SEATTLE (WA)
BishopAccountability.org [Waltham MA]
July 3, 2024
[See also the AG’s Petition and the Archdiocese of Seattle’s Opposition to the Petition. We provide brief excerpts of the amicus brief below. See also the full text.]
This amicus brief provides additional information to the Court as it considers the Washington Attorney General’s Petition to Enforce Investigative Subpoena.
There are conditions specific to Washington State and its three Catholic dioceses which create a special need for an investigation and report by the Attorney General. Many such investigations and reports have already been done elsewhere in the United States, often after disagreements about document production have been resolved. The record shows that the Archdiocese of Seattle’s own reviews of its documents have not yielded comparable results, and that other dioceses have recently shown more transparency. (pp. 1-2)
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ISSUES ADDRESSED BY AMICUS
A. Whether AGO investigations are beneficial and depend on documents.
B. Whether the unique situation in the Archdiocese of Seattle, and the Dioceses of Yakima, and Spokane, would benefit from an AGO investigation.
C. Whether the inadequate results of the Archdiocese of Seattle’s own file reviews make the AGO’s subpoenas more urgent.
D. Whether recent document disclosures by U.S. Catholic dioceses indicate a path forward for the Archdiocese of Seattle. (p. 4)
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The benefits of an AGO investigation and report go well beyond the identification of additional accused priests. The Petition has revealed to the Court the depth of information contained in the file of Seattle’s Fr. Michael J. Cody. When the files of all the known accused priests in a diocese are produced and analyzed, it becomes possible to discern patterns across the cases, to identify diocesan officials and bishops responsible for managerial misconduct, and to
confirm the use of costly treatment and reassignment strategies to maintain offending priests in ministry. As the Court has seen in the Petition, the survivors of abuse are themselves present in the priest files. But AGOs use grand jury testimony and hotlines or other outreach to hear directly from survivors. In combination with the diocese’s files, the witness of survivors provides a deeper, more complete picture of priestly abuse, childhood suffering, and diocesan misconduct. (p. 6)
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The Unique Situation in Seattle, Yakima, and Spokane
There are conditions specific to Washington State that would make an investigation especially beneficial, and also mean that an investigation and report would break new ground.
Native Children
No investigation by an attorney general has examined the abuse of Native children in boarding schools, missions, and Native parishes, a tragedy that is finally beginning to get the attention it deserves, thanks to the work of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. At least two priests accused of abuse have been assigned to reservation parishes in the Archdiocese of Seattle: Fr. William O’Brien at St. Joachim’s on the Lummi Reservation (1936-1949) and Fr. Michael J.
Cody at St. Paul’s on the Swinomish Reservation (1968-1970). The Jesuit abuse of Native children was endemic at St. Mary’s Mission in Omak on the Colville Reservation in the Diocese of Yakima, as recently described in the Washington Post and vividly mapped in a project called Desolate Country.
Institutional Abuse
The Briscoe Memorial School, staffed and run by Irish Christian Brothers in the Archdiocese of Seattle, was a “truly brutal place” that merits scrutiny by the AGO. (p. 10-11)
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The Archdiocese of Seattle’s Inadequate Use of Its Own Files
The Petition’s examination of the documents from the Cody file provides insight into what the archdiocesan files reveal about a priests’ abuse of children, the timing and extent of the archdiocese’s knowledge of the abuse, and its ways of responding: sending the priest out of state for psychological evaluation and treatment, transferring him to other parishes without divulging his abuse history to vulnerable communities, and its failure to act on the priest’s own wish to be laicized.
Our review above of other AGO investigations has shown that valuable results can be obtained when law enforcement professionals investigate a collection of files like this, especially when they have the trust of survivors willing to come forward. The Archdiocese of Seattle has not used its total access to its own files to comparable effect. (pp. 12-13)
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Kinsale File Review
McChesney and her Kinsale team have done many file reviews. There are irregularities in the assignments in the 2016 list that perhaps indicate that adjustments were made by the archdiocese to the information Kinsale provided. In light of the concerns outlined in the Petition, it is notable that the irregularities involve accused priests who worked in the archdiocese’s social services for charitable purposes.
For example, Fr. Dennis Muehe’s assignment history in the 2016 list indicates that he was “in residence” at four parishes from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s. This is usually an indication that the priest was working in a chancery position while he lived in those rectories. But the assignment list gives no indication of Muehe’s chancery position. It is from Muehe’s 1994 obituary that we learn he was the Director of Catholic Charities in those years. An article about an allegation against him provides a possible reason that his long tenure at Catholic Charities was air-brushed away: “Father Muehe was the Director of Catholic Charities for decades and was known to often have a foster child with him.” (p. 16)
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Recent Document Disclosures by Catholic Dioceses
That the Archdiocese of Seattle conducted three reviews of the vast abuse archive which it controls, with so little to show for the effort, stands in stark contrast to the file review it did to support its long-overdue 2004 request to the Vatican for the laicization (so-called defrocking) of Fr. Michael J. Cody – a 79-page document that includes 46 document exhibits, a letter from Archbishop Brunett analyzing the Cody case, and a detailed table summarizing it. This
laicization request shows that the Archdiocese of Seattle understands that its documents are a crucial source for analyzing the careers and abuse histories of accused priests, and also for describing the archdiocese’s own role in those cases.
As we have seen, resistance to AGO subpoenas by dioceses is common but can be dealt with. Document production in clergy abuse litigation and investigations will almost always encounter privilege claims from dioceses and religious orders, demands for redactions, and requests for protective orders. It is no accident that many of the Cody documents, eventually made public at trial, are stamped: “Sensitive Information” Per Protective Order.
Nevertheless, the public release of large diocesan abuse archives has been included as a nonmonetary clause in major abuse settlements, with the result that over 200,000 pages of church files are now publicly available. Four archdioceses have posted document archives on their own websites: the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the Archdiocese of Chicago, and the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee integrated the documents into its list of accused priests: clicking on a name brings the reader to an information page, and scrolling down affords access to the priest’s file.
In the Archdiocese of Santa Fe’s bankruptcy, Archbishop John Wester recently agreed to
donate his abuse files to the University of New Mexico for public access. We might be seeing
the end of extreme measures taken by Catholic bishops and dioceses to resist disclosure and even
destroy documents, as described in a remarkable report commissioned by Bridgeport Bishop
Frank J. Caggiano and written by Judge Robert L. Holzberg (retired).
CONCLUSION
In light of these developments, the Archdiocese of Seattle’s resistance to subpoenas is
callous with regard to the victims of its priests and out of step with other dioceses. The interests
of the people of Washington will be best served if the documents about widespread child abuse
now in the control of the Archdiocese of Seattle are produced so that the AGO’s investigation can
proceed. (pp. 17-19)