Pedophile priests: A culture of secrecy

Stacy J. Willis

Friday, March 22, 2002 | 5:45 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

Larry Zajac is watching the story unfold with sorrow and sympathy: six boys allege they were molested by their priest at St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church in Henderson.

Zajac, 48, has been through this -- same abuse, same church. It was 35 years ago and it was a different priest. In some ways, he says, that makes it worse. Time has passed and individuals have changed, but the legacy of abuse is still at large.

Nine years ago, Zajac sued the diocese, which was then called the Diocese of Reno-Las Vegas, and settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Last week's news stories about the latest allegations prompted him to revisit his memories of St. Peter the Apostle parish.

"It's really hard to even put it into words. It's so disappointing. You hope that it's going to come to an end, and then it is repeated again," he said.

In recent months the Catholic Church has been pummeled by a series of allegations of priests sexually abusing children worldwide. In January the Church in Ireland agreed to a $110 million payment to clergy-abused children; in Boston the archdiocese will pay more than $15 million. From Australia to California, parishioners are coming forward with accusations that they were victims and that the abuse has been happening quietly for generations.

It's a complicated issue that has many searching for a cause -- and pointing fingers.

The broader problem for the church, critics say, is not that individual cases of abuse occur, but that the institution seems unwilling to consider its role in the abuse.

"Dioceses handle cases of sexual molestation by keeping it a secret, a confession," Jeff Anderson, Zajac's attorney, said. "They see these guys as committing some kind of sin when these guys have actually committed some kind of felony...

"They live in denial. It is a culture of secrecy. It's a secret between the child and priest, and then between priests, and then it leaks to the bishop," Anderson said. "The bishop talks to the family and promises it will be taken care of, and appeases them because they are good, faithful Catholics, and they don't go to the police."

Anderson lives in St. Paul, Minn., and has represented more than 400 alleged victims of sexual assault by Catholic priests around the nation in the last 20 years.

In the last five years, five of Anderson's cases involved the Diocese of Las Vegas and were settled out of court.

The most recent civil suit against the Las Vegas Diocese, which was filed this month by attorney Al Massi, names the Rev. Mark Roberts as the perpetrator and defendant -- but also names the Diocese of Las Vegas, Bishop Joseph Pepe, and former Bishop Daniel Walsh for negligence.

Roberts, the pastor and youth spiritual director, allegedly sexually assaulted the boys on several occasions within the last four years.

Church officials "knew or should have known" the abuse was occurring, Massi said, "and they had a responsibility to do something about it."

"This is not just about the individual priest," Massi said. "This is about the institution. It's about the institution's lack of supervision, investigation, and acceptance of responsibility."

But Las Vegas Catholic Vicar General Bob Stoekig sees it differently.

"I don't think you can pin it on systemic problems," Stoekig said. "You have to look at individual people.

"We take allegations of this kind very seriously and we cooperate fully with the police," he said. In fact, Stoekig said he personally called Henderson Police on Jan. 31 to report Roberts after the bishop decided that was the proper thing to do.

When asked to elaborate on how the diocese makes that decision after an accusation of sexual abuse first arises, Stoekig said, "The process is really an internal process and it is not appropriate to comment on it."

The diocese sent Roberts to an undisclosed location for counseling and offered counseling to the victims.

Walsh, who was transferred to the Diocese of Santa Rosa in California last year to replace a Bishop who was also involved in a sex scandal, was featured in an interview on PBS's Jim Lehrer NewsHour this month.

He said he was concerned that the good name of falsely accused priests could be damaged, so he created a "Sensitive Issues" committee in Santa Rosa made up of clergy and lay Catholics to investigate each allegation and determine "if it's credible."

"If it is credible, then they do further investigation and make a recommendation to me," Walsh told the NewsHour. "Once the accusation is believed to be credible, the one who's accused is put on administrative leave."

The police are notified, Walsh said, "as soon as we believe it's a credible accusation."

Attorney Anderson said the church has exploited its power in the community to "get away with that."

"They tell prosecutors they will deal with it, and because they are the Catholic Church, they are believed," Anderson said.

Henderson Police detectives are still investigating the allegations against Roberts and anticipate forwarding the case to the Clark County District Attorney's office in the next few weeks, Officer Terry Bowler, a police spokesman, said.

There are many theories about why some priests abuse children. Some say a priest is no different than any other pedophile -- a pedophile is a pedophile whether he is a Catholic priest or a secular teacher or a clergyman in another faith.

"In every context this happens. It's amazing how prevalent it is in many institutions," the Rev. Bartholomew Hutcherson, a priest at UNLV's Catholic Newman Center, said. "It's not just the Catholic church.

"You don't throw out the institution. It's not an indication of the church being bad," he said.

But Thomas Plante, associate professor and chairman of clinical psychology at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit University in California, says there are elements of the church that make it more likely to bear this sort of abuse.

Priests have extraordinary one-on-one access to boys and are less likely to be caught, fired and prosecuted than in many other institutions, he said.

"Unlike other religious traditions the Catholic church is very hierarchical. In other traditions, you have a board of directors that hire and fire clergy. If you have 30 people involved in the hiring and firing, you have a democratic process that is less likely to put up with this," said Plante, editor of the book "Bless Me Father For I Have Sinned, Perspectives on Sexual Abuse Committed by Roman Catholic Priests."

Traditionally, Anderson said, suspect priests are removed from their post and transferred to a different diocese. Roberts, the accused priest at St. Peter the Apostle, also served as a priest at St. Joseph's and St. Frances De Sales parishes in Las Vegas in years past. Stoekig said there were no previous complaints about Roberts, nor any ongoing investigations of any other diocesan priests.

Although some speculate that the growing percentage of homosexuals in the priesthood is related to the abuse -- researchers say as many as 60 percent of priests are gay -- Plante says that's a red herring.

A pedophile is a pedophile, he said, "and that's unrelated to whether a person is heterosexual or homosexual," he said.

It is difficult to determine for certain whether there is anything that distinguishes pedophiles in the general population from those who serve as priests, according to David Clohessy, national director of the Chicago-based Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests, which has about 3,500 members.

"There is no single answer to why it happens. There's a group of 'if only' people who believe that if only priests could marry or if only women could be priests or if only seminarians were screened better, it wouldn't happen. All of these things might help, but there is no one answer," Clohessy said.

Clohessy said a celibate priest's life appeals to young men who are shameful about their sexual preferences.

"Some seminarians are spiritually inclined but sexually confused young men who are drawn to the priesthood by the vow of celibacy because they think, 'I can make a deal with God, and he will rid me of this compulsion if I dedicate myself to the church,' " Clohessy said.

But the mandatory vow of celibacy, he said, more likely contributes to the culture of secrecy than to the propensity to abuse.

"Celibacy contributes in that it sets a high and difficult requirement for priests, and a great many priests don't meet it and are loath to report others for not meeting that requirement when they themselves haven't met the requirement," Clohessy said.

Like pedophiles in the general population, Plante said, 70 percent of priests who molest have been sexually abused themselves.

"Some of these guys are highly motivated to change, and others feel like they've done nothing wrong," Plante said.

As a layperson and victim, Zajac says he thinks the Catholic culture, historically, didn't see sexual molestation of boys as a violation of the celibacy vow.

"Some people will think this is crazy, but I think it goes way back in the church and was at one time accepted as a way to deal with celibacy. I think at one time they thought celibacy meant 'not having sex with a woman' and so this was OK," Zajac said.

Catholic Church officials say that is untrue -- the church does not condone sexual abuse of children, nor has it ever.

Survivors of sex abuse say that some of the pain they endure is after the abuse -- because leaders in the church are hesitant to acknowledge any institutional role in the abuse.

"The church has largely treated us as the enemy," Clohessy said. "In the early 1990s we spent some time trying to work with bishops on prevention, trying to make them see the light. But it became apparent that it's not a lack of knowledge on their part, it's a lack of will or courage."

Clohessy wrote a letter to Bishop Walsh in 1993, asking for an apology for the way the diocese treated Henderson victims.

Walsh later responded in writing by condemning Clohessy's organization, saying SNAP seemed to "demand vengeance and vengeful trashing of the Church and the many good priests, religious and laity who serve the people in the Church."

Keeping the faith

And that's the problem for Catholics -- how do you keep your faith through all of this?

Attorney Massi said the Henderson victims' families are devoted Catholics who still attend church despite their ongoing lawsuit against the Rev. Mark Roberts.

But such allegations don't go unnoticed by the faithful.

"It kind of boggles the mind for me, because growing up in a Catholic church, we are taught that these are priests you can trust and open up to," Pamphey Quick, a 20-year-old Las Vegas Catholic, said.

"The fact that it is just coming out that these priests have a problem with these things alters what you've been taught since you were little. You kind of feel ashamed in a way," Quick said.

Clohessy said he is not optimistic that the church will make internal strides toward openness or prevention.

"We still see a shocking number of cases where the accused priests are recycled into parishes. We see very little emphasis on prevention. Churches should make clear that priests will be defrocked for failing to report suspected abuse, and that has never been the case," Clohessy said.

Zajac said "When you get to dealing with the church about what they are doing to try to change, you realize it's a huge bureaucracy, and no policy is being made on a local level. Not a lot of change is going to happen."'

On Thursday Pope John Paul II broke his silence about the sex abuse cases, saying it was casting a "dark shadow of suspicion over all priests" and the church "shows concerns for her victims."

No policy changes

Although church leaders received the message as a strong rebuke and indication of upcoming reform, the Vatican announced no policy changes or preventive programs.

But if change isn't coming from Church leaders yet, in some places it is being instigated by laypeople.

In Boston, groups of lay Catholics are organizing and asking for change, Clohessy said -- "they are saying, don't donate until this gets cleaned up."

But in other dioceses the demand for change is slower coming.

"I haven't questioned my priests because they are very honest people," Quick said. "I think the church is going about it right from what I know. I think they are going the right route in keeping it under the table and dealing the with families on a case-by-case basis."

Hutcherson said he is fielding questions from some Catholic students, but that he hasn't encountered anyone for whom the events have caused a crisis of faith.

"But I would say that I have certainly seen outrage locally about the secrecy in the Boston case," Hutcherson said. "We wonder whether the church has created exemptions from the law for people in positions of power. There is certainly a sense of some of that in the church.

"The problems now are not so much about sex but about the use, or misuse, of power. There is an air of clerical privilege," Hutcherson said.

"One of the problems I run into occasionally is this idea that the priesthood equals power for some priests. But Jesus created us to be servants."

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