Sins of the Fathers

The Young Catholic cleric could see it coming. The Church was out of touch with the few diehards who still attended Sunday Mass. He had always believed his Church was a moral voice, an ancient tradition, a righteous institution. But he couldn't ignore the decadence that was cracking the sacred structure upon which he had built his life.

The stories of sexual scandals involving priests (and even bishops) were well known. Parishioners, better educated than in the simpler days when he had entered the seminary, were bored by the sermons and fed up with the hypocrisy of the Church's stance on so many issues. He felt torn apart by the hierarchy's demands on priests for a perfection of spirit that few could achieve. When he met with his superiors to tell them how he felt, he was appalled to find Church leaders committing the same acts they preached against. How could these priests invite boys from the seminary into their beds, or keep women on the side, and still celebrate the Holy Eucharist with their practiced looks of piety? He knew it was all a lie.

That Catholic cleric wasn't talking about James Porter, the former priest who goes on trial in Massachusetts this summer on charges that he raped altar boys, then allegedly told them that "God will punish you." He wasn't talking about Covenant House's Father Bruce Ritter—once regarded as America's answer to Mother Teresa—who, as it turned out, was accused of doing to young street hustlers precisely what he professed to be saving them from. And he wasn't talking about former Archbishop Robert Sanchez of New Mexico, who has been accused of having sex with 12 women, some of them in their late teens.

That idealistic cleric lived in the 16th century, not the 20th, but he was roused to action by a similar sex scandal involving live-in sexual partners for priests. He was talking about the hypocrisy of a Roman Catholic hierarchy that had lost its moral authority among hardworking townsfolk, who had grown tired of the corruption. That Catholic cleric was Martin Luther, the leader of the Reformation.

It may seem a distortion of historical perspective to suggest that the scandals screaming across the front pages of newspapers and airing almost weekly on Geraldo and Sally Jessy Raphaël are akin to a movement that transformed Christian faith worldwide. But not for Father Andrew Greeley, a Chicago priest, author and sociologist who has spoken out on the issue. "It is without doubt the worst crisis in the Catholic Church since the Reformation," he told Playboy. "It is all part of the clerical culture that has produced the pedophilia crisis."

In a recent article published by the Jesuit magazine America, Greeley projected that there could be as many as 100,000 people in this country who, as children, were sexually abused by priests. Insurance companies have found the Church such a high risk that most no longer offer it liability coverage.

Some questions have suddenly been raised about the clerical culture that produced this kind of sexual deviance and the secretive, insular institution that covered it up for generations. The crisis has also cast shadows over a long-accepted tenet of Catholicism: priestly celibacy.

Tom Fox, editor of the National Catholic Reporter, calls this a "historical moment" in which the structure of the Church is caving in on itself. The Church has already been battered by a sexual revolution that challenged its rigid teachings, a feminist movement that attacked its patriarchal system and a gay rights movement that has grown increasingly militant.

"It's much bigger than pedophilia," says Fox. "The problem is that the Judeo-Christian society has failed to teach healthy sexuality. With all this going on, people look for historical analogies. The Reformation is an accurate one."

•

On January 23, 1993, James Porter walked into the Washington County courthouse just outside St. Paul, Minnesota. The TV crews and newspaper photographers fanned out before him and backpedaled to get the shot as he walked the halls. He was led by his young Minneapolis defense attorney, Paul Lukas, who hobbled on crutches and used them to block cameras. This is the choreography of scandal's bad theater.

Nervously adjusting his thick glasses, Porter entered the courtroom, darting his eyes away from the young woman who sat in the front row. He walked past the family members and friends and reporters who stared at one of the priesthood's most notorious sexual predators.

Even one of the attorneys involved in Porter's case said he was "dressed like a pedophile" that day, with his wrinkled plaid wool pants and a mustard-colored sweater crisscrossed with lines of blue and green. A ski hat was crammed into the front pocket of his grungy gray coat. The judge banged the gavel and told Porter why he was before the court: sentencing in the conviction on six counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual misconduct against his baby-sitter in 1987. (Porter had married and fathered four children after leaving the priesthood in 1974.)

The judge called the young woman to the stand. On the lapel of her jacket was a gold button that said Hero. Young, frail, innocent and female, she defines our image of a sexual victim. The notebook paper shook slightly in her hand as she began to read: "There is a man in this room today with a very sick disease called pedophilia.... This man has brought a lot of anger and sadness.... He should not be let out. [Then] he cannot hurt anyone else."

Porter looked down at the defense table. He cupped his hands and closed his eyes as if he were praying, the ritual hand movements and poses of a pious priest. Although he had not been a man of the cloth for almost 20 years, he had not forgotten the traditional expressions of sorrow employed for funerals and the confessional.

Seated a few rows behind Porter was Mark Smith, ashen and somber in his blue polyester blazer and tan parka. Middle-aged, confident, intelligent and male, he defies our image of a sexual victim. Yet he and scores of others had been sexually abused by Porter when he was a priest and they were altar boys at parishes across the country.

Just one month earlier, 68 of Porter's victims had reached a reported $5 million settlement after a series of civil suits. And Porter was still facing a Massachusetts grand jury's indictment on 46 charges of molesting victims while he was a priest in the Sixties. If convicted on the criminal charges this summer, Porter will be an old man when he gets out of prison.

Outside the courtroom, Smith, surrounded by reporters, had explained that Porter was not the only one who should be handcuffed: "It's not just him. This was a partnership with Porter and the Catholic Church. The hierarchy has to be held accountable for what it did. They were all in this together."

•

The Porter case provides an example of the Church's complicity in protecting pedophile priests. The pattern has been established in case after case: Priests are caught, sheltered by their fellow priests and shuffled from one parish to another, where the abuse often continues.

The hierarchy's secrets in the Porter case were locked up for years at the Fall River Archdiocese. They were brought to light only through a subpoena by the Bristol County grand jury that indicted Porter. The personnel file offers a remarkable paper trail, documenting how Church superiors assigned him to priestly roles even though they were fully aware that he was a pedophile.

In one document—Porter's 18-page letter to the "Most Holy Father" at the Vatican—he requests that he be "released from the responsibilities of the priesthood, including the release from the obligation of celibacy" because of his "wrong relation with youth of the same sex." The written confession traces his progression from all-American adolescent to adult sex offender.

Porter was a tall, thin, socially awkward teenager. When he went on to Boston College, Porter decided to consider "the vocation," as it was called back then. His mother was "so proud to think that her son was to become a priest," he said in his letter to the Vatican, that there was no turning back.

Porter entered St. Mary's Theological Seminary in Baltimore in 1956; two years earlier, On the Waterfront was playing at the movies. There was Karl Malden starring, alongside Brando, as the tough-talking Irish priest who could punch as hard as any dockworker. The priest as rugged American hero had already become a stock character in movies such as Boys Town, with Spencer Tracy, and Angels with Dirty Faces, starring Pat O'Brien. The young men took these Hollywood images with them when they packed their bags for the seminary.

It was a glorious age for the Church. American Catholics were soon to elect their first president. The country was sprouting new churches. Enormous (continued on page 144)Sins of the fathers(continued from page 76) old estates were being converted into seminaries that opened their doors to a bumper crop of all-American boys.

"You were told that you would be the most educated individual in your community, a leader, and that you had a responsibility," says Father Jack McGinnis, a recovering alcoholic who now counsels fellow priests with sexual-and substanceabuse problems. "They fostered an elitism that we all soon found was false. I've spent a lifetime coming to terms with that lie."

He compares his days at the seminary to a prolonged high school experience in which the most important rite of passage—getting laid—was a sin to talk about. The only glimpse of sex education was a mandatory course on de Sexto, or the Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not commit adultery. They had always been told that within the hierarchy of sin, masturbation was worse than fornication. There was no release for the sexual energy buzzing inside them. "Pray and play sports," they were told.

McGinnis confides that of course he masturbated as a young seminarian. "I was like just about everyone else. I'd masturbate and confess it every month. It's very common. Most priests have had some sexual release. Any priest who tells you different is not being honest."

The seminarians' teachings ran contrary to their natural drives and, as one psychologist states, "the psychic damage was inestimable." As an adult, McGinnis has learned to accept celibacy and has always been proud to be a priest. But he likens the guilt he felt, as a teenager and the deprivation of knowledge about sex to a kind of "incestuous abuse" by the Church's patriarchy. The silence about sex left him and thousands of other priests trapped in sexual immaturity. Most would grow out of it. Some, however, would act out that immaturity.

The first time Porter showed his sexual immaturity was just after his ordination in 1960, when he was given his first assignment at St. Mary's parish in North Attleboro, Massachusetts. Porter began molesting children within a month, according to the indictment. Parents complained to other priests. One father took his concerns directly to Monsignor Humberto Medeiros. Porter was reassigned to another parish, Sacred Heart Church in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Porter, however, kept going back to North Attleboro, where the young boys had called him "the horn"—for horny. Fall River Bishop James Connolly's notes indicate that Porter would solicit a boy to get "his back rubbed, then go on from there."

Porter was told to go home to his parents in Revere, Massachusetts, where he was treated for depression. Porter wrote to Connolly, saying, "Believe me, I am striving to be priestly. ... There have been many temptations ... but thank God, with His grace, I have handled them well."

According to the indictment, the day after he wrote the letter Porter molested two more boys from a parish in nearby New Bedford. A few months later he was picked up by state police in New Hampshire for molesting another boy. The case was never prosecuted. Bishop Connolly's notes describe the victim as a 13-year-old "non-Cath" boy.

Porter later claimed he was tortured by what he was doing. "I was afraid to admit to myself or anyone else that I was not worthy of the priesthood," Porter wrote. "I was now using the priesthood as a crutch and shield to protect me from harm."

From 1964 to 1970, Porter was shuffled from parish to treatment center to parish, leaving a trail of molestation accusations in New Bedford, Massachusetts; Houston; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; Las Vegas; and Bemidji, Minnesota. In the parish schools' yearbooks are haunting photos of Porter the coach posing in the gymnasium with the young boys in their basketball uniforms. In 1970, after a decade-long spree, Porter was sent to the Paraclete treatment center in St. Louis.

This nationwide pattern of complicity and cover-up has been documented by Jason Berry in his eloquent new book, Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Berry's research began in 1984, when he investigated Father Gilbert Gauthe, a Louisiana cleric who would ultimately plead guilty to sexually abusing more than 30 boys.

In the Chicago suburb of Berwyn, parishioners at St. Odilo's learned why their popular parish priest, Father Robert Mayer, had quietly left in the summer of 1991: He had been spotted sunbathing nude on the roof of the rectory with a 20-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy. Mayer had been shuffled among parishes for years, even though a lawsuit for sexual misconduct was brought against him in 1982. (The suit was later settled out of court.)

About the same time that Jason Berry began his work, elements within the Church were also becoming aware of the problem. Father Thomas Doyle, a canon-law expert for the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C., was a rising star in the Church's national hierarchy in the early Eighties. He had all the right credentials—a sturdy Irishman, big on Reagan, big on the military, macho, conservative, sharp.

But Doyle was troubled by the spate of sexual scandals that began breaking in the press and by several more that he knew were being kept quiet. He wasn't one to overlook the complicity or the apologetic tone coming from his fellow priests. The angrier Doyle got, the more annoyed his superiors grew. He set out to do a full study of the problem. In 1985 Doyle coauthored a report to be presented to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Doyle noted that approximately 30 cases, involving 100 children, had been reported in the press. He pointed out that one diocese already had $100 million in claims pending.

He reported if one could "predict, with actuarial soundness," that exposure to civil claims over the next ten years "could be established with a limit of one billion dollars." He went on to call it a "conservative cost projection."

The report warned against the Church's practice of protecting the offending priests. "Failure to report such information is considered a criminal offense in some states," Doyle wrote. He told the bishops that, contrary to the generally held opinion, they could be forced to testify before a grand jury. He also warned that "the idea of sanitizing or purging files of potentially damaging material has been brought up. This would be in contempt of court and an obstruction of justice."

The report went nowhere. For his trouble, Doyle ended up leaving the Vatican Embassy and taking up a post in Greenland.

•

The Church's well-documented negligence has been a gold mine for litigation. And no one is better at it than Jeffrey Anderson, the St. Paul, Minnesota lawyer who has won $30 million in settlements by representing victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy and other authority figures. His clients have been victims of abuse by the clergy of all denominations, including Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians and members of the Assembly of God. But, he says, "the vast majority are Catholic. The severity of the problem in the Catholic Church is unique because it is a culture in which sexuality is repressed."

Asked about the argument that there are no more sexual deviants in the priesthood than in the rest of society, he responds quickly: "Bullshit. Priests are so naive about all this. I've taken so many depositions and heard so much crap, it all blurs into one big problem. The clerical culture is one of secrecy that converges to protect itself," he says. According to Anderson, the Church uses a three-pronged attack when confronted with accusations of sexual abuse: "Appeasing the parents, repudiating the victims, keeping it quiet."

Anderson was off to Chicago for a meeting with a judge and an attorney for the diocese in a case that he says epitomizes the Church's pattern of bullying victims and their families when they come forward with allegations.

It was the case against Father Robert Lutz, which began in 1989. A couple from the Chicago suburb of Northbrook noticed their son was acting strangely—sleeping with a toy gun, hiding knives under his pillow and locking the windows on hot summer nights.

At about the same time, allegations of sexual abuse by Lutz were being raised by the family's neighbors. The parents feared that might explain their young son's troubled behavior. His mother asked him if he had ever had any trouble with the priest. The child's answer was every parent's nightmare.

"Mom, I put that way back here," the boy said, pointing to the back of his head. When the couple told the diocesan representatives about their son, they said the priests and lawyers were less concerned with the damage to their boy than with protecting Lutz. Out of anger, the parents joined the criminal complaint and eventually filed a civil suit.

Anderson estimates the Church has spent in excess of $1 million in this legal battle, and the family has been countersued by Lutz for libel, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. (The countersuit has since been dropped.)

"It is the most outrageous case I've worked on. The Church has attacked a good family," says Anderson. "The Catholic hierarchy has the power and influence to accomplish its goals quietly and cleanly. It can prevail on police not to prosecute priests, it can intimidate families into silence, it believes it is above the law."

•

In the fall of 1970 Porter was undergoing treatment at Paraclete. He was an outlaw who insisted that he wanted to return to active duty as a priest. But the psychologists at the facility were finally beginning to see the dangers. They recommended that Porter be removed from the priesthood.

Porter's troubles coincided with a time of tumult in the Church, which was clashing head-on with the sexual revolution. The center of the conflict was the 1968 papal encyclical Humana Vitae, which forbade contraception. Since the late Sixties, more than 100,000 men have resigned from the priesthood.

In that maelstrom, the Vatican was swamped with requests for laicizations. In 1973 Porter's request for laicization was sent to Rome. At that time Porter was working for a branch bank in St. Paul. In 1974 his request was granted.

In the real world, Porter quickly learned that his actions would no longer be covered up. A mid-level bank manager who abused kids wouldn't be moved to a different branch, he'd be put away.

In his letter to the Vatican he had written, "In the lay life, I find out of necessity that I must cope with the problem or suffer serious consequences.... I no longer associate with youths, as I am too preoccupied with my profession and state of life.... I have enjoyed the social relationships of the opposite sex by taking them dining, dancing, movies, etc. I believe this has helped tremendously to overcome my other inclinations."

Porter may have tried to leave the past behind, but there were too many victims who refused to forget. Chief among them was Frank Fitzpatrick, a private investigator living in Rhode Island. Troubled by bouts of depression, Fitzpatrick searched his memory for possible causes. That's when the images came back: a man breathing heavily in the sacristy after Sunday Mass, the sound of bedclothes rustling. Then a face. It was Father Porter. He remembered the day Porter told his parents he was taking their son to a Celtics game but instead fed him rum-soaked pies until he was dizzy. Then Porter raped him.

Fitzpatrick asked in an ad in a local newspaper: "Do you remember Father Porter?" More than 60 people came forward. He went to the Fall River diocese, where an aide to the bishop told him, "It may be best to leave it in the hands of the Lord." Fitzpatrick preferred to turn it over to the police and knew he'd need evidence.

He tracked down Porter in St. Paul and called him on the phone to ask how many children he had abused.

"There could have been quite a few," the ex-priest said on the tape Fitzpatrick played for the Boston Globe. Porter estimated that there may have been as many as 100, but the point was, "it happened."

Fitzpatrick asked if Porter remembered him in particular.

"No," said the ex-priest. "I don't remember names."

•

A. W. Richard Sipe, an ordained priest who has left the active ministry and now lectures in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School, says that Porter is a "paradigm of the corruption of the Church" and that his pathology reflects a much deeper problem within the institution: The Church teaching on sexuality has lost its moral authority.

"The Church teaches us that every sexual thought, word or action outside of marriage is sinful. Do you know anyone who believes that?" he asks. "It dictates that priests practice absolute abstinence, yet does nothing to teach them how. That is how we end up with priests covering up for pedophiles and a gay subculture flourishing in the seminaries." Sipe believes that celibacy as it exists now is an inherently unhealthy institution. He points out that it wasn't until the 11th century that the Church made the vow mandatory. As these things go in the ancient Church, celibacy is a fairly recent invention. Nowhere does the Bible demand celibacy of priests. In early Christianity it was voluntary. From the Fourth to the Tenth centuries, there were many popes who fathered children.

The history of mandatory enforcement of celibacy is interwoven with two concerns that precate Christianity: property and power. For the popes to maintain primacy over kings, they had to show they could rule their own men. Women got in the way of that, and families caused problems with inheritance. So in the early part of the 11th century it was ruled that no man could be ordained unless he left his wife.

Sipe's 1990 book, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy, based on 25 years of research and some 1000 interviews with priests, found that of the nation's estimated 57,000 priests, two percent were pedophiles, who sexually fixated on children, and four percent were ephebophiles, who focused sexual desire on adolescents. That's approximately 3420 afflicted priests. Sipe estimates that about half of them have acted on their sexual desires.

While the numbers hew to the statistical norm for the general population, the Church's atmosphere of repression and guilt may intensify these disorders. Sipe insists that the root of the priest-pedophile scandal lies in the vow of celibacy, which he says is an unrealistic requirement of any man, especially the way it is taught—or more accurately, not taught—in the seminary.

The same men who will hear confessions and advise young couples on marriage frequently know little or nothing about sexual relationships. Sipe devised a four-year course on the teachings of celibacy that includes frank discussions of sex. It is designed to help priests "psychosexually adjust to a celibate life" and begin to gather the knowledge they will need in their pastoral roles. But as he points out, it has been rejected by every seminary. Most do nothing to educate their priests about sex, Sipe adds.

But just beneath that ignorance about sex lies a thriving gay culture within the Church. Several studies have tracked a dramatic rise in the number of homosexual clergy in recent years. Andrew Greeley estimates that 20 to 40 percent of Catholic priests are gay. And in his 1990 book, Gay Priests, social scientist James G. Wolf asserts that 50 percent of American priests are gay. He based this finding on a questionnaire sent out to 101 homosexual clergy members. Tom Fox places the range even higher and says that of the young men entering the seminary today, as many as 75 percent are gay, even though the Church teaches that homosexuality is "intrinsically disordered."

Greeley disagrees that celibacy has fostered a culture of closeted homosexuals and sexual deviants. He dismisses Sipe as an "anticelibacy crusader." Greeley, who recently published a novel about a priest who is guilty of sexual abuse, believes that "abolishing celibacy would not solve the problem." He says that early in their own lives, most pedophiles are compelled to target children, "long before the seminary and ordination." Greeley believes the key is "more elaborate preadmission and preordination screening."

But both Sipe and Greeley agree that something in the clerical culture contributes to the behavior. As Sipe points out, "ignorance, fear and guilt are poor allies in making moral judgments. The system of celibacy fosters ignorance by not teaching sexuality. Then it makes people frightened of their own and others' sexuality. Finally, it tries to control through guilt, making priests believe that their thoughts and actions are sinful. There is a sense that you have to keep it to yourself, that if you were only good enough you wouldn't have those thoughts. It travels deeper, until it becomes unbearable, and then acting out happens in the dark. There is no light."

•

In the middle of a residential neighborhood on Fremont Avenue in Minneapolis is a large blue house that looks like all the other houses on the street. A small sign above the buzzer says Alpha Human Services. It is a residential community licensed by the Minnesota Department of Corrections for adult male sexual deviants. Alpha offers the program that Porter has been ordered to complete as part of the terms of his sentencing.

Just inside the door is a punch clock and time cards for residents, plus grease boards and logbooks to keep the men accountable for their actions. The highly controlled atmosphere at Alpha uses peer pressure, monitoring and masturbation to sexually appropriate images to encourage residents to develop, as our guide repeats almost robotically, "sexual values stressing respect and empathy for persons with whom one wishes to be sexually involved."

Porter is supposed to enter the program this summer, but the director, Gerald Kaplan—who refuses to comment on clients—is said to be having second thoughts, according to a source who knows Porter's case. The treatment center accepts residents based on applications, and the source says that Porter's statement indicated he was too deep in denial. In addition, Alpha's program contradicts Catholic teaching. Masturbation, a grave sin in the Church, is part of the therapy.

The religiously affiliated centers try to help priests live up to their vows of celibacy. Father Curtis Bryant is director of inpatient clinical services at St. Luke's Institute, a Church treatment center in Suitland, Maryland. He notes that the Paraclete center—where Porter first received treatment—used to be a clerical retreat where pedophilia was treated as a "moral crisis, not a psychiatric one." The center prescribed gardening, silent meditation and prayer. Now both programs have more sophisticated clinical procedures and treatment methods.

And yet, Gary Schoener, a psychologist who has done reviews of the clergy treatment facilities for the Church, points out a common problem: Their programs do not include confrontation by the victims, which forces the priests to be accountable for their deeds and gives a feeling of justice to the victims. It also gives the treating clinician a true picture of an offender's actions, which isn't always easy with people like Porter, who remain in denial.

•

The Daughters of Charity National Health System in St. Louis is made of the same institutional brick that built Catholic seminaries, schools and hospitals throughout the United States. In the first week of Lent last year, it hosted a gathering of 31 experts on sexual abuse by the clergy, called together by the head of St. Luke's Institute, Father Canice Connors. The group included priests, psychologists and sociologists. Also invited were one victim and one mother of a victim.

That the panel was so weighted against the victims was not surprising to the dozens of members of Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests who protested outside. To them it was just another confirmation of the American priests' arrogance, an illustration that the clerical society was more concerned with its brethren than its wounded parishioners.

In the chill of that February morning, the protesters held up toys and poster-sized pictures of themselves as children in First Communion outfits "to capture the innocence" they lost to sexual abuse. They lit candles to symbolize how "light breaks darkness." But as Barbara Blaine, a member of the Survivors Network and part of a Catholic lay community that runs a shelter for the homeless on Chicago's South Side, noted, "the wind came along and blew the candles out."

When Blaine was 13, she says, the parish priest in her working-class neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio took a special interest in her. One day, she continues, her priest began sexually abusing her in his room in the rectory.

"He told me I was so special and blessed by God that I was irresistible to him," says Blaine. "When he had an erection, he would say, 'It is your fault.' And then he would abuse me." When it was over, he would tell her she needed to go to confession.

This lasted for years, she says, and eventually he began encouraging her to become a nun so that they could "get married in heaven." The guilt left her with migraine headaches and nausea. As a senior in high school she told another priest about what was happening and he told her, 'Jesus can forgive you. Jesus can forgive anything."

In 1986 she told the abusive priest's superiors what had happened. She told them that she didn't want to file a lawsuit but that she just wanted him to get help; but then she found out that the man who had abused her was given brief counseling and returned to ministerial work in her hometown. Since then, she says, nine other alleged victims of the same priest have come forward. Still, he remains in pastoral work.

"This is an important issue for women in the Church," says Blaine. "The Church teaches that women are inferior, that they are temptresses. But whether they are men or women, all victims need a sense of justice. That still hasn't happened for me."

Jeanne Miller, whose son said he was sexually abused by Berwyn priest Robert Mayer, believed that when she was invited to the Daughters of Charity gathering, she would be helping women like Blaine find that "sense of justice." She believed the group's findings would be presented to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

But Father Connors began to back off that position as the group sat around a conference table in St. Louis. Now Miller believes that Connors' intent was to begin a form of reconciliation between victims and clergy, which once again made her feel that the clerical leadership was more concerned with the priests and the lawsuits than with the victims.

"It is not a matter of reconciliation," Miller says, "it is a matter of resolution. I forgave Robert Mayer a long time ago. I recognize that he was a man with a problem who needed help. My son forgave him, too. What is unforgivable is that the entire faith system, the morals, values and principles, are hypocritical."

By 1991 Miller founded a group called Victims of Clergy Abuse Link Up. She got thousands of calls and used her own money to create a national network based out of her home.

On October 17, 1992, some 500 people gathered for Victims of Clergy Abuse's first national conference. They packed the ballroom of the Woodfield Hilton in Arlington Heights, Illinois. The audience held the full cast of characters. There were Jeffrey Anderson, the fearless litigator; Father Doyle, the Church's first whistleblower; Frank Fitzpatrick, the Porter victim who broke the silence; and hundreds of other victims, their families, concerned priests, nuns, theologians and clinical psychologists. Everyone, that is, but the abusive priests.

At the start of the meeting, Jeanne Miller turned the microphone over to Sipe, who was greeted with sustained applause. These were "good Catholic couples" appalled at the vitriol of their own Church, working-class fathers enraged over what had happened to their sons and daughters, young men with deep lines of pain etched on their faces from something horrible that happened a long time ago. Sipe looked out at them, took in the faces searching for truth, honesty, change, and thought about a German town where, in the year 1517, Luther posted his 95 theses and touched off the Reformation.

He opened his arms and said, "Welcome to Wittenberg."

"'Most priests have had some sexual release. Any priest who tells you different is not being honest.