Church in
Crisis
Grand jury reports Long Island diocese protected 58 abusive
priests
By GILL DONOVAN
A grand jury investigation report released Feb. 10 charged the
diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y., with protecting 58 sexually abusive priests
through what it called a “sham” policy designed to protect the
church’s reputation and minimize payouts to victims.
The 180-page report from the Suffolk County grand jury was written
after more than 30 priests and more than 40 victims of abuse testified. The
grand jury also examined thousands of church records over a nine-month
period.
The report said, “The response of priests in the diocesan
hierarchy to allegations of criminal sexual abuse was not pastoral. In fact,
although there was a written policy that set a pastoral tone, it was a sham.
The diocese failed to follow the policy from its inception, even at the most
rudimentary level.”
The grand jury also heard testimony about the diocesan policy from
Fr. Michael Hands, now imprisoned for child abuse, who had agreed to cooperate
with authorities in return for sentencing considerations (NCR, Jan. 17).
According to the Associated Press, Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas
Spota, who made the report public, said Hands’ testimony was
“absolutely material” to the grand jury proceedings.
The Rockville Centre diocese, led by Bishop William Murphy, is the
nation’s sixth largest, with 1.3 million Catholics. Prior to becoming
bishop of Rockville Centre, Murphy had been chief assistant to Cardinal Bernard
Law, former archbishop of Boston. Murphy was unavailable to comment on the
report’s release in New York because, according to his spokesperson,
Joanne Novarro, he had traveled to Boston. Murphy was scheduled to give
testimony there Feb. 12 to a grand jury investigating whether he and other
Boston church officials should face prosecution for their mishandling of
abusive priests in Boston.
Though the Suffolk County grand jury could not indict any of the
abusive priests because a five-year statute of limitations had expired, it
recommended that the New York legislature abolish the statute in cases of child
abuse and pass a law requiring all clergy to take suspicions of child abuse to
police.
Most of the accounts of abuse recorded in the report occurred
during the tenure of Bishop John McGann, who led the diocese from 1976 to 1999.
Bishop James McHugh followed him and was replaced by Murphy in 2001.
The report concluded, “the history of the Diocese of
Rockville Centre demonstrates that as an institution they are incapable of
properly handling issues relating to the sexual abuse of children by
priests.”
The report documents allegations of the rape of cheerleaders and
altar boys, of acts of molestation and seductions in churches, rectories, on
camping trips, and in the homes of the minors who were abused. It tells of
instances in which priests provided minors with pornography and alcohol, and of
cases in which the diocese received allegations and didn’t report them to
police, but instead transferred the accused priests to other parishes.
The report does not name the accused priests but instead refers to
23 of them by letters of the alphabet, saying, for instance, that Priest D
abused “a minimum of six boys who ranged in age from 10 to 17.”
In a Feb. 11 report, Newsday, a Long Island daily,
recounts the charges against each of the 23 and in many instances
identifies the priests by matching the crimes described in the report to
allegations it has learned from victims.
Spota unveiled the report at a news conference in Hauppauge. He
said that in his examination of the thousands of pages of church documents he
had found no evidence that the diocese ever reported a case of an abusive
priest to police.
Spota said of the grand jury report: “This document tells all
of us what was really happening in the Diocese of Rockville Centre for years
and years and years. High-ranking prelates protected 58 colleagues from
disgrace rather than protecting children from these predator priests.”
According to The New York Times, Spota, a practicing
Catholic, said he was particularly offended by the actions of one priest who
abused a boy in his rectory bedroom and then gestured to a crucifix and said,
“I’ll talk to you later.”
The grand jury report said that in 1990 the diocese created what
it called an “uninsured perils fund,” which was designed to cover
claims for sexual abuse, trampoline accidents and exposure to asbestos. The
fund came from parish donations and paid out about $1.7 million. “Not
surprisingly, there have never been any payments made from the fund for either
asbestos or trampoline accidents,” the report said.
The grand jury further identified the role played by the
diocese’s Office of Legal Affairs, usually identified as the
“intervention team,” formed of three people assigned to handle
allegations of sexual abuse. Two members of the team were lawyers. Murphy
dismantled the team last April.
The grand jury has charged that while the team tried to appear
sympathetic to victims, its goal was actually protecting the diocese through
discouraging lawsuits, persuading victims to not go public with accusations and
assisting abusive priests in efforts to remain in ministry.
Though the grand jury report didn’t name the team, according
to Newsday, one of the members was, in all likelihood, Msgr. Alan Placa,
the diocese’s former vice chancellor who in April was temporarily removed
from ministry for allegations that he had sexually abused minors at a school
where he served as dean 25 years ago. The paper identified Placa as
“Priest F” in the grand jury report.
Priest F was the diocese’s chief engineer of its legal
defense policy. He often served the diocese by collecting information that
might challenge the credibility of an alleged victim, should a lawsuit be
brought. In many cases, Priest F was the first person from the diocese to
contact alleged victims.
Only rarely did he identify himself as an attorney. The report
quoted a memo from Priest F in which he asked a diocesan official to not
identify him to alleged victims as a lawyer:
“In fact, in these cases, I am functioning in an
administrative capacity,” he wrote. “My legal training is very useful
in helping to gather and analyze facts, and in helping us to avoid some obvious
pitfalls, but we must avoid ‘frightening’ people: I have had several
people refuse to see me without having an attorney of their own present,
because they are afraid that ‘the church lawyer’ will somehow do them
harm.”
Priest F, according to the report, “ignored, belittled and
revictimized” victims. “In some cases, the grand jury finds that the
diocese procrastinated for the sole purpose of making sure that the civil and
criminal statutes of limitation were no longer applicable.” The report
said that in once instance, Priest F told a nun that seeing one victim was a
waste of his time because the statute of limitations in the case had
expired.
According to the report, the nun’s response was, “You
bastard, these people are hurting. Why do you care about the statute of
limitations? That’s not why we are here.”
Responding in a news release Feb. 10 the diocese called the report
unfair. It said that the diocese “unequivocally rejects the
characterization of its actions” in the document.
“Specifically, the accusation that the Diocese of Rockville
Centre conceived and agreed to a plan using deception and intimidation to
prevent victims from seeking legal solutions to their problems is simply not
true,” the release said.
Elsewhere in New York, a clerical abuse review panel met in
Manhattan Feb. 10 to hear testimony from Daniel Donohue, a former seminarian
who has accused Msgr. Charles Kavanagh of having molested him. Kavanagh,
suspended in May, previously served as pastor for St. Raymond’s Church,
one of the largest parishes in the Bronx. Kavanagh is regarded as one of New
York’s leading fundraisers.
Donohue appeared at the meeting with 10 members of his family.
After the meeting the family told The New York Times that neither side
seemed satisfied. The archdiocese said it wouldn’t comment on the
panel’s activities.
The archdiocese, according to Donohue, wants to see a letter
Kavanagh sent Donohue, who has said that since it is his last leverage for
obtaining a meeting with New York Cardinal Edward Egan, he won’t show it
until he meets with the cardinal. Egan has declined to meet with him.
Joseph Zwilling, archdiocesan spokes-person, said that, as a
matter of policy, Egan won’t meet with victims.
Gill Donovan is a staff writer for NCR. His e-mail
address is gdonovan@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, February 21,
2003
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