All the attention on Holocaust restitution claims distracted many Vaticanologists who might have otherwise kept a better watch on what was happening inside the IOR. But for those paying close attention, there were warning signs that the bank was still plagued by systemic problems. In 1999, the $232 million fraudulent empire of American financier Martin Frankel unraveled. The FBI tracked down Frankel and arrested him in Germany. Prosecutors discovered a troublesome IOR link. Frankel had established the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation to Serve and Help the Poor and Alleviate Suffering, a British Virgin Islands company through which he ran millions of offshore dollars, much of it stolen from clients. A seventy-nine-year-old monsignor, Emilio Colagiovanni, had allowed Frankel to use his separate foundation at the Vatican Bank so that Frankel’s money transfers stayed off the radar of financial watchdogs.1
That Colagiovanni had any connection to a swindler like Frankel surprised prosecutors. The elderly monsignor was a scholar who edited a Vatican-approved canonical law quarterly and served as an emeritus judge on the Roman Rota, the Pope’s prestigious court of appeals. Seventy-three-year-old Peter Jacobs was another priest dragged into the scandal. Father Jacobs was president of Frankel’s offshore foundation, and had himself been suspended from his priestly duties for having earlier defied his archbishop by running a popular Manhattan restaurant that was supposed to send its profits to the poor, but was the subject of press stories about how it fueled lavish lifestyles for shady characters.2
Frankel had promised the Vatican a $55 million contribution. The terms of the “contribution” meant that the Vatican would have kept only $5 million and the other $50 million would stay under Frankel’s control in a Vatican Bank–linked foundation.3 But Frankel never gave a cent. Prosecutors had trouble believing that no one at the bank spotted that the Frankel foundation had unrestricted use of a third-party IOR account through which millions in cash passed regularly. And their suspicions were heightened when they discovered that Colagiovanni had consulted with the Vatican’s third-ranking prelate, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the Sostituto for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, as well as the Papal Nuncio to the United States, Cardinal Pio Laghi.4 Soon questions led back to Gianfranco Piovano, the Vatican Bank’s chief prelate. Piovano, it turned out, had met several times with Colagiovanni, Jacobs, and their attorney, Tom Bolan, a former partner of legendary New York lawyer Roy Cohn.5
The media loved the Frankel case. A search of his Greenwich home had uncovered an enormous stash of pornography, a Ouija board, and printed reminders to shred documents and to check on jurisdictions that did not have extradition treaties with the U.S.6 Still, the Vatican Bank ultimately deflected inquiries about its own civil liability. The IOR instead blamed any wrongdoing on the two American priests, claiming as Marcinkus had a decade earlier, that it was the unwitting victim of sophisticated con men. In one of its most impolitic defenses, Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls downplayed Colagiovanni’s status by saying he was merely a “pensioner” and dismissed Jacobs as an “ex-Jew.” Father Jacobs had a Jewish father, although his mother was Catholic; he converted to Catholicism in his twenties, was baptized, and ordained a priest in 1955.7 As for the wayward foundation, Navarro-Valls said it “does not have any relationship with it [the Vatican] whatsoever.”
The Frankel probe was another reminder to Caloia that even after nine years he did not have full control of the bank’s numbered foundation accounts. It was the same issue that had frustrated him with Monsignor De Bonis and the Cardinal Francis Spellman Foundation. Whenever Caloia thought he had made improvements, something like the Frankel scandal mocked his lack of progress.
Even though Caloia drilled down inside the IOR to find out what had gone wrong with Frankel, his focus in 1999 was on ensuring that the Pope appoint him for another five-year tenure. His term was set to expire that October, and his opponents were anxious to find a replacement.
American Cardinal Casimir Szoka was no Caloia friend.8 Szoka carried weight inside the Curia. John Paul had picked him in 1990 to run the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, and in 1997 he was appointed the President of the city-state’s Governorate, one of Marcinkus’s old posts. Before arriving at the Curia in 1990, Szoka was the treasurer of the American Bishop’s Conference as well as Detroit’s archbishop. During ten difficult years in Detroit, he oversaw that diocese’s considerable downsizing. Even his critics acknowledged he was a tough decision maker who ran a lean administration (he had to close thirty parishes due to lack of money).9 And, as the son of a Polish émigré who himself spoke fluent Polish, he had influence with John Paul.10 Szoka wanted Hans Tietmeyer, the outgoing president of Germany’s central bank, to be the IOR chief.11
The anti-Caloia contingent even planted stories attributed to “Vatican sources” that the church was wooing Tietmeyer.12 While the German banker had an impressive résumé, his sponsors underestimated the enmity that John Paul and his private secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz, had toward Germans due to what the Nazis had done to Poland.13 Although John Paul had no special affection for Caloia, the IOR chief’s gray countenance worked to his benefit: neither had he made an enemy of the Pontiff during nearly a decade of service. Ultimately, the Pope was not persuaded that Tietmeyer—who did not even speak Italian—was a better replacement. Not even Szoka could change John Paul’s mind. All the jockeying for power ended when the Pontiff vowed publicly, “As long as I’m alive, there will never be a German in charge of the Vatican’s finances.”14 The Pope confirmed Caloia for a third term.
During his first decade, Caloia had discovered that the religious community often had a terrible view of the Vatican Bank. “There was a wall of distrust,” Caloia said, “at least not much enthusiasm. For them, the IOR was intent on ‘profiteering’ and ‘speculation.’ ” Many clerics were conflicted about money. They realized it was necessary to run the parishes and dispense help to the needy, but at the same time, “Holy monks consider money the shit of the devil.”15 As far as Caloia was concerned, “the challenge is if money is the devil’s shit, then we Christians must be able to turn it into a good fertilizer.”16
By 2000 Caloia had come to see his role as that of a “financial advisor” who had “customers” with different needs and wants. Some were rich religious orders “with custodians who speak ten languages and play the stock market.” Others were poor and only worried about not losing money in a swindle or fraud. And he tended to those differences in ways Marcinkus and Nogara had never contemplated. Under his guidance there were only a few clerics left inside the IOR. The bank had three times as many employees as just twenty years earlier. His easy-going stewardship meant morale had lifted.17
On the cusp of his third term, the seasoned Caloia knew that unforeseen crises from some hidden shadows in the bank might prevent him from accomplishing his informal to-do list. “The Devil is always lurking, multifaceted, and treacherous,” he told friend and author Giancarlo Galli.18 He could not then have imagined that just as the all-consuming fight over Holocaust restitution had distracted top clerics from focusing on his reform proposals, a shocking problem—priests and child sex abuse—would derail his efforts this time around. The sex abuse scandal had captured the interest of inquisitive Vaticanologists, diverting their attention from the IOR. It soon centered on money issues as billions of dollars were paid out for decades of crimes of pedophilic priests. It meant that Caloia’s substantive plans for remaking the bank got lost in a deluge of sordid crimes and disturbing charges of cover-up at the highest levels of the church.
• • •
For decades, the Vatican and dioceses dismissed occasional cases of sexual abuse of minors by clergy as aberrations unique to the individual priest accused of wrongdoing. Among clerics, just as in the general population, it was expected that there might be some sexual deviancy. There were, according to the church, few such cases. But some insiders knew that was a lie. The first published report indicating there might be a pervasive problem, at least in the American church, was by journalist Jason Berry. A priest assigned to a rural Louisiana parish, Gilbert Gauthe, was arrested in 1984 on multiple counts of forced sex on boys as young as seven. When parents discovered that Gauthe had a predatory history and that instead of alerting civil authorities his superiors had transferred him around to different parishes, they sued.19 In reviewing that court file Berry came across the deposition of a local bishop who admitted that he then knew about a second pedophile in his parish. But he refused to identify him to the lawyers for the parents.20
While Berry started a month of reporting he also pitched his article to national outlets. Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine all passed. Berry’s groundbreaking three-part investigation ran in May 1985 in a free Louisiana alternative newsweekly, The Times of Acadiana.21 The editors, in a preface to Berry’s first part, noted “incest and molestation by caretakers of young people are on the rise. It is also a problem of the Catholic Church outside of Louisiana. Other cases involving priests who molested youngsters in California, Oregon, Idaho and Wisconsin have recently been reported.”22
Berry’s investigation was a searing indictment of how church officials in Louisiana buried reports of sexual abuse of minors and did their best to pay off victims to keep them silent. By the time his story ran, the tiny Lafayette diocese in which Gauthe had committed his crimes was deeply in the red from $4.2 million in confidential settlements to the families of nine victims, and $114 million in pending claims in another eleven lawsuits.
The Times of Acadiana had a circulation of 25,000. The National Catholic Reporter ran a condensed version of Berry’s series in June. In an editorial note to a companion piece, NCR publisher Thomas Fox wrote, “In cases throughout the nation, the Catholic Church is facing scandals and being forced to pay millions of dollars in claims to families whose sons have been molested by Catholic priests.” But the national press still did not pick up on the story. “There was no popular sense back then that sexual child abuse in the church was an issue,” Berry later said.23 (Berry won a Catholic Press Association Award for his work.)
There were some exceptions. Berry’s hard-nosed reporting motivated Carl Cannon at the San Jose Mercury News and Karen Henderson at the Cleveland Plain Dealer to start their own investigations.24 A small group of American victims formed Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) in 1988.25 That same year Berry told the National Law Journal, “There is a whole string of little sexual Watergates laced out across the map of America.”26 And Berry and Cannon discussed it on the Phil Donahue Show. A few in the clergy’s hierarchy realized there was a serious problem. Canadian bishops issued guidelines in 1992 for better screening of abusive priests after sordid revelations about abuse at a Newfoundland orphanage emerged.27 But that stirred little interest in America media. That same year, 1992, Berry published Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, a seminal book about the American clergy and the hidden problem of child sex abuse (despite Berry’s high profile, more than a dozen publishers passed on that book before his agent got a yes on the finished manuscript from a former seminarian who was the religious editor at Doubleday).28
Despite the book’s critically sound reception, the topic of sex abuse and the clergy largely remained off the front pages.29 As Frank Bruni wrote a decade later in The New York Times, “Catholic leaders insisted that child sexual abuse by priests was an aberrant horror, expertly quelling any significant protest among American Catholics and containing a debate about the need to reform church traditions. Cases of priests’ preying on children came and went, and though some of them badly embarrassed the church, none ultimately shook it.”30 That was true until the beginning of 2002 when the issue exploded in the United States.31 Pedophilia revelations and lawsuits over several months broke in Dallas; Pittsburgh; Manchester, New Hampshire; Boston; Tucson; and Philadelphia.32 In the wake of a criminal conviction of a defrocked priest, John Geoghan, for molesting a ten-year-old boy, The Boston Globe sued for the release of sealed church files. The documents revealed that the Boston diocese had ignored dozens of horrific abuse reports over thirty years, tried unsuccessfully to rehabilitate Geoghan, and when that failed began transferring him from parish to parish. Cardinal Bernard Law, then America’s senior prelate, had approved some of the transfers, as well as authorizing $15 million in confidential settlements to victims and their families. The files documented sexual abuse charges against eighty other Boston-area priests, some dating back to the 1960s.33
By January 2002, the Catholic Church in Ireland settled abuse claims that extended back twenty years with a then record payment of $175 million. By then, priest sex abuse cases had been reported from Australia to France to England.34
When Pope John Paul spoke out the first time that March, it was to say that the sexual abuse charges were casting a “dark shadow of suspicion” over all clergy. “As priests,” he said, “we are personally and profoundly afflicted by the sins of some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination in succumbing even to the most grievous forms of the mystery of evil at work in the world.”35
That fell far short of the language for which many had hoped. John Paul did not apologize to the victims. He did not order all bishops to contact local police in instances in which sex abuse was uncovered. The Pope thought it was the responsibility of the dioceses, instead of the Vatican, to rid the priesthood of abusers. That is because in appreciating the extent to which sexual abuse of minors was a church-wide cancer, there was in the Vatican a sense that the problem was confined to a few Western countries, particularly America. John L. Allen, Jr., the National Catholic Reporter’s chief Vatican correspondent, told the Boston Globe that inside the Vatican, top clerics did not believe that “sexual abuse of kids is unique to the States, but they do think that the reporting on it is uniquely American, fueled by anti-Catholicism and shyster lawyers hustling to tap the deep pockets of the church. And that thinking is tied to the larger perception about American culture, which is that there is a hysteria when it comes to anything sexual, and an incomprehension of the Catholic Church.”36 Secretary of State Sodano later told reporters that “the [sex abuse] scandals in the United States received disproportionate attention from the media. . . . It is fair to condemn evil, but one must keep it in proportion.”37 The Pope made it clear he did not think Rome had to intervene.
Meanwhile a survey commissioned by the American bishops had revealed that sex abuse was a bigger problem among U.S. priests than had been thought (the first report in 2002 identified 850 priests that had been accused since the 1960s, with 350 of those having been defrocked). Victims’ groups contended the number was much larger. The likelihood they were right was buttressed later that year when Australian church records revealed that one in ten priests there had been accused at some point of sexual abuse of a minor.38 (It was not then widely known that some clerics had returned to their priestly duties after serving prison sentences for sex crimes with minors.)
The Pope summoned twelve American cardinals and two senior bishops to Rome for an emergency meeting in April 2002.39 In prepared remarks he thanked them for keeping him “informed regarding the complex and difficult situation which has arisen in your country in recent months.” That caused much consternation since it again cast clerical sex abuse as if it were a recent American phenomenon. While he condemned sexual abuse of minors by priests as “an appalling sin in the eyes of God,” he also seemed to absolve the failure of some bishops to root out the predators. He claimed they had come up short because of “a generalized lack of knowledge of the nature of the problem and also at times the advice of clinical experts.” Instead of apologizing to the victims, the Pope said only, “I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern.” And he infuriated many by seemingly dismissing the overall impact of the crisis and its effect on the priesthood: “A great work of art may be blemished, but its beauty remains.”40
Before returning to the United States, the American cardinals issued their own statement. It called for better training in seminaries as well as a national day of repentance and prayer but fell short of promising the expulsion of abusive clerics or providing a framework by which sex abuse crimes could be reported to civil authorities.41 The cardinals did not address whether to inform local police about abusers. They also refused to embrace a “one strike and you’re out” standard.42 As for defrocking priests, they would act only against those clerics who had become “notorious and [are] guilty of the serial predatory sexual abuse of minors.” In cases that were not notorious, the bishops said that individual dioceses would handle them.43
Los Angeles’ Cardinal Roger Mahoney expounded on the collective statement to reporters. When it came to priests guilty of sexually abusing minors, but the incidents were decades old and there were no recent complaints, he said they should be left alone. What purpose was there in punishing them after so many years, asked Mahoney.44
The cardinals were not long back in the United States when Archbishop Julián Herranz Casado, the president of the prestigious Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, gave a talk at the Catholic University of Milan. Herranz Casado castigated the U.S. media for “sully[ing] the image of the church and the Catholic priesthood.” He condemned large financial settlements as “unwarranted” and accused the American bishops of falling prey to a climate of “exaggeration, financial exploitation, and nervousness.” The records of sexually abusive priests should not be turned over to civil authorities, he warned, lest the church’s sovereignty be weakened. Finally, Herranz Casado noted that to the extent there was any sexual abuse crisis, it was a result of gay men who had become priests. Child abuse, said Herranz, was a “concrete form of homosexuality.”45,I
The following month, one of the Vatican’s most influential canon lawyers, Father Gianfranco Ghirlanda, dean of the canon law faculty at Rome’s Gregorian University, weighed in. In a Vatican-approved article for La Civiltà Cattolica, he wrote, “From a canonical point of view, the bishop or religious superior is neither morally nor legally responsible for a criminal act committed by one of his clerics.” Moreover, Ghirlanda, widely reported to be passing along the private feelings of the Pope, said that any priest transferred to another parish after being “treated because of a history of sexual abuse” should not have any “good reputation” ruined by having his sexual misconduct against minors revealed to his new parish.47
The U.S. Conference of Bishops tackled the subject directly in a three-day heated conference in Dallas that June. They voted 239 to 13 for what most of them considered a beefed-up policy on clerical molesters. The bishops vowed to administratively remove sex offenders from any job where they were in regular contact with children but not to defrock them.48 “From this day forward, no one known to have sexually abused a child will work in the Catholic Church,” confidently predicted the conference chair, Illinois Bishop Wilton D. Gregory.49
Not everyone agreed the new rules were tough enough. Victims’ advocates thought they were riddled with loopholes that allowed abuse to go unpunished.50 “It isn’t zero tolerance,” said Peter Isely, a member of SNAP. “It is simply not what Catholics wanted.”51
In August, at a meeting of 125 top Catholic orders in Philadelphia, the delegates agreed that sexually abusive priests could not be stripped of their right to wear religious habits nor could they be expelled from their orders. The Reverend Canice Connors, a Franciscan priest who was the conference president, told the assembly that the media’s coverage of predator priests was slanted to create a “vengeful atmosphere” and he rejected calls by victims to adopt a zero tolerance policy for abusers. Zero tolerance, Connors said, was a “war slogan” that was not right for the Catholic Church (American bishops had approved such a policy a couple of months earlier, but it lacked any effective enforcement mechanism).52
No one then knew that the “transfer and don’t tell” policy adopted by Boston’s Cardinal Law was far more widespread than imagined.53 New York’s Cardinal Edward Egan startled even stalwart Catholics when he told reporters that the church would decide on its own if and when to pass along information about sex crimes to police and prosecutors. It was under no obligation to do so, Egan said.54 Despite much public outcry, the New York legislature failed to pass a law that would have added the church to a roster of professional groups, which included doctors and teachers, legally obligated to report all child abuse cases. The Catholic Church argued that such a law would be an undue state interference with its sovereign affairs and the sanctity of the confessional box.
America’s bishops in fact had ignored warnings about a sex abuse epidemic in the clergy for at least seventeen years. In 1985, two clerics had drafted a report about pedophiles in the priesthood—“The Problem of Sexual Molestation by Roman Catholic Clergy: Meeting the Problem in a Comprehensive and Responsible Manner”—and submitted it to the bishops.55 One of the authors was Father Thomas Doyle, a canonical lawyer at the Vatican’s embassy in Washington, D.C., who was considered on a fast track to becoming a bishop.56 Doyle was helped by Ray Mouton, the lawyer in the Gauthe case, and by Father Michael Peterson, an openly gay man who converted from Mormonism to Catholicism and founded a medical clinic with the sole mission to treat clerics with sexual compulsions and disorders.57 That ninety-three-page “eyes only” report warned that sexual abuse of minors by priests was “the single most serious and far-reaching problem facing our church today.” In a prescient warning, the authors said, “Those presumed to be guilty of sexual misconduct, especially if it involves child molestation, must never be transferred to another parish or post as the isolated remedy for the situation.”58
The authors predicted that even if the bishops acted with determination to address the problem, the church could still have to pay more than $1 billion in victims’ settlements. “If church leaders persist in cover-up rather than succoring the faithful, the world’s largest Christian institution would fall into a slough of financial and spiritual despair.”59 It urged that “clerics suspected of abuse” not be permitted to be parish priests in contact with children.
Not only did the American bishops dismiss that unsolicited report as alarmist, but it put a stop to Doyle’s promising career.60 He lost his position at Catholic University and was transferred from his embassy posting, first to the Grissom Air Force station in Indiana, and later to the remote Tully base in Greenland.61 (The Nuncio at the time who took the punitive action against Doyle was Archbishop Pio Laghi. Pope John Paul subsequently gave Laghi a red hat.) Peterson, meanwhile, was criticized for overhyping the report to drive more “business” to his medical clinic, where he treated priests with sexual addictions. By 1987, Peterson had died of AIDS.62
That there was such resistance to the report was evidence that the church’s top officials hoped to manage the problem rather than confront and root it out. Implementing what the report had suggested—it included a manual with guidelines for a national “crisis control team” to reach out to victims—would have meant admitting the seriousness of the crisis. Now, in the summer of 2002, and faced with an onslaught of media coverage, the bishops could no longer ignore it.63
Many victims who thought that the American bishops were responding too hesitantly looked to the Vatican and Pope John Paul for help. They found none. The Pope was quiet when accused pedophile priests threatened litigation against their bishops for violating their employment rights by defrocking them.64 And the Pontiff also did not respond publicly when a support group for sex abuse victims beseeched him to prevent priests from filing malicious defamation lawsuits against their accusers. John Paul was a bystander as the American church quietly approved an aggressive new legal strategy that included, as The Washington Post uncovered, “hiring high-powered law firms and private detectives to examine the personal lives of the church’s accusers, fighting to keep documents secret and engaging in new tactics to minimize settlements.”65
To the great dismay of victims’ rights groups, what did prompt the Pope and Vatican to intervene was when the American bishops were told that they did not have the authority to administratively remove a priest charged with sexual abuse. Instead, the Vatican decreed that canon law demanded a full church trial for accused priests.66
The previous December, John Paul had consolidated authority over the church’s often baffling and arcane rules that governed when and how a priest could be defrocked into the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition until it was given a less inflammatory name in 1965).67 German cardinal and canon law scholar Joseph Ratzinger—later Pope Benedict XVI—was the Congregation’s chief. American bishops had for years recognized that the cumbersome rules governing that office worked to the benefit of child molesters. Thirteen years earlier (1989), U.S. bishops had sent some canonical law scholars to the Vatican to argue in vain for a streamlined process. In any case, the byzantine rules of Ratzinger’s office only applied to defrocking ordinary priests. No one could touch bishops, so when Palm Beach’s Bishop Anthony O’Connell admitted he had molested a seminarian, the only recourse was to ask for his resignation.68
What was not evident to most outsiders was that the Vatican’s reactionary policy about sexual abuse by priests was driven largely by worries over financial ramifications. The Pope’s failure to apologize to victims was the direct result of fear that with thousands of lawsuits filed against dozens of dioceses around the world, plaintiffs would use a Pontifical mea culpa as an “admission against interests” by the church.69 The Vatican was also concerned that the church’s powerful American branch and its large payouts were setting a bad precedent that might soon have dire consequences for dioceses internationally.70
By the spring there were nearly a thousand lawsuits filed in the United States. Some of the dioceses had put aside tens of millions in contingency funds for settlements.71 It was evident to the church’s top moneymen like Caloia that the American parishes—the biggest contributor to Peter’s Pence—were going to be constrained for money between the litigation and settlement costs. They would be tapping their own parishioners for contributions to replenish those funds, and that would slash what they could send to Rome. The Vatican had to prepare for reduced income.
During intense backroom strategy sessions in 2002, the Vatican decided that no matter how the abuse scandal played out, it had to inoculate itself as much as possible against financial exposure. Although the Vatican controlled many aspects of local church life, even including the words used in liturgical prayers, it wanted to make certain that individual dioceses had the full responsibility for managing the sex abuse scandal.72 The church’s policy would last through all further shockwaves of sexual abuse in any country: each diocese was its own separate legal entity, responsible for its own liability. The financial problems in one diocese were insulated so they did not affect a wealthy neighboring diocese. Each was its own non-profit corporation, usually with trusts for its real estate holdings, so that any bills and judgments against it could not be collected against any other diocese, and particularly not from the Vatican itself. Some of the largest, like Chicago, had a long-established separate banking system that added another layer of complexity to its financial relationship with Rome.73 To further insulate the individual dioceses, the American bishops had voted to double to $10 million how much a diocese could liquidate of its own assets without seeking Vatican approval (Rome approved the higher limit and even suggested the American church tie it to an inflation index so it automatically increased over time).74
Attorneys retained by the church double-checked to ensure that all 2,864 Catholic dioceses and 412,886 parishes worldwide—even Rome itself—were legally independent from the Vatican and that any financial fallout from the sex abuse litigation would not affect the city-state.75 Putting all the pressure on the individual dioceses had predictable consequences. After a large 1985 jury award, insurance companies in the United States began excluding coverage for sex abuse from their liability policies.76 That meant many dioceses had to self-insure when it came to the costs of litigating and settling abuse cases. The following year Boston paid $85 million to settle cases with 552 victims.77 Boston had about $14 billion in just property holdings, and $160 million worth of that property was unused.78 Still, since it was cash poor, it had to close schools to raise the settlement money, a move that embittered many loyal Catholics.79 Portland, Oregon, on the other hand, did not have any cushion. Facing a $53 million settlement, it was the first archdiocese to declare bankruptcy in 2004 (two religious orders and eleven other dioceses have since filed bankruptcy).80
Even that first insolvency could not have prepared the church for the coming flood of litigation and criminal probes: more than $3 billion and still counting as of 2014 in settlements and awards just on American abuse cases; the ransacking of clergy pension and retirement funds; the shuttering of churches, schools, and in some instances entire parishes; and special assessments that have strained the purses of ordinary parishioners to keep some dioceses afloat.81 Sometimes the struggle for survival led to bitter fights when bishops relied on canon law to “suppress a parish”—the equivalent of a civil eminent domain action—and thereby gain control over the property and money.82,II
Even the parish bankruptcy filings got mired in millions of dollars of litigation. Portland’s archbishop, for instance, argued that he had “bare legal title” to the diocese’s assets and properties and therefore contended he could not sell anything to satisfy the claims of victims. Moreover, his lawyers cited the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state as a financial shield, saying it prevented any court from interfering with its church-granted powers.84 “Neither the bishop nor the diocese is the owner of parish property under Canon Law,” Nicholas Cafardi, the dean of Duquesne Law School and himself a canon law scholar, said in a sworn statement.85
Notwithstanding all its careful planning to keep a legal moat around the Vatican, in 2003 the church was caught by surprise when a Louisville, Kentucky, gun-slinging medical malpractice attorney, William McMurray, filed a federal class action and named the Holy See. Three Louisville men claimed they were abused by priests for decades and sought damages on behalf of all American victims of clerical abuse. McMurray based his suit on a 1962 document uncovered in the discovery of another case, signed by Pope John XXIII, directing that sex abuse complaints against priests should be “pursued in a most secretive way.”86 Top church officials were furious about the Kentucky suit and moved to dismiss it on well-established grounds that the Pope was immune as a foreign sovereign from civil litigation in U.S. courts. Secretary of State Sodano, in a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, his American counterpart, urged her to convince the administration of George W. Bush to intervene to get the case dismissed. According to WikiLeaks cables in which State Department officials recorded the back-and-forth between Sodano and Rice, he complained about “aggressive attorneys” and told her, “It is one thing for them to sue bishops but another thing entirely to sue the Holy See.”87 Secretary Rice explained that his request was impossible because of America’s separation of powers.88 Sodano believed that her failure to stop the litigation against the Pope demonstrated “a lack of respect for Vatican sovereignty.”89
Sodano’s extraordinary plea to Rice was evidence that Rome was very worried that the U.S. court system was unpredictable and that eventually a jury inflamed by the sordid details of an abuse case might decide to hold the church’s CEO—the Pope—responsible for the actions of his wayward priests and the connivance of cardinals and bishops in protecting the abusers.90 To the Vatican’s great frustration, not only did it fail to get a dismissal, but the Kentucky filing encouraged similar lawsuits against the Pope in other American jurisdictions.III
The full extent of the sex abuse scandal was made clear in a February 2004 145-page research report about the crisis undertaken by New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.91 The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had authorized the study.92 It concluded that 95 percent of American dioceses had at least one complaint of a sexual assault by a priest against a minor (the authors did not count incidents before 1950).93 During the five-plus decades, 4,392 priests had been accused of abusing 10,667 children, a figure that in some years was as high as 10 percent of all priests.94 At least 143 were serial molesters who carried out their attacks in multiple dioceses.95 Four out of five victims were minor boys.96
“Few incidents [less than 5 percent] were reported to the police,” the study concluded. The authors speculated it was because so many victims were children that they often did not report the crime until after the statute of limitations had passed. Even when the police were notified about abuse in a timely manner, only one in three priests were charged with a crime. Fewer than 3 percent of those served any prison time. And astonishingly, “the priests with many allegations of abuse were not more likely than other priests to be charged and serve prison sentences.”97
The study determined that significant numbers of abusive priests had themselves been abused as children, and as clerics they often battled substance abuse problems—overwhelmingly alcohol—or untreated mental illness. Yet, only a quarter were ever referred for any treatment by their clerical superiors.98 To try to cure offenders of their sexual compulsion, they were often sent to “spiritual counseling.”99 And to the church’s embarrassment, it had spent more on attorney fees in defending the abuse litigation ($38.4 million) than it did on treating all its problem priests over fifty years ($33.3 million).100 Only much later was it discovered that millions more had been spent on attorneys who lobbied state legislatures to block efforts to extend the statute of limitations when it came to child sex abuse claims.101
Many victims and their families felt betrayed by their own church. So did many ordinary Catholics who sensed the church only reacted when there was another story or lawsuit. Author Jason Berry wrote that Pope John Paul II “responded to continuing allegations of clergy abuse with denial and inertia.” Berry noted that the Pontiff was “a commanding figure” in dealing with major international and political issues, but that when it came to “the greatest internal crisis facing the church, the pope failed, time and again, to take decisive action in response to clear evidence of a criminal underground in the priesthood, a subculture that sexually traumatized tens of thousands of youngsters.”102
Father Richard McBrien, a Notre Dame theology professor, called the clerical sexual abuse scandal “the greatest crisis to confront the Catholic Church since the Reformation of the 16th century.” Regarding rooting out the abusers, McBrien later concluded that John Paul “had a terrible record, full of denial and foot-dragging.”103 In one of the highest-profile cases, John Paul had sent out a dreadful message to the highest echelons of the church. He had failed even to consider the evidence of sexual abuse charged by nine respected seminarians against Marcial Maciel Degollado, the powerful Mexican priest who founded the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi movements.104 Maciel shared the Pontiff’s ultraconservative political philosophy and was, according to Jason Berry, “the greatest fundraiser of the modern church.”105 Maciel spread his money around to build good will for his order, everything from grand parties for Secretary of State Sodano to cash gifts to the Vatican. In 1999, the Pope intervened to close an internal case in which two of the abused seminarians sought Maciel’s excommunication in a proceeding before the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.106 When Father Rafael Moreno, Maciel’s personal assistant for nearly two decades, tried warning the Pontiff in 2003, John Paul “didn’t listen, didn’t believe.” When Moreno tried getting an audience with the Secretary of State, Sodano refused to meet him.107
Maciel was ultimately unmasked for having not only abused boys, but for having sexual relationships with at least two women, and fathered up to six children. One of the boys Maciel had fathered with a domestic servant thirty-seven years his junior claimed that the bishop repeatedly had raped him.108 When news became public of John Paul’s protection of the influential insider, it seemed to represent on a larger scale what had happened with many far less powerful and well-known child-molesting priests in local parishes.109
I. Archbishop Herranz repeated the view of other top Vatican officials who had publicly linked clerical sexual abuse of minors only to homosexuality. That is demonstrably false. In society as a whole, most pedophiles are heterosexual. That is not surprising since heterosexuals are the large majority of the population. But it was different in the all-male priesthood, where 80 percent of the abuse cases were men to boys. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had written a much cited October 1, 1986, letter to all bishops “on the pastoral care of homosexual persons.” In it, Ratzinger wrote that “homosexual persons . . . [have] a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent.” Simply being gay exhibited a “strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil.” Ratzinger’s conclusion—that the “practice of homosexuality [that] may seriously threaten the lives and well-being of a large number of people”—was often cited by traditionalists for the facile argument that the church’s sex abuse problems resulted simply from too many gay priests. Such gay bashing only hastened a public debate that played out in the media about “how widespread is homosexuality among priests?” A report that studied death certificates from the mid-1980s concluded that “The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population.” As late as 2011, Bill Donahue, president of the influential Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, continued to dismiss the sex abuse crisis as caused primarily by gay priests. In the National Catholic Reporter, Donahue wrote, “While it is true that most homosexual priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been priests who are homosexual,” and that abuse cases among priests had increased because “there was an exodus of heterosexual priests after Vatican II. . . . And there was a surge in homosexuals in the seminaries.”46
II. Resentment built in the United States when it became public that Cardinal Sodano’s nephew, Andrea Sodano, was in business with Raffaello Follieri, a flashy young Italian businessman—known best in America for dating actress Anne Hathaway and living in a $37,000-a-month Fifth Avenue Manhattan penthouse—who boasted he had insider information and Vatican contracts to buy $100 million in the distressed American church properties. Follieri, who was friends with Bill Clinton and bragged of meeting Pope Benedict, pled guilty to fourteen counts of wire fraud in 2008 and was sentenced to fifty-four months in federal prison. Upon his 2012 release he was deported to his native Italy. As for Andrea Sodano, the FBI considered him an unindicted co-conspirator. “It helps to have an uncle in robes,” wrote author Jason Berry.83
III. Some cases in which the Holy See was named as a defendant—such as a 2005 Houston case—were dismissed based on sovereign immunity. But that defense did not always work. In the Louisville case, for instance, in 2007, U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn III ruled a suit could proceed; in 2008 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that while the Vatican was immune from most litigation, the case could move forward on the narrow question of whether top Curial prelates had engaged in a deliberate cover-up of sex abuse by American priests. In 2009, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that another lawsuit—Doe v. Holy See—could proceed under an exception to the Sovereign Immunities Act. In 2011, a federal judge allowed a Portland case to advance, ruling that the plaintiff had produced “evidence that tends to show the Holy See knew of [the abusing priest’s] propensities and that in some cases, the Holy See exercised direct control over the conduct, placement, and removal of individual priests accused of similar sexual misconduct.” The Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of the Portland case. It was not until 2012 that a U.S. District judge put an effective end to the claims against the Pope with a ruling that the Holy See is not the employer of molesting priests.