphere." Many centers, like the now-defunct House of Affirmation in Worcester, were funded by various dioceses, and had a distinctly spiritual atmosphere. Others took a more medical approach: at the Silver Springs, Maryland-based Saint Luke Institute (founded by Peterson), which opened its doors to pedophilic priests in 1982, clergymen were evaluated before entering by top psychiatrists from the Johns Hopkins University Sexual Disorders Clinic.

The most sophisticated center could be found among the Servants of the Paraclete, a Catholic order in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. Since 1949, the monastery had served as a spiritual retreat for clergy suffering such ills as alcoholism and depression. And by the early '70s, Sipe says, the Paracletes were training in psychology and sexuality at the San Francisco-based Institute for Advanced Study of Sexuality. Four years later, in 1976, the order launched two programs specifically for pedophilic priests -- the first in the world. According to Sipe, Catholic treatment centers were "on the cutting edge," using advanced techniques to treat those who had molested minors. Court records in the Kos case show that Church superiors relied heavily on the Paraclete center (which stopped treating pedophiles in 1995 because of the escalating number of lawsuits). In a 1997 deposition for the Kos trial, Jay Feierman, the psychiatrist who worked at the monastery, testified that he had evaluated 300 sexually disordered priests from 1977 to 1984 alone. By 1995, he had cared for 1000 priests.

Such revelations suggest that the Catholic hierarchy had all the information and expertise it needed to tackle the problem of clergy sexual abuse -- yet it failed to protect its victims. The Church, critics charge, did not safeguard children by prohibiting priests from taking camping trips alone with kids, or forbidding minors to sleep at rectories. The Church, they say, did not encourage clergymen to report suspicious behavior on the part of their peers; it did not warn parishioners about the signs of sexual assault. "They did not do anything to protect victims," says Sylvia Demerest, the Dallas attorney who represented three of the 11 plaintiffs in the Kos case. Demerest speaks for many detractors when she suggests that, early on, the Catholic Church knew more about the psychological profile of a serial child molester than any other organized group in the United States that worked extensively with children -- including the schools. Still, thousands of children were repeatedly placed in harm's way.

"This has been a consistent problem within the Church," Demerest says. And yet, unconscionably, Church leaders continue to claim that they did not have enough knowledge to protect young parishioners. "These people knew they were sitting on a powder keg," says Demerest. "They knew priests were doing unspeakable things to kids. They chose to ignore it."

NOT SURPRISINGLY, Church leaders bristle at the notion that the Catholic hierarchy has turned its back on this long-simmering problem. Maniscalco denies that the NCCB leadership "swept the issue under the rug," let alone encouraged bishops to cover it up. To him, such criticisms simply are not relevant. "They are germane only if the bishops had been saying, `We don't care if people get hurt,' " he explains. Would he concede that not everyone responded to sexual abuse of minors by clergy in an effective pastoral manner? "Obviously," he replies, "we weren't as successful as we would have liked." He adds: "Would the Church like to go back and do things differently? Probably." Still, Maniscalco maintains that bishops tried to do what they believed was best. "To the extent that the Church didn't always realize its ramifications," he says, "we might not have been as effective as we should have been. But we never condoned [clergy sexual abuse]. We knew it was wrong."

Even some mental-health professionals believe the Church did not deliberately deceive its flock, but was instead misled by the experts it relied on. Fred Berlin is among them. Berlin, who founded the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic in 1971, has advised the NCCB on treating pedophilia since 1993. That the Church once stood ahead of the curve in recognizing the need to treat sexually disordered priests seems, in his words, "one of the greatest ironies of this whole story." Unfortunately for the Church, he explains, "bishops deferred to mental-health people whose knowledge about pedophilia was wrong" by modern standards. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the psychological community defined pedophilia as a form of arrested development. The pedophile had gotten stuck prematurely in his psychological growth. He gravitated toward minors sexually because, in emotional terms, he was one himself. Pedophiles, the theory went, could be cured if they received treatment -- primarily, talk therapy -- to figure out what had gone wrong and to learn how to function as adults.

This clinical view, according to Berlin, caused experts to give bishops what would now be considered bad advice. Back then, after months of therapy, a pedophilic priest might have returned to his diocese -- only to be reassigned to another parish, with unfettered access to kids. "We would never allow this today," Berlin notes. "We appreciate the tenacity of this illness. We talk about supervision. We talk about control, about avoiding temptation. This idea that you can send the person off to the doctor and he's magically cured doesn't exist."

Ultimately, Berlin echoes the notion that Cardinal Law expressed when he wrote in the July 27 issue of the Pilot, a newspaper published by the Boston archdiocese, that society and the Church have been "on a learning curve" regarding sexual abuse of minors. "We all know more about pedophilia," he says -- about its deep-seated nature, about its resistance to treatment. If people want to assign blame for the crisis of clergy sexual abuse, he implicates the mental-health community as well: "Those treating the priests were just as culpable as the bishops for sending the priests back into the community."

To be sure, critics of the Church recognize that awareness has evolved -- both inside and outside the Church -- when it comes to sexual abuse of minors. And some detractors acknowledge that Church superiors probably were honest people who didn't intend to inflict harm. Psychologist Eugene Kennedy, who argues in the recently released The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality (St. Martin's, 2001) that Catholicism suffers as a result of its failure to deal with sexual intimacy, makes a point of defending Law, whom he first met in the 1960s. "I have known Bernie Law for many years," he says, "and I must say that I simply do not believe that he would ever deceive others in such a grave matter."

This is not to say that the Church has no culpability in the existing crisis. Balboni, the Bridgewater State criminologist, explains just how the Church's institutional culture served to cultivate a disastrous silence during the pre-Gauthe era between 1970 and 1985. After interviewing 20 bishops nationwide, she found that cultural factors overwhelmingly shaped their responses to child molestation by priests. Bishops saw discipline as an internal matter to be shared only with top personnel in their dioceses. It would have been anathema for them to attend NCCB meetings and "air their dirty laundry," she says. Bishops also view themselves as Church defenders, as institutional bureaucrats. To disclose their priests' sexual misconduct in a public arena -- even in closed NCCB sessions -- would have been tantamount to bringing scandal down on the Church. And so, rather than push for reform, she says, "bishops protected themselves and their dioceses." She adds, "Bishops aren't appointed to change the Church. They're appointed to maintain it as it is."

That, of course, is why Cardinal Law's much-repeated lament -- "I only wish the knowledge that we have today had been available to us earlier," he wrote in the Pilot -- is so bothersome. After all that the Church has endured since the Gauthe case -- watching its priests go to jail, funneling millions of dollars toward settlements, hearing its reputation maligned -- observers cannot help but interpret talk about learning curves as an excuse. Or even worse, as a desperate attempt to evade legal and moral responsibility. "It's smoke and mirrors," as Tom Economus puts it. "Church officials will say anything to get themselves off the hook."

In the end, it might not really matter what the Church knew or didn't know about sexual misconduct among clergy in 1970 or 1980 or 1990. For centuries, it understood one crucial piece of information: such conduct is a moral crime. As Doyle says, "We may not have known how the sexual disorder develops, or how to care for our priests. But we knew about the harm. We knew priests were running loose on our kids."

Everything else, in other words, should have been irrelevant.

Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: October 5 - 11, 2001