UNITED STATES
New York Times – Sunday Book Review
MORTAL SINS
Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal
By Michael D’Antonio
400 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. $26.99.
By JANET REITMAN
Published: June 7, 2013
It’s hard to say anything original about the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church over the past 30 years. Hundreds of books and articles have dealt with the subject, which has also spurred an entire genre of daytime talk show — the secular confessional. By now, the basic outline of the story has become depressingly familiar: a needy, socially isolated boy (sometimes girl) falls victim to a charming, manipulative priest while church elders either turn a blind eye or quietly ship the offender to a different parish. Afterward, it’s business as usual.
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Michael D’Antonio’s exhaustively researched, if meandering, new book, “Mortal Sins,” adds a new dimension to the story, concentrating on the arduous legal battle to bring the church to account. In this new telling, the heroes are not just the survivors of the abuse but also the lawyers and advocates who have gone to bat for them. This is perhaps the most comprehensive narrative of the abuse debacle to date, and D’Antonio, a former Newsday reporter and the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, had access to key players, as well as a trove of previously unseen church files and court documents. The glut of information D’Antonio presents is overwhelming, but the story he tells — about the culture of secrecy inside one of the world’s largest religious organizations — is damning.
D’Antonio begins in 1984, with the Rev. Thomas Doyle, an expert in canon law assigned to the Vatican’s embassy in Washington. Doyle, a gun-loving conservative, begins investigating complaints against members of the clergy after receiving a report that Gilbert Gauthe, a priest from Lafayette, La., had molested several boys. The parents had filed a lawsuit, and Doyle immediately recognizes the situation for what it is: a scandal that could open the floodgates to many more pedophilia cases and destroy the church. But Doyle’s superiors meet his warnings with a shrug. They are less concerned, as D’Antonio tellingly points out, with the fate of a few isolated priests and their victims than they are with finding a Latin American priest who is bishop material: apparently, too many churchmen in that part of the world had children.
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