The Catholic Church 'excused and enabled' the sexual abuse of thousands of children by at least 169 priests in Philadelphia, a three year investigation has found. Ed Moloney reports from Philadelphia
Fr Nicholas Cudemo first got to know Ruth* in the late 1960s when she was eight years old and he was a teacher at Archbishop Kennedy High School in Conshohocken, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A priest since 1963, Fr Cudemo was a big sports fan, as were Ruth's father and older brother. They would go to games together or invite the priest over to watch them on TV. Often he stayed for dinner and sometimes he said Mass in the livingroom. Ruth's family felt privileged to have a priest spending time with them; he was, they believed, a good influence.
But a common interest in sport was just the priest's way of ingratiating himself with the family so that he could begin sexually abusing Ruth. The harrowing story of the repeated rapes and mental torture he then inflicted on Ruth and of how he got away with this and many other crimes for more than 40 years has just been published in what is "the most graphic and shocking of all the reports that have come out", according to Terence McKiernan, president of Bishop Accountability, which chronicles clerical sex abuse in the US.
The product of a three-year investigation by the Philadelphia grand jury under the direction of the city's district attorney, Lynne Abraham, the 418-page report pulls no punches, accusing church leaders and their aides of concealing decades of sexual crime committed by at least 169 priests against perhaps thousands of children of both sexes.
"We mean rape," the grand jurors state. "Boys who were raped orally, boys who were raped anally, girls who were raped vaginally."
Secret records hidden in the archdiocese's archives, the report states, show that two recent Philadelphia prelates, Cardinal John Krol and his successor, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, "excused and enabled" the abuse by burying the allegations so that they would outlast the statute of limitations. Investigations were sabotaged, whistleblowers punished, abusing priests promoted and transferred, and the public and police kept deliberately in the dark.
"In its callous, calculating manner the archdiocese's 'handling' of the abuse scandal was at least as immoral as the abuse itself," the report concludes.
The scandal ignited by US clerical abuse began just three years ago when the courts ordered the release of confidential documents held by the Boston archdiocese. Already it has become a full-scale crisis that threatens to bankrupt the Catholic Church in the US.
The Boston archdiocese settled with victims for $85 million and has been forced to sell church property to pay the bill, while an estimated $200-300 million has been paid out elsewhere. But these settlements may be dwarfed by the law suits in Los Angeles which, according to one reckoning, could cost between $500 million and $1 billion.
LIKE ITS COUNTERPART in Los Angeles, the church in Philadelphia, whose one and a half million faithful constitute the seventh largest diocese in the US, has avoided criminal proceedings thanks to a restrictive local statute of limitations. But survivors of sexual abuse in Philadelphia have begun a campaign to win what the victims in Los Angeles secured, a year-long window during which past victims will be allowed to sue the archdiocese. If they succeed, the financial crisis facing the American Catholic Church might well turn into a catastrophe.
"That will be a huge battle," conceded Marie Whitehead, who heads the local branch of the victim group, Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests (Snap) and who is herself a casualty of multiple clerical abuse in Philadelphia. "The church will fight it tooth and nail."
The clerical abuse scandals have exposed a theological and political fault line in the American church and sparked a bitter ideological conflict between right and left. Conservatives blame liberal theologians for the sex scandals and are using the issue in a wider struggle against progressive elements.
Their standard-bearer is the Rev Michael S Rose, an Ohio priest whose book, Goodbye, Good Men, alleges that a deliberate policy exists in some seminaries to screen out "manly, orthodox men" while welcoming homosexuals and dissenters into the priesthood. Some conservatives, such as history professor James Hitchcock, of the Jesuit-controlled St Louis University, go as far as to claim that the cover-ups exposed during recent scandals were orchestrated by gay sympathisers in the hierarchy, what some term "the lavender mafia".
The US hierarchy has sided with supporters of Fr Rose. The election of the conservative Pope Benedict XVI and the creation of an alliance between Bush- supporting Protestant evangelicals and Catholic conservatives on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage may herald an unprecedented period of discord in the American church.
The Philadelphia grand jury report does not differ from other American scandals in that the bulk of the victims in the archdiocese were boys, but the worst cases chronicled by the grand jury involved priests abusing girls. For those experts in sexual behaviour who believe that homosexuality is only one of several risk factors in clerical abuse, the case of priests such as Fr Nicholas Cudemo suggest that singling out sexual orientation as a cause of paedophilia may be too simplistic.
FR CUDEMO'S STORY, one of 27 detailed accounts of clerical abuse in the report, is certainly a horrifying one, but it also shows that clerical paedophiles in Philadelphia manipulated their victims in remarkably similar ways whether they were attracted to girls or boys.
After making friends with Ruth's family, Fr Cudemo moved in on Ruth. He took her on trips to visit his mother or for ice-cream treats, and to begin with everything seemed innocent. But the priest was biding his time, grooming the girl for serious abuse. Ruth told the grand jury that she was around 10 or 11 years old when Fr Cudemo began sexually abusing her, first by kissing her, then by touching her breasts and vagina, and then with oral sex. He started phoning her and telling her to do sexual things to herself, things she did not then fully understand.
Fr Cudemo began raping Ruth when she was 11 years old. After raping her he would hear her confession, telling her that the only way she could connect to God was through him. Not long after the rapes began, Ruth started menstruating, and before she graduated to high school in 1973, Fr Cudemo got her pregnant.
That made Fr Cudemo angry. He said the pregnancy was Ruth's fault and called her stupid. He took her to a clinic for an abortion, but left her to face the procedure alone. Afterwards, he once more blamed Ruth because, as she told the grand jury, he was "very pro-life".
In 1973 Ruth moved to Cardinal Dougherty High School in Philadelphia, only to discover that Fr Cudemo had joined the teaching staff. The abuse continued and worsened. She told the grand jury that Fr Cudemo started "bringing in other priests" to rape her, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups which Fr Cudemo would watch as they abused her.
The sexual abuse was horrific but so was the mental torture, as the report graphically records: "She became very upset as she recalled these events and had to take a break from testifying. Ruth told the grand jury that . . . He told her she was a 'walking desecration', that she was 'unworthy of God's love'. He made her feel ashamed, and then would hear her confession."
Fr Cudemo's sexual and psychological torture of Ruth continued until she was 17, but the consequences have been permanent. She has attempted suicide several times, has had seizures and has entered into several terrible personal relationships. Her husband told the grand jury that she still slept "in a position of fear with her arm covering her head".
Ruth was only one of at least 11 girls that Fr Cudemo abused during his teaching career, although the grand jury report lists only those who were the subject of formal complaints to the archdiocese. There were certainly many more. Other priests also abused girls - in confessionals, in rectories, in their homes and, in one case, in hospital as the girl lay helpless in traction after an accident.
The experience of Marie Whitehead, the leader of the Philadelphia branch of Snap, suggests that Ruth's ordeal was far from unique. Now a 58-year-old nurse, she repressed her memories until her 40s when she began experiencing emotional crises and went for counselling.
"Somebody asked was I ever sexually abused . . . and the memories came back, hundreds of memories over a two-and-a-half-year period," she says. "It was bad. It was rape by my parish priest, it was torture, it was beatings, and other priests were involved. . . Like 83 per cent of victims, I didn't tell anybody".
At Snap meetings across the US, she says, more women than men turn up.
The Philadelphia archdiocese was well aware of the allegations against Fr Cudemo, as it was about the scores of other clerics implicated in the scandal. But the treatment of Fr Cudemo served as a template for others.
Fr Cudemo was twice promoted as pastor to Philadelphia parishes and was shuttled from one school to another even as the allegations against him, finally amounting to 10, piled up, including a threatened lawsuit alleging that he had abused his own cousins. Each time, the archdiocese persuaded victims to stay silent. Fr Cudemo was allowed access to children despite the evidence against him and was finally removed from his parish only when victims threatened to name the cardinal in a lawsuit. Even then, he was presented with a certificate declaring him "a retired priest in good standing in Philadelphia", thereby allowing him to minister in Orlando, Florida, where he now lives in retirement. He was finally defrocked in June 2005.
THE PHILADELPHIA PRELATE in charge during the worst of Fr Cudemo's excesses was Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, an Italian-American from New York. His view, the report states, was that if a priest confronted with an allegation denied it, then the complaint should be deemed "not credible" and the case dropped.
The cardinal's secretary, Monsignor William Lynn, was charged with investigating allegations, but his inquiries "were designed more to discredit the victims and conceal evidence of their abuse", the report concluded. Victims who made allegations often discovered that their private lives were investigated more thoroughly than the priest's.
One seminarian who complained of boyhood abuse found his past life probed extensively and unsuccessfully for evidence of homosexual behaviour, and was expelled from the seminary while his abuser remained untouched. The culprit was "not a pure paedophile", Monsignor Lynn later explained, as he had also slept with women, abused alcohol and stolen money from parish churches. A nun who complained about a priest receiving pornographic literature was sacked.
The church in Philadelphia is now led by a former Vatican diplomat, Cardinal Justin Rigali, a close friend and adviser to Pope John Paul II who took over midway through the grand jury probe. At first he and his legal team greeted the report with a mixture of apology and anger, with one lawyer labelling the report "anti- Catholic", a none too subtle dig at the Jewish background of district attorney Lynne Abraham.
Since then, as the contents of the report have been digested by the Catholics of Philadelphia, the church has decided that staying silent may be the wisest option. No archdiocesan spokesperson would talk to The Irish Times about it.
• Victim's name has been changed