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The Kiwi who's cleaning up the church for Pope Francis
By Adam Dudding
Take the motorway north across Auckland's Harbour Bridge and in 15 minutes you'll reach Albany. There the once-green rolling hills are carpeted with light-industrial business parks – hectare after hectare of grey, low-rise boxes clumped into small groups around a carpark, with a roadside sign vaguely hinting at what might be going on inside. In one of these grey boxes, a stone's throw from the Albany Expressway interchange, the occupants include an animal-exporting business, a builder who's never there, a web design company, and a smiley, white-haired Yorkshireman in his late 60s who occupies a small office with a computer, a meeting table and a view of a roundabout. His name is Bill Kilgallon, and his job is to help dig the Catholic Church out of a deep, ugly hole. Since the mid-1980s, when the first reports of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests began to appear in the US, the scandal has mushroomed: the American church has spent a reported $3 billion settling lawsuits with victims. Abuse in church-run boys' school in Ireland was described in a 2009 report as having been at "epidemic" levels. Senior church officials have been sacked for moving known paedophile priests from diocese to diocese, or even between countries. Last year Pope Francis reportedly told an Italian journalist that as many as 1 in 50 members of the Catholic clergy was an abuser. In New Zealand, meanwhile, at least a dozen priests or members of Catholic orders have been convicted of sexually abusing children. Kilgallon has two quite distinct jobs addressing this scourge. Since 2010 he's been director of the New Zealand church's "National Office for Professional Standards" (NOPS), meaning he handles complaints from anyone who says they've been abused by a priest or member of a Catholic religious order in New Zealand, and plans strategies for preventing future abuse. That's a paid, four-day-a-week job. In March last year, though, he was shoulder-tapped to join the "Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors", a team of 17 people from around the world reporting directly by the Pope with advice on how to tackle the sex abuse crisis. Kilgallon's fellow commissioners include a former Polish prime minister, clergy, child-protection experts and two victims of clergy abuse. It's an unpaid post, apart from travel expenses. In October he's off to the Vatican to meet his boss in person for the first time. "I'll have to improve my Italian a bit, because he doesn't use English." ROMAN DAYS As it happens, Kilgallon speaks pretty good Italian, a legacy of his time in Rome training as a priest. He was born in County Mayo, Ireland, in 1946 and moved to Leeds in the north of England four years later. He's arrived in New Zealand with his wife Stephanie just four years ago, having followed in the footsteps of adult sons who emigrated here half a decade earlier (one of them's a journalist whose byline you've probably seen before in this newspaper). Kilgallon's father was a miner who was determined his sons wouldn't be. There were 250-odd families in the housing estate where Bill grew up, and was the first resident ever to get a tertiary qualification. He wanted to work with people. He wasn't fervently religious, but could see that church was the focal point of his community and that priests were the people lifting other people up through education. He wanted in. He trained two years in England, four in Italy. Rome, with its ferment of radical politics from the right and the left, was an exciting place in the mid-60s. As Kilgallon recalls, the best speakers at the political rallies in the piazzas tended to be from the Communist party. The church seemed to be changing too: many Catholics were captivated by the radical "liberation theology" emerging from South America with its emphasis on the connection between Christianity and activism, especially in relation to social justice and poverty. Back in Leeds as an assistant priest, Kilgallon noticed homeless people were using the cathedral as a place of refuge, and set up a homeless day centre in the crypt. From that matter-of-fact starting point, his career is a daisy-chain of logical steps. Over the decades, the homeless shelter morphed into a large social services charity with over 800 staff and Kilgallon at its helm, offering addiction, disability and mental health services. When Kilgallon saw council and health trust rules were blocking homeless people's access to healthcare, he got involved in local politics to change the rules. Along the way, he shed the dog-collar. Neither marriage to Stephanie, nor political engagement, were compatible with remaining a priest. He also became an organisational Mr Fixit, leading four inquiries into failing social care organisations, including one into allegations of sexual, physical and emotional abuse in children's residential care services run by a local authority. In 2006, when the Catholic Church of England and Wales set up a "National Catholic Safeguarding Commission" to try to manage its response to the priestly paedophile scandal sweeping the globe, Kilgallon was just the man to chair it. DECADES OF SCANDAL After years of reading shocking headlines that it can feel like the church has been dealing with a sex abuse crisis forever. But Kilgallon points out that that's not really the case. For the longest time, not only were most Catholics unaware of what had been going on in their church, but most people in society were unaware of how widespread sexual abuse of children by people in positions of trust and power was in general. When Kilgallon completed a (totally secular) MA in social work at Warwick University in the mid-1970s, child sexual abuse wasn't even on the curriculum. In the mid-1980s, thought, the scale started to become apparent. Abuse of children occurs in every country and in every society, says Kilgallon, and religion isn't a necessary component. "Every organisation where you've got people who have some authority over others is vulnerable to this." The reason we didn't hear about it for centuries, says Kilgallon, is that "children were literally expected to be seen and not heard and they didn't have a voice". The truth finally emerged late last century because some victims found the courage to came forward as adults to tell their stories, some people believed them, and some media were willing to report it. In Leeds, Kilgallon worked with paediatricians and police officers who were among the first people to recognise the scale of the problem – within families, within church organisations, within state facilities – and at first they weren't thanked for speaking out. "They were uncovering something people would rather not know about." ABUSE COMPLAINTS When Kilgallon arrived in New Zealand in 2010 he saw that the church was looking for a new director of the National Office for Professional Standards and applied for the job. It seemed tailor-made for him. The job has two parts. There's strategic work to make keep abusers out of the clergy and religious orders in the first, place, and spot them if they do manage worm their way in: improve recruitment and background-check protocols and so forth. The other part of the job is dealing directly with abuse victims who have finally decided to confront the church that let them down. Last year Kilgallon handled 30 complaints, and he expects that figure to keep rising each year: child abuse is a crime where victims can take decades before reporting it. So far, reported rates of Catholic clergy abuse in New Zealand has been lower than abroad, possibly because the church here has a relatively small role in running institutions such as children's homes. "In New Zealand institutions have mainly been by government, and there's nothing to suggest they were any more free of abuse than other organisations around the world." Complaints that arrive at NOPS' door range from indecent touching to indecent assault through to rape. Some offending was a one-off; some occurred over months or years. Victims' ages at the time of the offences range from eight or nine to teenaged. The earliest offending Kilgallon has been told about happened in the late 1940s; the most recent in the late 1980s. Many offenders have already died. Often the offender has already been convicted in relation to other victims. Wwhat really matters, though, isn't the extent of the offending, but the severity of its impact. "The damage done can be very long-lasting – it affects mental health, the ability to form relationships, it affects confidence," says Kilgallon. "That's why I never refer to 'historic' abuse. It might be historic in that it was a committed a long time ago, but for the victim, when they come to me and say 'I was abused 20 years ago', they're still going through the pain." The blandness and non-churchiness of his office is deliberate – if someone has been abused by clergy, crosses and bleeding hearts and statues of the Virgin Mary may be the last things they want to see. After meeting a complainant, Kilgallon will appoint an investigator to look into the case. The investigator (often a former cop) will write a report that's seen by one of three six-person committees around the country. The panel decides if the complaint stands up on the "balance of probabilities", and if so the church takes action. Usually there will be a personal apology from the relevant bishop. Counselling may be offered. Sometimes there'll be a cash payment – Kilgallon won't name a figure, beyond saying they are "in the line of New Zealand payments" and not the huge figures you might see in the US. As recently as a decade ago, abuse victims were asked to sign confidentiality agreements when receiving payouts. That would never happen now, says Kilgallon. Where it looks like a crime was committed and the abuser is still alive, Kilgallon will encourage the victim to go to the police. A very small proportion of complaints turn out not to stack up when investigated. Some complainants are upset when they come in, others calm. Some people write things down so they don't have to describe their experience out loud. They're not nice stories to tell or hear, says Kilgallon. "You've got to listen very carefully to the person and give them the support neccesary at the time, and you've got to be able to listen to nasty experiences without falling to pieces in the interview, because that doesn't help anybody" Yet you can't listen "without an emotional reaction. The things they've gone through are things that anyone with normal human feelings would find abhorrent." Earlier, when I ask him how long he thought he'd be in the job, he says: "Meeting someone who'd come in to make a complaint – if I wasn't upset by that, that would be the time to go". He says it matter-of-factly, in that blunt Yorkshire way, but his eyes redden at the rims and, just for moment, well up. THE NEW POPE Kilgallon is working to fix the Catholic Church's problem with child sex abuse, but he's clear this isn't a problem Catholics have a monopoly on. "It would be lovely and tidy if it was just one organisation, but sadly it's across the board." In Australia, a Royal Commission is looking at historic misdeeds at institutions including private schools and state institutions. Religious groups in the commission's sights include Catholics but also Anglicans, the Salvation Army and Hari Krishnas. (Kilgallon has previously said he wouldn't be opposed to a similar Royal Commission in New Zealand.) In the UK, there's an inquiry underway into how entertainers such as Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris were able to use their celebrity power to get away with abusing young people, and the same inquiry is looking into abuse in local authority and voluntary organisations, in the armed services and police, in the education system – and in religious-run bodies. And yet – surely it can be argued that the Catholic church has some special characteristics that made it especially prone to a fall from grace: celibate priests; a patriarchal structure that sidelines women and places at the very a man who's like he has a hotline to God. A culture of undeserved deference towards nuns and priests. Some of that's true, says Kilgallon, but not all of it. Celibacy seems to be a red herring: sexual abuse happens in religions that don't require celibacy, and in any case, "the majority of sexual abuse is in the family". The existence of a clerical caste is definitely an issue though, says Kilgallon, and the more extreme the heirarchy the bigger the problem. In Ireland, for instance, priests had such status that "people didn't believe they would do any wrong". Patriarchy's not helpful either: "In business, in social work, in a church – my experience is that where you've got a good balance of men and women in leadership positions, you get a far better organisation." For all that, he says the church is genuinely trying to get its house in order. Pope Francis's predecessor Benedict reportedly missed many opportunities to sack paedophile priests during his long service as a senior Vatican official before becoming pope in 2005. As Pope, Benedict made the right noises, expressing his "shame and sorrow" about the church's record, and defrocking priests. Yet there was anger over his apparent reluctance to hold to account the bishops who had harboured those priests or moved them between dioceses. Kilgallon met Pope Benedict in the UK in 2010. "Like a lot of things, when you actually sit down with somebody and talk to them about why they're taking an approach you understand it. I might have wished he'd done things in a different way, but he was following a path he thought would get good results and clear people out of the church." If that sounds like damning with faint praise, Kilgallon is much clearer in his enthusiasm for Francis, who became Pope in 2013. "He's been a breath of fresh air." Kilgallon has particularly high hopes for the Pontifical Commission he serves on. "The first thing the commission recommended to [Francis] was setting up a structure of accountability for bishops. It went to him, and was immediately set up. The indications from him are that's he's taking it seriously." Kilgallon is currently creating a template for the Commission from which the church in every country can build its own guidelines for responding to complaints of abuse and preventing it. Will the stain this has left on the reputation of the church ever be washed away? "I hope so," says Kilgallon, but it could take a long while. Good reputations are built up over time. Bad reputations are built up very quickly." But it's not really his concern. "My job's not about reputation. The only reputation I'm interested in for this office is that people can find help to get three things: truth, justice, and healing."
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