'The Catholic Church's Sins Are Ours"

By Jennifer Haselberger
Canonical Consultation
November 09, 2015

http://canonicalconsultation.com/blog.html

What follows is the acceptance speech that I delivered this part weekend at the Call to Action Conference in Milwaukee.

In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Frank Bruni wrote of the dangers of genuflecting too readily before society’s temples, religious or otherwise, and rued the damage that is caused when faith is truly blind. Bruni was reflecting, as one might expect, on the film Spotlight, which opened this week in New York, Los Angeles, and, significantly, Boston. Spotlight, as I am sure you all know, recounts the story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe investigation into the history of sexual abuse by clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston.

Many of you will probably remember when the Boston Globe began releasing its articles in the spring of 2002. You may also recall that one of the starting points for the Globe investigation was the James Porter case from the early 1990s. Most people associate Porter with Massachusetts, and especially his home diocese of Fall River, where he would later admit to having abused over 100 children in the 1960s. But Porter’s attempts at treatment brought him to Minnesota, my home state, where he lived for nearly twenty years before returning to Massachusetts to stand trial. It was the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis that advanced Porter’s request for laicization, a process that allowed him to subsequently enter into marriage in the Catholic Church. In fact, he was married at my home parish, not long after my baptism at the same church. Some of his children, my contemporaries, were baptized in the very same font as I was. Eventually, he and his wife moved their family to the suburbs, where they attended the same parish as my cousins. Porter was also permitted to volunteer as a math tutor at the nearby Catholic school. Permitted until, that is, his arrest and conviction for molesting his children’s babysitter.

In his reflection on the film, Bruni writes of what many critics have described as one of the most difficult moments of Spotlight, when the plaintiff’s attorney representing many of the abuse victims tells a reporter from the Boston Globe to mark his words: ‘If it takes a village to raise a child’, the lawyer warns, ‘it takes a village to abuse one’.

The Porter case epitomizes this view of widespread complicity in the sexual abuse scandal. Porter has been accused of molesting as many as 68 children between 1960 and 1963; abuse that was largely kept secret because of a culture of shame and denial. Nonetheless, by 1963 at least four parents had approached church officials with reports of abuse, prompting Porter’s transfer to a new town and a new parish. His second assignment lasted a mere two years, and was followed by a stint in a treatment facility operated by the Servants of the Paraclete. After less than two years in treatment, Porter was assigned to church-run halfway house in northern Minnesota and then to the parish of St Philip in Bemidji. Within months Porter began to abuse children in Minnesota, and so he was sent to a new treatment facility in St Louis where he eventually decided to leave the priesthood. By 1971, Porter was living in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis and working at a bank.

There is no question that church officials in Massachusetts and Minnesota were aware of Porter’s history when they allowed him access to parishes and parishioners. The Diocese of Fall River reassigned Porter after receiving complaints from parents. The diocese in northern Minnesota where he served, the Diocese of Crookston, was governed by a bishop with a particular concern for so-called troubled priests, who had invited the Servants of the Paraclete to open a halfway house in his diocese. And, out of all, the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis was probably the most informed, as it was the Archdiocese that processed Porter’s laicization, gave permission for his marriage, and was implicated in the first of his criminal trials.

It took the reporters at the Boston Globe two years to assemble the jagged pieces of the Porter story- two years in which they struggled to assemble the facts to show who knew what and when. I never read the Globe reports. I was living in Belgium in 2002, and so I was both linguistically and geographically isolated from the scandal that was engulfing the American Catholic Church. Then again, when I eventually decided to look into the Porter case in 2013, I didn’t have to work nearly as hard as the Globe reporters to figure out who was to blame. That is because when I decided to look into the matter, I had the files at my fingertips. In a cardboard box sitting on the floor of my office at the Chancery in Saint Paul, I had four files on Porter that had been part of the private archive of Archbishop John Roach.

I can’t imagine what the reporters from the Globe would have done if they had ever had access to those files, which included letters between the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis and Fall River dating back to Porter’s request for laicization in the 1970s as well as more recent letters including advice on legal strategy dating from the 1990s. For instance, in one of the files I came across a letter from Father Kevin McDonough, the longtime Vicar General of the Archdiocese, to the Bishop of Fall River describing why the Archdiocese paid or assisted with the costs of legal defenses for priests accused of sexually abusing minors. Father McDonough advised the Bishop of Fall River to do the same for Porter, because in his experience if an accused priest had good legal counsel, his attorney would convince the priest to stay quiet, whereas if the priest did not have good counsel, he was more likely to try to spread the blame for his actions. The implication was, of course, that without legal counsel the accused priest was likely to implicate the diocese or the bishop.

The files contained other interesting relics of the Church’s attempts to hide or suppress its knowledge of Porter’s history of abuse. In one file, which sadly also contained a newspaper notice of the death of one of Porter’s sons, who died of an accidental overdose following his father’s imprisonment, I found both a 1974 document entitled, ‘Stipulation to Execution of Rescript’, which was signed by Porter at the time that he was laiciz ed and required him to receive the express permission of the Archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis to enter into marriage because of his ‘past problems of sexual orientation’ that ‘might jeopardize a possible future marriage’ and a copy of a statement made by the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis in the early 1990s indicating ‘there was no information trail that led from Porter’s abusive past to the decisions made about his marriage’.

As I wrote to Archbishop Nienstedt a mere days after finding this manila-foldered equivalent of a smoking gun, what was contained in those files, along with the response of the Archdiocese to the recent acts of abuse by Curtis Wehmeyer, made it impossible for me to continue in my position given my personal ethics, religious convictions, and sense of integrity.

(One priest who saw that letter of resignation prior to its submission optimistically thought I would be called in for an exit interview. Sadly, I was not.)

What made finding the Porter files significant for me was that it made it absolutely, unquestionably and undeniably clear that at every stage of Porter’s tragic history, people- both clergy and laity- who were aware of Porter’s history made decisions not to warn or inform those who would be most impacted by having him living in their midst, and then lied about their knowledge when they were finally being held to account. The people who remained silent included bishops, priests, lawyers, Chancery staffers, and lay members of the various communities, but for me they were something more. They weren’t just names or titles, they were people I knew and worked with every day. More importantly, they weren’t disgraced and exiled prelates like Cardinal Law. In many cases, these were the people that were still calling the shots.

The question that I wrestled with then, and still wrestle with now, is why they did it. How could they have abdicated their responsibility, unquestioningly obeyed such commands, caved in to a fear of punishment, demonstrated such obvious moral indifference, and willfully closed their eyes to the suffering of others? Are they evil, or was it that they had simply become intoxicated, seduced, or even bought with the personal advantages that such compliance was thought to bring, including through association with the power that is, or was, the Catholic Church.

More than two years ago I called upon these former colleagues of mine to engage in a process of self-reflection, to ask and answer the same questions that I have just posed to you. I invited them to join me in an old-fashioned Catholic examination of conscience, in the hopes that we might honestly consider and offer amends for our individual roles in the sexual abuse crisis.  It was and is my belief that such a process- if undertaken honestly- would be an uncomfortable one for us all.  For, it is all too easy for each of us to point a finger at the priests or deacons (or religious men and women for that matter) who have committed acts of sexual abuse and say, ‘There, there is the perpetrator, the one who has caused this harm’. However, in my opinion, if we each reflected honestly on our individual situations, we would be required to expand our understanding of the nature of the violations that have been committed to acknowledge not only who committed what acts, but also who benefited from them, and we would be called on to identify those structures and practices that facilitated the abuse- our acts and omissions- and to acknowledge our accountability. A moral examination need not confine itself to legally verifiable actions or omissions. It can also speak to a community’s moral responsibility. 

This is what Bruni is calling us to do in his op-ed on Spotlight.  Even the article’s title ‘The Catholic Church’s Sins Are Ours’, can be seen as a call to action, both literally and figuratively. Bruni calls on us all, as Catholic faithful, not to be too cowed, not to be too credulous, to confront the institutional church and its hierarchy about the Catholic Church’s all too obvious failings. This responsibility of confrontation, along with a refusal to be silent, is, in my opinion, a responsibility that lies with all of us, and it is one that is all the greater when the Church’s true weaknesses lie within.