MINNESOTA
Canonical Consultation
11/09/2015
Jennifer Haselberger
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.
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