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	Letter from SNAP to US Attorney's Office WBAY December 21, 2010 http://www.wbay.com/Global/story.asp?S=13724121 Letter from Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests to the U.S. Attorney's Office, provided to Action 2 News: December 21, 2010 To: James Santelle, United States Attorney, Eastern District of Wisconsin From: Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests Re: Destruction of evidence by Green Bay diocese of child sex crimes by priests, concealment and transfer of known sex offender clergy Mr. Santelle, I am writing on behalf of childhood victims of rape, sexual assault and abuse by clergy sex offenders in Wisconsin and our families. SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAPnetwork.org) is the oldest and largest self help organization of survivors of clergy sex crimes in the world. SNAP was founded in 1989 and currently has over 10,000 members in the United States alone. In February of 2005, a lawsuit was filed in Milwaukee County alleging fraud on behalf of the archbishop of Milwaukee and several senior managers of the archdiocese for concealing and transferring known sex offenders without notification to work with children and families in parishes and schools. That such a pattern and practice exists has been well established in thousands of now documented cases of child sex abuse by Catholic clergy around the United States. A national study by John Jay College of Criminal justice completed in 2004 and appended on a yearly basis, concluded that over 5,000 clergy have sexually assaulted children in the United States over the past decades; the vast majority were known to have committed these crimes by their superiors. Since 2005, cases on behalf of victims in the diocese of La Crosse and Green Bay have also been filed in civil courts alleging similar fraud. In 2007, the Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously upheld the cause of action in the 2005 claim, concluding that sufficient evidence existed of the intentional concealment and misrepresentation by Wisconsin church officials of known child sex offenders. The filing was significant since Wisconsin law, as of 1995, bars any negligence claims against religious organizations for sex offender clergy based on a 1st amendment ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the mid 1990's. Last month, the Wisconsin Appeals Court, in a consolidated appeal involving 13 lawsuits charging the Archdiocese of Milwaukee with negligent misrepresentations about priests accused of assaulting children, upheld lower court ruling that insurers were not responsible for damages because what the church is accused of doing is no "accident." Failing to use ordinary care to ferret out priests with a sexual abuse history and representing them as safe to be around children are voluntary acts, according to the court. It does not matter whether the church was able to foresee the sexual abuse - it is the misrepresentation that the children would be safe that is the cause of injury. Our concern today focuses on the diocese of Green Bay. Current and past Green Bay bishops, church officials and managers have been called as defendants in a high profile fraud case concerning a serial child sex offender, Fr. John Patrick Feeney. Feeney, according to hundreds of pages of previously secret church records, was directly reported to officials of the Green Bay diocese for repeatedly sexually assaulting children in his 40 year career as a priest. After transferring Feeney into well over a dozen assignments in northeastern Wisconsin, the bishop of Green Bay moved Feeney to a parish in Los Vegas, Nevada, where he went on to assault more children. Feeney was then eventually moved to California. In 2002, Outagamie County authorities arrested Feeney and brought him back to Wisconsin for prosecution for crimes committed in parish assignments in the 1970's against children, based on the tolling of the criminal statute for child sex assault under Wisconsin law. Feeney was convicted and is now in prison. Fraud claims against the diocese of Green Bay have were filed on behalf of Wisconsin and Nevada victims of Feeney in 2007. In a decision that mirrors the Wisconsin high court, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled this summer against the Green Bay diocese. Last month, a deposition in the Green Bay diocese fraud case was of Fr. John Doerfler. As Chancellor and Vicar General, Doerfler is the second or third highest ranking official of the Green Bay diocese. In his managerial duties assigned to him by his bishop and under the internal rules of the Catholic Canon Law, Doerfler is responsible for the maintenance of all clergy priest records and files of the diocese. According to the John Jay report referenced earlier, the Green Bay diocese, based on figures supplied to the researchers by the diocese, as of 2004 had documented allegations of child sex assault on at least 51 clergy working in the diocese over the past several decades. 16 of these direct reports involved clerics who live and work in the Green Bay diocese and are members of the Norbertine religious order, whose international headquarters is in De Pere. Catholic canon law requires that every diocese and religious order maintain in a specifically designated and secured "vault" a "secret archive" containing all reports, evidence, internal church investigations, mental health evaluations and assessments, and all materials, records and documentation, including decisions and orders by the local ordinary and his managers, of every cleric alleged or determined to have committed sexual acts against children and minors. Sometime in 2007, according to Fr. Doerfler sworn testimony, while under direct orders from the bishop of Green Bay, he and staff members of the diocese under his supervision began to deliberately and systematically destroy what appears to be nearly all records and documentation concerning sex offender clergy. This material would include criminal evidence of child sex crimes by clerics as well as evidence of fraud by the bishops of Green Bay and the senior management of the diocese. The document destruction was first ordered by Bishop David Zubik. Zubik has since been promoted by the Vatican to run the diocese of Pittsburgh. As a justification for his actions and the orders of his bishop, Doerfler, surprisingly, cites federal HIPPA laws, regulating health providers and insurers. In other words, the diocese of Green Bay is claiming that the destruction of evidence pertinent to both criminal authorities and the court examining their pattern and practice of fraud while employing Fr. Feeney was necessary due to the requirements of federal law. In our representation of clergy abuse survivors, we are requesting that your office investigate this matter to ensure that no federal laws have been violated by what appears to be an intentional set of actions to circumvent justice for the victims of the Green Bay diocese's astounding number of felony sex offenders; perpetrators that were not only allowed to continue working with children in Wisconsin but some known transferred across state lines where they continued their assaults on new victims. As in other cases across the country, the records stored within these dioceses frequently indicates a long history of continuous notifications to church authorities of these criminal activities, their knowledge of the nature and extent of the crimes committed and their understanding of the obvious risk they posed to innocent children and youth should they be allowed to continue working as priests. Similar to others dioceses, Green bay failed to notify parents, children or the wider community that they were retaining the services of known felony sex offenders, placing them in positions of authority with direct contact to children, and filing away this critical information in a locked vault. And now, after decades of concealment that has perpetuated some of the most abhorrent felony crimes in our communities, the Green Bay diocese suddenly destroys criminal evidence they have meticulously kept for decades upon decades just when our legal system is holding them accountable for aiding and abetting these criminals. Since our state tolling laws enable law enforcement to seek justice in cases where the offender has left the state, we are fearful that criminal evidence was also destroyed; intentionally disrupting future federal, state and local law enforcement investigations and the spirit and intent of our state laws. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first known instance of a Catholic diocese or institution destroying nearly all records of sex offenders; a trend that we fear will only magnify among its numerous institutions across the United States should the Green Bay dioceses actions be left unaddressed. Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter, Peter Isely SNAP Midwest Director John Pilmiar SNAP Wisconsin Co-director
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