In the spring of 2002, another factor came to dominate the debate over what causes clergy sexual abuse: homosexuality. The debate generally produced more heat than light — although it seems clear that there are a disproportionately high number of gay men in the priesthood, and a disproportionately high number of adolescent boys among victims, no one can be sure whether there is any causal link between those two factors. Most gay priests, like most straight priests, don't abuse children; some straight priests, like some gay priests, get sexually involved with adolescent boys. Scholars say there is no evidence about how — or whether — the misconduct of gay priests with adolescent boys differs from that of the gay male population in general. Nor, they said, do gay and straight adults appear to have different patterns of involvement with adolescents or younger children. “There is no evidence that an adult gay male is any more likely to seek out a boy for sexual activities than that an adult heterosexual man would seek out a little girl for sexual activities,” said Dr. Fred S. Berlin, founder of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma in Baltimore. Asked why the vast majority of the victims are boys, Berlin echoed Gill's observation; “People have probably had the sense that if you have an adult male in the presence of teenage girls, there is probably a need for a chaperone and that presumably decreases the risk of something going on. Perhaps there is an assumption that an adolescent male in the presence of a priest doesn't need to be chaperoned. But we don't have statistics about any of these disorders…. We don't have anything to turn to.”
Despite the lack of data, Church officials seemed increasingly concerned about the role of homosexuality in the priesthood. As the crisis in the Church tore through dioceses around the nation, the Pope was initially silent. But by early March, as the unrelenting scandal grew, the pontiff's spokesman could no longer avoid directly addressing the issue. And when he did, his remarks would jangle this rawest nerve in the clergy sexual abuse crisis. “People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained,” the spokesman, a Spanish psychiatrist named Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, declared to the
New York Times,
referring to gay priests. “That does not imply a final judgment on people with homosexuality. But you cannot be in this field.”
Navarro-Valls's comments were swiftly and predictably condemned by many scholars and gay rights groups, which accused the Vatican of trying to shift blame. “The Christian response would be to make meaningful restitution to the victims, cooperate with law enforcement to bring perpetrators to justice, and learn how to prevent future abuse,” said Mary Louise Cervone, president of Dignity/USA, the nation's oldest and largest group of gay Catholics. “Instead, they are trying to make gay priests the scapegoats for decades of criminal abuse.” Some raised a more practical concern, arguing that if Rome really wanted to empty seminaries of gay men — a proposal under consideration at the Vatican— it would face more empty rectories and more barren altars. Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay. “If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church's operation,” Sipe said. “And it's very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.”
But the issue was now on the table. At the Vatican meeting, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that he was concerned about the increasing number of gays in the priesthood. “One of the difficulties we do face in seminary life or recruitment is when there does exist a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual men think twice” about joining the priesthood for fear that they'll be harassed. “It is an ongoing struggle. It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men [and] that the candidates that we receive are healthy in every possible way — psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.” And Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit argued that clergy sexual abuse is “not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem…. We have to look at this homosexual element as it exists, to what extent it is operative in our seminaries and our priesthood and how to address it.” Bishops need to “cope with and address” the extent of a homosexual presence in Catholic seminaries, he said. Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said he wouldn't let gay men become priests. “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he has never committed any homosexual act,” he said.
For several decades, the Catholic Church's main approach to priests who were sexually abusive to children was to send them off for treatment at one of a handful of psychiatric centers with close ties to the Church.
Rev. Jay M. Mullin was one of those priests. Ordained in 1969, Mullin had been in ministry for twenty-three years when Rev. John B. McCormack, then Cardinal Law's chief lieutenant for clergy personnel matters and now the bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire, summoned the priest to the chancery. Mullin was anxious on the drive into Boston, and with good reason. A man had accused Mullin of molesting him twenty years earlier, when the accuser was a teenager and Mullin was a new priest in Allston, a working-class neighborhood of Boston. Even though Mullin denied the allegation, he agreed to contribute $10,000 to an archdiocesan out-of-court settlement with his accuser, and the archdiocese removed him from his parish and told him he could not return until he spent time in one of the psychiatric hospitals at which the Catholic Church had spent millions to quietly treat accused sexual predators.
So in late 1992, Mullin's ticket to treatment brought him to the St. Luke Institute, a Catholic psychiatric hospital in suburban Maryland. Named for the patron saint of physicians, it was founded by Rev. Michael Peterson, a Washington doctor who was gay and who died of AIDS in 1987. For several days there, Mullin observed some of the Church's attempts to treat sexually abusive priests with one-on-one therapy, sex addiction support groups, and a device with a mercury ring, jokingly called a “peter meter,” that measured a man's level of sexual arousal based on the circumference of his penis. “You go into this room with the doctor, who is from Johns Hopkins, and you get into a blue johnny. And he wants you to masturbate so that they can get a penis size,” Mullin recalled. “And then, for the next hour or so, they show you pornographic images. They show male and female. They showed female with a female. A male with a male. In various age levels from people in their twenties and thirties. I'm alone in the room. They're observing me. They're videotaping it. And they have the instrumentation. They finish up with kiddie porn — my first introduction to the whole pornographic industry. It was not a joy.”
For several decades before priests like Geoghan propelled clergy sexual abuse into a crisis, the Catholic Church saw places like St. Luke as one of their best defenses against recidivist rapists. The Maryland center, and counterparts like the Servants of the Paraclete centers, run by a religious order in Jemez Springs and St. Louis; the secular Institute of Living in Hartford; and the Catholic-run Southdown Institute in Ontario, took out ads in the remote advertising space of religious journals. The bishops shipped them their most troubled priests. Psychiatrists evaluated the priests, sent reports estimating the risk of relapse to supervising bishops, and then frequently returned them to their ministry. That process was costly — Sipe has estimated the Church spent $50 million on treatment over twenty-five years. And there was a human cost, too — some priests, like Geoghan, reoffended even after multiple visits to multiple centers. Critics charge that the Church tried to use psychology as a cover: priests got short-term treatment and were returned to parishes, in some cases despite psychological recommendations that they have no further contact with children. Victims, especially those who were molested by priests who had been in treatment, wonder bitterly now why the Church used its own treatment centers.
“No institution can police itself,” said David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “If the Church wants to restore trust, leaders should be more open about these treatment facilities. If chemical companies said, ‘Just trust us —send us your dioxins; we'll clean them up,’ the public would be wary.”
The treatment centers had been born in a rush of Christian compassion. On a blustery night during the depths of the depression, Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald heard a knock on the back door of his rectory in the Brighton section of Boston. He gave food and a coat to a beggar who, as he walked into the dark, turned around and said that he, too, was once a priest. That was the genesis of the Servants of the Paraclete, a religious order whose mission was to care for troubled priests. In 1947, Fitzgerald opened the Jemez Springs retreat for troubled or alcohol-abusing priests; sexual misconduct was not part of the mission then. When Fitzgerald was asked about treating child molesters, his idea was to buy a small Caribbean island and isolate them there, according to Rev. Peter Lechner, servant general of the Servants of the Paraclete. By the mid-1960s, though, the Paraclete retreat began welcoming an increasing number of pedophiles and, more commonly, ephebophiles.
Throughout the 1960s, sexual disorders were treated with psychoanalysis in secular institutions — an approach now discredited — and the Paracletes lagged behind even in that. It wasn't until the 1970s that Jemez Springs began to “approach modern standards,” Lechner said. It adopted regular therapy and employed an in-house psychiatrist. In 1976, the Paracletes opened the first treatment center in the world for psychosexual disorders. By 1995, psychiatrist Jay Feierman had consulted with a thousand priests about sexual disorders. “They knew more than anybody in the world,” said Sylvia M. Demarest, the Dallas attorney who later represented victims of Jemez Springs patients. A
Rocky Mountain News
reporter who spent a week at the center in 1987 described an atmosphere that encouraged emotional exploration. Priests there had psychodrama therapy and role-playing. They wept together. Therapists encouraged them not to repress sexual impulses. Dr. Feicrman, the program's chief psychiatrist, complained about the Church's message that a priest is “not allowed to be affectionate, he's not allowed to be in love, he's not allowed to be a sexual being.” Officials at the Paraclete Center made the final decision about whether a priest was ready to return to ministry — but later some of those decisions would look like terrible mistakes. Of the two thousand priests who were treated at Jemez Springs from 1947 to 1968, Lechner said ten committed criminal acts after leaving. Among the “graduates” from the 1960s and 1970s were men accused of long lists of molestations, like James R. Porter, Jason Sigler, Rudy Kos, and David Holley—some of whom molested children when the Paracletes sent them out on weekends to officiate in local parishes. In 1993, the Paraclete center was forced to pay $525,000 and set aside $7.6 million more from insurers to settle lawsuits with twenty-five plaintiffs who said they were attacked by Porter. They also settled with seventeen plaintiffs suing Holley, who is serving a 275-year sentence for molesting children. Bruce Pasternack, a lawyer who defended alleged victims in the Porter case, said the treatment center made New Mexico the world's “dumping ground for ecclesiastical waste.” Demarest, who represented Kos's victims, still speaks with contempt of the treatment Kos received. “I can tell you what the atmosphere was. They flew in fresh fish and special food items and they went on hikes in the mountains and they were released over the weekend into local parishes, where they continued to abuse children,” said Demarest. “There is not one single shred of evidence that anyone gave one whit about the victims.” The Paraclete fathers shut down the sexual disorders treatment center in New Mexico in 1994. They would not rebuild it.
In 1981, a new kind of priest set about building a new kind of treatment center on the East Coast, Michael Peterson was a psychiatrist before he converted to Catholicism and entered the priesthood. An experienced substance abuse counselor, he founded the St, Luke Institute with alcohol treatment in mind. But by the mid-1980s, patients were joined by an increasing number of priests who had been accused of sexual misconduct. As patients like Geoghan, Kos, Gilbert Gauthé, and Monsignor Michael Harris moved in next door, the neighbors were told that they were “in training,” said Nannie Presley, who lived across the street for fourteen years.
The relationship between the Church and its doctors was shaken by the priest abuse scandals in the mid-1990s. Minneapolis psychologist Gary R. Schoener remembered receiving a telephone call from a rattled John R. Roach, then Archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis, Roach wanted Schoener to review records the archdiocese had received from the centers that had been treating priests: the St. Luke Institute, the now-defunct House of Affirmation, and the Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico. “The archbishop said, ‘For God's sake, are we getting bad advice?”’ Schoener recalled. “Are they using the wrong tests? Are they misinterpreting them? Is one of the centers better than the others?” Schoener reported back a few weeks later. He had been impressed by the psychiatric reports, and he said they would pass muster in secular hospitals. But he faulted the centers for accepting the Church's investigations at face value. They failed to contact victims. They left responsibility for follow-up to the priest's diocese. In short, the psychiatrists saw the Church as their boss. And, Schoener concluded, they wanted the boss to like them. “The mindset of these folks was to get him back there, that somehow the guy was fixable,” said Schoener. “They are a key part of the mistake. It's not that I don't blame the Church. 1 blame them both.”