New Bishop Learns from Sexabuse Crisis, by Mary Garrigan, Rapid City Journal, August 6, 2011

New Bishop Learns from Sex-abuse Crisis

By Mary Garrigan
Rapid City Journal
August 6, 2011

http://rapidcityjournal.com/lifestyles/new-bishop-learns-from-sex-abuse-crisis/article_3b014dc8-bec1-11e0-bfb8-001cc4c002e0.html

Robert Gruss, center, enters the arena during the opening procession for his ordination at Barnett Arena at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center in Rapid City on Thursday, July 28, 2011. (Aaron Rosenblatt/Journal staff)

In Catholic churches all across western South Dakota for the past 11 months, people prayed for the arrival of Bishop Robert Gruss, even before they knew his name.

Those prayers were answered when the 55-year-old Davenport, Iowa, priest was ordained as the eighth bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Rapid City on July 28.

But in Gruss’ home diocese of Davenport, where acrimony lingers over the $37 million bankruptcy settlement that Gruss helped negotiate with clergy sexual abuse victims, some people are still angry with Rapid City’s new bishop, and disappointed by his old diocese’s response to the crisis.

“I would say the Diocese of Davenport has a very, very poor record of, first of all, disclosing and then holding abusive priests accountable … and Gruss was part of that decision-making,” said Craig Levien, a Davenport trial lawyer who filed the first clergy sexual abuse lawsuit against the diocese.

Levien ultimately represented more than 100 victims of clergy sexual abuse in that diocese and brought about 25 lawsuits against the diocese, including the claims made by Michl Uhde of Davenport against the late Monsignor Tom Feeney. Uhde’s sexual abuse began when he was in the second grade and lasted until the seventh grade, and it resulted in a $1.7 million jury verdict against the diocese, leading to its decision to file bankruptcy. Uhde, 61, lost that verdict to the bankruptcy settlement.

The Davenport Diocese, home to 100,000 eastern Iowa Catholics, experienced one of the worst clergy sexual abuse scandals in the nation.

At one point, credible allegations that dated from the 1950s through the 1980s were made by about 200 people against 34 priests of the diocese.

By comparison, the crisis has left a much smaller footprint in Gruss’ new diocese, which has one-third the number of Catholics and about two-thirds the number of priests as Davenport does. The Diocese of Rapid City has experienced far fewer allegations of clergy sexual abuse. According to the victim’s advocacy organization BishopAccountability.org, about 30 victims have made historical allegations against six “credibly accused” priests since 2002, not counting accusations made by Native American plaintiffs against religious order personnel who ran missions and schools on reservations in South Dakota. That litigation is ongoing.

Davenport became one of eight U.S. dioceses to date to declare bankruptcy in a scenario that is routinely described by all involved as painful, brutal and divisive. In that bankruptcy, 167 victims were awarded $37 million, of which insurance companies paid about $20 million. Prior to that, the diocese had paid about $10 million for pre-bankruptcy allegations. And as chancellor of the diocese at that time, Gruss was in the middle of the legal cases and in the center of the media spotlight.

Uhde said he’s concerned that Rapid City is getting a bishop from a diocese that was dysfunctional in its response to the crisis. It initially refused to participate in the self-audits mandated by the U.S. bishops’ conference.

“He was probably the poster boy of many of the wrong decisions that re-victimized many of the victims here,” Levien said of Gruss. Like many victim advocates, Uhde and Levien want Davenport church leaders to reveal the current locations of all accused priests who are no longer in active ministry.

Gruss calls the Davenport crisis a “really sad and devastating situation for all parties involved” and agreed that his high-profile post often made him the target of public anger over the scandal.

“I became the face of the diocese in some ways, and it was something I wasn’t used to,” he said.

“It was challenging, being a priest and dealing with victims who have been abused by priests. The victims were angry, and they had every right to be,” Gruss said.

After a decade as a parish pastor, Gruss had gone to work full time for the diocese as its vocations director just as the national crisis was hitting its full stride in Davenport. When the diocese’s lay chancellor decided she could no longer deal with the demands of that job, in light of the burgeoning abuse crisis, Gruss unexpectedly found himself named chancellor in 2005.

“By default … that’s the way I think of it,” he said when asked how he was tapped by an ailing bishop for the job of overseeing Davenport’s response to its clergy sexual abuse crisis.

Uhde, who hoped to be a Catholic priest and entered a seminary for a short time, is still angry at Gruss for the way he handled Uhde’s initial allegations, made during a 2005 meeting, against another accused abuser, Bishop Lawrence Soens.

He accuses Gruss of stonewalling him about Soens. Soens went on to become a bishop in another Iowa diocese.

“I was so furious by the way I was treated. After that meeting, it was real clear that they weren’t going to give me answers voluntarily,” he said.

Joe Kelley, parish council president at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Davenport, where Gruss has been a popular pastor for nearly a year, said he knows nothing about diocesan negotiations over clergy sexual abuse, but he knows Gruss as a spiritually humble man who has been “a blessing to our parish.”

“I can’t see him acting out of any other motive other than to do the will of God in any situation. That’s what I know of him. I know he would act with compassion with anyone,” Kelley said.

Sacred Heart is an inner-city parish, with a cathedral that is more than 100 years old. “We have a lot of challenges,” he said. The parish had been losing members for various reasons in recent years, but when Gruss showed up, “we started gaining people and young families.

“He just has a quiet energy about him. The man is very humble and very quiet and very unassuming, but in the short time I’ve known him, I’ve found him to be a real godsend for us,” he said.

Kelley understands that there are people on both sides of the bankruptcy settlement who are unhappy with it — those who think it was too little money and those who think it was too much.

“There’s pain on a lot of different sides of it. I know there are people who are dissatisfied with the settlements,” he said. “Do I think it was fair? It’s not for me to say. I wasn’t abused. But I’m paying the toll on it, as are a lot of other Catholics in the diocese.”

Kelley pledged financial support to a $22 million capital campaign designed to get the Davenport diocese back on firm financial footing. He said he’s willing to pay for the sins of others because it’s the right thing to do.

“From the perspective of a Catholic sitting in the pews — we have to step up and do what’s right,” he said.

Gruss has had no contact with Uhde since the bankruptcy was finalized in 2008, but he said he made a decision early on not to take the anger of victims personally.

“A priest who abused his power and authority was the one who abused them. All I could do was be with them, personally,” he said. “I learned a lot about myself, but I also learned a lot about the travesty of this on the church and on innocent children.”

Those lessons made him a better priest, he said. He hopes they also will make him a better bishop for Rapid City.

So does Robert Brancato, head of the Rapid City chapter of the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests. Brancato was himself a victim of clergy sexual abuse. He attended Gruss’ ordination to “say a prayer that the new bishop would become as big a supporter of zero tolerance and open minds and open records as Archbishop (Charles) Chaput has become.”

Brancato said attending his first ordination was “tough for me. I ended up leaving early,” he said. He said he would have preferred the diocese pay for a smaller event and donate the money it saved to a victims support group, instead.

Gruss, who is looking forward to many things about his new assignment, is grateful that the scandal has been less common here than in Davenport.

“That would just mean that so many more innocent children have been hurt,” Gruss said.

“All of life’s experiences help make us who we are today,” Gruss said. “I think compassion has a little different face than it had in the past because of that. I saw the evil side of the church, but I also saw the healing side.”

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8424 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com