Sexual Abuse "in the DNA of Roman Church"

By Emma Alberici
The Lateline
February 26, 2013

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2013/s3699078.htm

[with video]

Transcript

EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: Just a short time ago we were joined from Irvine, south of Los Angeles, by Patrick J Wall, a former priest and monk who is now a lawyer and an advocate for victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Patrick Wall, welcome to Lateline.

PATRICK J WALL, ADVOCATE FOR SEXUAL ABUSE VICTIMS: Thank you.

EMMA ALBERICI: Now you are a former member of the Roman Catholic clergy. Can you tell us the circumstances around which you actually left the priesthood?

PATRICK J WALL: Well after 12 years in the monastery and six years as the priest, all six years I was assigned to follow perpetrators, I came to the conclusion in my early 30s that if I wanted to be a defence lawyer and to defend child abusers the rest of my life, that was going to be my next 40 years.

And at that point after, you know, discovering that this is just not an isolated phenomena to the diocese or the religious order I belong to, it's really a worldwide phenomena, I had to pull the plug and leave in '98.

EMMA ALBERICI: On your CV it says you actually worked as a fixer in the Church consulting on hundreds of abuse cases. What was your role as a fixer?

PATRICK J WALL: Well there are different dimensions to it and unfortunately I got to see it early in my priesthood, you know, both being on the finance council, being on the tribunal and then being in parishes where perpetrator priests were withdrawn. Essentially it was trying to put out the fire in multiple different ways.

One of the great lessons I learned on being on the finance council is that the donors of the archdiocese were telling the people who were polling them that the number one and number two issues for them about giving money to the Church - again, this is back in the mid-'90s - was the childhood sexual abuse problem.

EMMA ALBERICI: Can you give us an example of any of the matters you dealt with during your time as a so-called fixer for the Church?

PATRICK J WALL: Well, for instance one guy, I had to go and fill in a parish for him. He had a real strong addiction to 16-year-olds and doing everything - that was kind of his maturation age and going around with 16-year-olds. And after he was withdrawn and even after he had been sent to treatment, he came back from treatment and then he would wiggle his way back in and all of a sudden you'd hear from parishioners that he was showing up in people's houses.

And, you know, then at that point you report it up to the abbot, you report it up to the archbishop and they do make some changes, but eventually nothing ultimately changed until in the 2000s, long after I left.

EMMA ALBERICI: Why wasn't your role as a so-called fixer to take the issues to police?

PATRICK J WALL: That was never, ever part of the culture. And that's why I bring it up with everybody that whether you look at the documents in Los Angeles, you look in the documents in Dublin or you look in the documents in Sydney, they're all exactly the same. The culture is to keep it internal, deal with it inside and never ask for help outside ever.

EMMA ALBERICI: Did you think that was wrong at the time?

PATRICK J WALL: At the time, no. At the time, I mean, that's just part of the culture. You deal with it internally. It's not viewed as a crime, it's viewed as a sin, and that's ultimately one of the largest issues and it really didn't start changing in the United States until mandatory reporting in the late '90s.

EMMA ALBERICI: Is that when your mind changed about this?

PATRICK J WALL: That's partly when I was having the same epiphany, yes, that something had to change. That ultimately it's part of the culture, it's been part of the culture all the way back to the Didache in 60 AD and that there had been constant attempts by the popes over the years to curtail the problem, but it's never, ever been snuffed out. Childhood sexual abuse by the clergy and by bishops is literally - seems to be in the DNA of the Roman Church.

EMMA ALBERICI: Do you have any sense of the scope of these crimes worldwide, the number of priests involved, the number of victims?

PATRICK J WALL: Well the pretty constant threat analysis you have to do is after, you know, decades of cases that generally about 6 per cent of the Roman Catholic clergy is going to offend against a child in their lifetime.

So, you simply just got to do the math and calculate it out and that's about the chance that you're going to have. When you look at the cases in LA or you look in the cases in Philadelphia or you look in the cases in Dublin, that seems to be the number that holds pretty constantly, a good 6 per cent.

EMMA ALBERICI: The recent release of 12,000 documents related to the LA diocese, the biggest diocese in the United States, tell us about your role in that case and what exactly those documents revealed in terms of the extent of the involvement of the most senior clergy in the Catholic Church?

PATRICK J WALL: Well what we've found is consistent in the review of those documents, that there's a small control group and that small control group is made up of bishops, auxiliary bishops and vicars for clergy, that they handle all the cases internally and they never contacted police.

But the thing that became so heinous in the documents over and over again is that they calculated what the criminal statute of limitations were, they calculated what the civil statute of limitations were and in some cases they would order the priest to leave the United States.

Sometimes they would order them to stay outside the State of California and then at other times they would order them to absolutely remain in the facility almost like a clerical prison.

EMMA ALBERICI: Did the Vatican know this was going on?

PATRICK J WALL: Oh, complete with the Vatican approval. And they actually even consulted with the Vatican on many cases on exactly what to do.

There's a great letter from Cardinal Oddi in 1984, this is even before Cardinal Mahony came to power telling them to work with the famous seven Filipino priests that were allegedly raping the same girl.

And what they did is they actually paid to make sure that priests stay back in the Philippines and then what they attempted to do after that is they actually took that case through the civil courts knowing that they weren't telling the courts everything and they allowed the courts to make some - what are now pretty known to be bad rulings while withholding all the documents from the courts.

EMMA ALBERICI: Now you've been directly involved in those 2007 cases from which we've seen the recent release of those previously classified 12,000 documents. Now within that, is there any evidence that you've seen that links the Vatican directly to these crimes or to their cover up?

PATRICK J WALL: Yes, the names in fact were sent because part of the whole procedure to dismiss a priest from the clerical state, if you're doing on the criminal side, is to have to state the exact evidence.

So, for instance, they would need to be able to be able to - Father Lynn Caffoe, for example, they would need to be able to tell the 1974 incident, the 1980 incident, the 1984 incident with very clear and specific knowledge in order to be able to prove with moral certitude that Father Caffoe should never have been ordained a priest.

So that knowledge went directly to the Holy See and in many cases went directly to Joseph Ratzinger at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith before he became the Pope.

EMMA ALBERICI: Is it a coincidence, do you think, that these documents have been released in the United States and just weeks later the Pope announces his resignation?

PATRICK J WALL: I don't think there's a strong correlation between that at all. I think more importantly in Rome what the Holy Father is getting tremendous pressure over is all of the scandal that's come forward in his recent report by the three cardinals who did an internal investigation.

That - literally, you know, the kids are running the Holy Sea. That there's so many excesses and unfortunately parties and just immoral things going on in Rome that compounded by the problem with the Vatican Bank, compounded with the problem with Vatican links and so-called "The butler did it", compounded with the international problem of childhood sexual abuse - all of those things together brought tremendous pressure on the Pope to step aside.

EMMA ALBERICI: So do you think Pope Benedict feared a direct confrontation of sorts with criminal authorities?

PATRICK J WALL: Well, this ends it now, doesn't it? And it seems to have achieved its goal that he's no longer there, he will be out as of Friday and someone else will come in and he will just disappear into the sidelight. One of the things that we never got to see, unfortunately, because the German bishops shut it down, was an investigation in Germany about all the childhood sexual abuse cases there and how Joseph Ratzinger handled sex abuse cases while he was the Archbishop of Munich in Freising.

EMMA ALBERICI: You mentioned that roughly 6 per cent of all priests worldwide will commit some kind of abuse in their lifetime. That means of course that 94 per cent of priests are doing the right thing. Given that already we've seen a $660 million settlement in the US over 500 victims, how damaging to the Church do you think the financial settlements will be and how will that impact on their ability to do the good work that of course they do do around the world?

PATRICK J WALL: Well, I think people don't understand the depth and breadth of this particular institution, remembering that the Roman Catholic Church is larger than General Electric and General Motors put together. The Economist did an article last summer talking about $170 billion a year just in the United States alone.

When you take a look at the landholdings, they're one of the largest landholders in the world. In most companies they operate in a tax-free zone. They have investments that go back centuries. So this is a very well-heeled institution.

And the other thing is even if you have $3 billion in settlements in the United States that have gone out, that doesn't hardly even touch what they make in interest per year in the overall portfolio.

So, this really hasn't affected operations. It has affected long-term ability to raise money and I think that's what's most important, because what will happen is if grandma and grandpa in their last will and testament starts to make decisions that they don't want to leave their money to the Church, then long term, that will have some serious affect.

But the Roman Catholic Church operates their own insurance companies they're so large and so it's very difficult to see that even $3 billion or $4 billion will have any impact on them at all.

EMMA ALBERICI: Now you would be aware that Australia is about to commence a royal commission into ...

PATRICK J WALL: Oh, yes.

EMMA ALBERICI: ... child abuse among all institutions in Australia, but of course there has been a bit of a spotlight on the Catholic Church. What are your hopes for that particular royal commission?

PATRICK J WALL: Well I hope the royal commission has the moral fortitude to really go into the secret archives and to literally get the documents because unless they go and seize the documents, my experience has been as a Roman Catholic bishop or a Roman Catholic official will straight up practice mentor reservation and not answer a question directly under oath.

So what you're going to find is that there were perpetrators from the United States who were sent to Australia. There were perps from England and Ireland, the English-speaking world that were sent to go to Australia so they would be untraceable. And Australia in turn would have sent some bad guys to other parts of the world in order to protect the institution.

That's the kind of thing that are in the documents and if they take a good, hard, serious look, it'll - again, it's like opening up an onion; you will start to be able to peel it back and actually see the pattern and practice of moving these perpetrators around. And they're in the documents.

Just look in the LA documents alone. Look in what they found in Philadelphia in the grand jury reports, look what they found in Dublin in the Ferns Report. It's consistent across nation and across languages.

EMMA ALBERICI: Finally, I note you're now married and a father and I wanted to seek your views on the vow of celibacy and whether you believe it's a factor in the issue of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church?

PATRICK J WALL: Yes. Celibacy does play a role in this, but it plays a role because this is really a sexual system. So it's a celibate system on the face of things, but it's ultimately a sexual system where, you know, 50 per cent of priests at any time are not celibate. They have boyfriends, they have girlfriends. And when you have a system that ...

EMMA ALBERICI: Where is the evidence of that?

PATRICK J WALL: Well, every diocese has children that they're paying for, for education, because the priests have fathered them. If you look at the old stories about the parish living in-house secretary that would follow the pastors around. If you look at any kind of data regarding the sexual activity of the clergy, they will pretty much tell you, as long as it's confidential, that they either have a boyfriend or they have a girlfriend.

That's the way of nature. You can't really fight the natural law. If you have a great, big river, you probably should depend on the river and go with the flow of that river because that's the way Mother Nature and God has made us.

So, when you are going against nature and you have this celibate system of which the vast majority don't practice it, you actually have a sexualised system that is compromised. And so when you have somebody who's compromised as a bishop, when they try then to go and actually discipline a priest who is having problems or who is a child molester, then there's coercive power coming back and the actual practice of celibacy just doesn't happen in the real world.

EMMA ALBERICI: And on that note, we've run out of time. Patrick Wall, I thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us this evening.

PATRICK J WALL: Thank you.