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Church in
Crisis
Former priest is canon law expert for abuse suits
How good a canonist is Patrick Wall? The answer may lie in another
question: “How many priests do you know who were laicized in the second
half of the 1990s?” Wall was, and he was able to land that new status
because, he said, “I knew all the judges, I knew all the people who would
hand carry all the documents, I knew an extremely good canon lawyer to
represent me, and I also knew what I had to say within the documents.”
In 2001, four years after he left the priesthood, Wall was driving
along Southern California’s Interstate 405 when he called lawyer John
Manly. He’d read an op-ed piece by Manly, was impressed, and wanted to
tell him so. Manly had focused on the issue of U.S. bishops putting known
sexual predator wolves back into the sheep pen, said Wall. “And while
there aren’t that many wolves,” he said, “the wolves that are
there are extremely vicious.
“So I called [Manly] to let him know he was on track,
‘keep going,’ and offered that if you ever have any canonical
questions, give me a call,” he said.
A couple of months later, former Benedictine Wall was on
Manly’s staff as canon law expert in the sex abuse suits.
In the early 1990s as a monk at St. John’s Abbey in
Minnesota, Wall’s first assignment was to fill in for a priest who
“had ‘difficulties,’ so to speak. All my five parish assignments
followed pedophiles,” he said.
In the mid-1990s Wall went to Rome for further studies in canon
law at the Gregorian. He subsequently left the priesthood. He worked for a
while at the district attorney’s office in San Diego, “just a county
job,” he said, before switching to a career in sales.
Wall now works with attorneys in Manly’s office “to
ensure the plaintiff is suing the correct entities in the church and, second,
that we’re suing all the entities.”
Beyond that, he provides Manly with the relevant accompanying
canon law background to each step of the civil case.
“You hear the argument that these things happened 20 and 30
years ago during the sexual revolution, that that’s when all these
different people were doing these things,” said Wall. “But I think
the reality is that it takes [victims] at least 20 years to come forward,”
he said. People being victimized more recently will not come forward until some
form of maturation occurs, said Wall, “and one thing that triggers that, I
think, is when they have their own children.
“The bishops just will not accept the fact,” he
summarized, “that just as there’s a normal percentage of alcoholics
in the clergy, there’s going to be a normal percentage of pedophiles. The
irony is that you have highly trained people, the bishops, who understand human
nature. I spent six years in the confessional box,” he said. “We know
what human nature is all about after a while. Why would you come to any
assumption that you would have no problems occurring in the future?”
-- Arthur Jones
National Catholic Reporter, December 20,
2002
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