The hero of the first hour

(VA)
Die Zeit [Hamburg, Germany]

May 13, 2021

By Doris Reisinger

[Photos above: Doris Reisinger and Tom Doyle]

A note from BishopAccountability.org: This essay is European scholar-survivor Doris Reisinger’s perspective on Tom Doyle and his work.  Doyle and Reisinger have long been interested in spiritual abuse and the systemic, international nature of Catholic clergy abuse.  How do you see these issues?  What has Tom Doyle meant to you?  Is the crisis in a new international phase?  Please email us at staff@bishop-accountability.org.  We’ll share your thoughts and questions with Tom and Doris, and we’ll post selections from the correspondence.  Many thanks!

As an insider of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, Thomas Doyle became an invaluable source of knowledge for survivors.  Father Thomas Doyle grasped the extent of the abuse scandal in the USA early on. He acted quickly, meticulously and did not allow himself to be deterred.

Father Doyle paused. On that day in the summer of 1984, the Dominican priest at the papal embassy in Washington, D.C., the nunciature, had an unusual case: in the city of Lafayette in the US state of Louisiana, Pope John Paul II was named as a defendant in a civil case. The lawyer Joseph Minos Simon was responsible for this. Obviously, a PR coup. Simon wanted to attract attention. Doyle contacted Wilfred Caron, a lawyer at the US Bishops’ Conference. Caron made sure that the Pope’s name disappeared. Doyle’s task could have ended here. But it didn’t, because he knew what the trial was about. Simon represented the Gastal family, whose child had been sexually abused by a priest named Gilbert Gauthe.

The journalist Jason Berry, who covered the abuse crisis in the USA from hour one, called Doyle a classic whistleblower decades later: someone who loved his church and therefore could not remain silent. In his books Lead Us Not into Temptation (1992) and Vows of Silence (2004), Berry paints a detailed picture of Doyle. It is the picture of an exceptionally gifted and completely unpretentious man with clear moral principles. He was born Patrick Doyle in August 1944, to a family of Irish descent in the Midwest. At 20 he entered the Dominican Order, where he was given the name Thomas. The Second Vatican Council, a decision-making assembly in Rome of all Catholic bishops, was in full swing and changed the Church permanently: the Latin Mass, which Doyle loved very much, was replaced by the new Mass. Much seemed uncertain during this time. Confreres left the Dominicans to get married. Others now openly admitted their homosexuality. Only six of the 16 young men who began with him were eventually ordained priests. “The issue of my seminary years was to survive,” Doyle said later.

Doyle is direct. He speaks with the urgency of someone who has decades of experience in a struggle that many have ignored for too long: the fight against abuse in the Catholic Church. When I got to know him, he had long been something of a hero in the United States. A very unpretentious hero, without a manager, without a website of his own, without elaborate self-presentation. He replied to my first email within a few hours: directly, bluntly, as is his way. If I need more information, he added, I should get in touch at any time.

When Thomas Doyle began his priestly ministry, there was nothing to suggest that he would become a hero or that a career in the church was open to him. It began with the fact that he trained in canon law in order to be able to better help his people in matters of marriage law. When the Archbishop of Chicago heard this, he helped the young priest to study in Rome. This was followed by a doctorate in Washington, and by the time Doyle had completed his dissertation in 1978, he already had a reputation as an excellent canon lawyer. He was appointed judge at the ecclesiastical court of the Chicago archdiocese and appointed to the nunciature in 1981. When the commentary on the new Code finally appeared in 1983 and the name Thomas P. Doyle was above the section on marriage law, the budding diplomat and canonist had reached the height of his ecclesiastical career.

Then came that day in the summer of 1984, and with it the beginning of a church crisis that Doyle would never let go of. The first thing he did was try to find out as much as he could about the situation in Lafayette: Gauthe had been charged with 34 counts of child sex crimes and was likely to face a long prison sentence. According to press reports on the case, other parents of children who were victims had joined the lawsuit. In addition to Gauthe, other priests were accused.

Doyle turned to a priest friend named Michael Peterson, who ran a therapy center for clerics. From him Doyle learned that there were similar cases in other dioceses. The two spoke to Gauthe’s attorney, Ray Mouton. It soon became clear to the three of them: Many bishops in the USA had for years been quietly transferring priests who had abused children from one parish to the next, settling complaints out of court and forcing families to remain silent in order to avoid legal proceedings and bad press. But this strategy no longer worked, because the Gastals had set a precedent with their lawsuit in the summer of 1984, which had already resulted in more lawsuits. In the long term, a church crisis of unimagined proportions emerged. At the same time, it was clear to Doyle: The bishops would be completely overwhelmed when dealing with such a crisis; they were too used to secret practices and interpretative sovereignty in church affairs. Aware of the drama of the situation, Doyle briefed the Nuncio Pio Laghi, who reported to Rome.

At this point, in late 1984, Doyle thought, the Church now had a lesson to learn, and it was going to learn it the hard way. The key was to act quickly. After discussions with a number of friendly and influential bishops, including Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia, Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua of Pittsburgh, and Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, a plan was in place: Doyle wrote a handbook with Michael Peterson and Ray Mouton. It should bring all US bishops to the same level of knowledge and serve as a guide for action in dealing with cases of abuse. A number of bishops had expressly encouraged him to do so. The Manual was created in the winter months of 1984/85 and made it clear, among other things, that pedophilia was incurable; that accused priests could not be transferred, but should be immediately suspended; that the destruction of files was a criminal offense; and that the top priority was concern for survivors. Cardinal Law tasked a young auxiliary bishop named William Levada from Los Angeles with assisting the three authors of the Manual with the presentation. The abuse issue would become the main theme at the next US Bishops’ Conference in June 1985. Doyle was relieved.

But a month before the assembly he received a phone call from Levada that sobered him. Doyle was not invited to the assembly. Apparently, the trio had made themselves unpopular. It was rumored that Mouton would speak to the press. Some felt that Doyle and his friends were trying to make a profit. Wilfred Caron, the legal expert at the Bishops’ Conference, felt left out. The Bishops’ Conference issued press releases saying they already had procedures and did not need the Manual. Bishops’ conference officials assured Doyle the problem would be seen to. Action was necessary. He should trust the bishops. He should be patient.

Doyle, Mouton, and Peterson nonetheless sent a copy of the Manual to every bishop in the United States, and Doyle even received $1,000 from Cardinal Law himself for the cost of copying. Meanwhile, the cardinal continued unfazed with his policy of dealing with accused priests in his diocese of Boston by transferring them. In 1996, he wrote a Christmas letter to one of the worst offenders in his diocese – the priest John Geoghan, who over the course of time abused more than 130 children and whose accusations Law already knew in the early 1980s – in which he downplayed his crimes as illness and thanked him “on behalf of those you have served well.”

And when Paul Shanley, the most notorious perpetrator in the Boston archdiocese, was forced to retire, Law thanked him by saying, “For thirty years … you brought God’s Word and His Love to His people.”  It all came out when, in 2002, the cardinal was finally cross-examined by lawyers for the victims. He couldn’t remember much then, but he could remember Doyle and his Manual. However, he added, he had no recollection of ever reading it.

In the mid-1980s, Doyle was still hoping that the bishops’ defensive stance would soon change, once they understood the pain of the victims and the extent of the crisis. In vain. The majority of American bishops viewed the “problem” as hyped up in the media. Bishop A. J. Quinn of Cleveland, who had been given the task of keeping the Diocese of Lafayette in good order, even wrote verbatim to the nunciature: “The church has weathered worse attacks … So too will the pedophile annoyance eventually abate.”  Nuncio Laghi advised Doyle to turn to other subjects. His colleagues at the nunciature kept their distance, and in 1986 Doyle lost his job there. He applied to the university  ̶  and was not accepted. He ended up becoming a military chaplain in the Air Force.

He also wrote canonical specialist articles on dealing with clerical abusers and in the evenings often spent hours on the phone with survivors who turned to him for help. Doyle was present at the first members’ meeting of a survivors’ organization, the Linkup, in October 1992. At the same time, he became the contact person for victim lawyers who had trouble finding their way through the thicket of church hierarchies, responsibilities, and laws. As an insider, Doyle was an invaluable source of knowledge to them. When lawyer Jeffrey Anderson, after many hours of consultation, insisted on paying him a fee, Doyle passed the money on to those who needed it most urgently. And when Anderson first asked him in 1988 if he was willing to testify in court, Doyle said yes. Unexpectedly, the priest in his early 40s found himself “on the other side.” He was dismayed to see that bishops treated abuse victims like enemies of the Church, against whom they called their lawyers to prevent even the smallest admission of guilt and to haggle over every dollar in compensation.

He witnessed how survivors were re-traumatized, suspected and humiliated in conversations with bishops and in court hearings. How complainant parents were in turn sued by diocesan lawyers for reputational damage. In one Chicago case, even parents who refrained from filing a complaint out of fear of the effect police interrogation would have on their child were indicted and summoned by church attorneys for daring to interact with other victims. Doyle was stunned. His initial hope that the bishops would sooner or later act right faded.

But the “problem” did not go away. According to reports by the Boston Globe in 2002, the number of lawsuits increased dramatically. Now the cooperation of law enforcement and civil authorities, on which the bishops had previously relied, also waned. Grand jury investigations were initiated in several US states. The church’s reaction to this was a meeting of the US bishops in Dallas, planned by a public relations firm. The result: a Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, a number of basic Norms, and a National Review Board to oversee their implementation.

But instead of applying the Norms consistently, exceptions were immediately created that enabled bishops to leave known perpetrators in service or to take them back into service. As early as 2004, some of the National Review Board’s most respected members left because they felt that the bishops were not serious. It became clear to many that there was no point in making new appeals to bishops. In addition, the question of the role of the church leadership in Rome arose more and more urgently. When SNAP reported the Vatican to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2011, Doyle was there as a supporter. On the indictment list among others: Pope Benedict XVI.

Today Thomas Doyle is 76 years old. Even if individual bishops had changed and acted correctly, the hierarchy by and large “behaves the same today as it did in 1985,” Doyle sums it up after 36 years. It is about much more than a crisis: The fact that violence against children was routinely accepted reveals a very dark side of the institutional church. The bishops do not put it in order “because they can’t.”  It will all end only “when the system that created and sustained it changes radically.”

Doris Reisinger, 37 years old, is doing research in the Catholic Theology Department of the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. She is a Fellow of the Gender, Sex and Power research group at Notre Dame University in the USA. She has just published a book together with Christoph Röhl: Only Truth Saves: Abuse in the Catholic Church and the Ratzinger System.

About the Christ & the World Series

How can the process work properly? The churches in Germany are struggling to come to terms with the issue: the sexual violence that pastors (of all people) have committed against children and young people has caused a crisis of confidence. This also includes the question of how it could be that bishops and their co-workers hushed up actions, delayed transparency, and failed to take care of the victims. Christ & the World has researched and reported intensively on this over the past few months. We know that this is a difficult topic, but at the same time we want to fulfill our journalistic task by contributing to clarification and opinion-forming. Yes, but isn’t there anything positive? How are you doing better? Aren’t there people in the abuse scandal who have shown how to act properly? Oh yes, there are. And we want to widen our view for them – initially in a series of portraits: The author and scholar Doris Reisinger will introduce three people for C&W who acted wisely and decisively: three role models.