Ten years ago, Fr. Tom Doyle, 50, made a decision he says erased any hope he might have had for upward mobility on the ladder of church employment. But this decision, according to Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, SNAP, has allowed him “more than any other priest in the United States” to bring hope and healing to hundreds of victims of clerical sex abuse.
A decade ago, Doyle, at the time a canon lawyer at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, became aware of the problems of sex abuse among Catholic clergy. He had been monitoring correspondence for what was perhaps the first highly publicized case of clerical abuse in the United States – a lawsuit in the Lafayette, La., diocese.
Joining ranks with attorney Ray Mouton, the lawyer defending the Lafayette priest, and the late psychiatrist and Catholic cleric Michael Peterson, who was acting as a referral person for the Lafayette diocese, Doyle helped produce an extensive report about the clergy sex abuse problem. That document may have been the begining of the end of Doyle’s standing in the official Catholic circles.
The idea for the report jelled after Mouton “found out the diocese was covering up for other pedophiles and began blowing the whistle,” Doyle said. Alarmed that the Lafayette scenario was occurring “a lot” elsewhere, Doyle said the three professionals were compelled to do something about it.
Their report on the issue was a “freewill offering” to the bishops, Doyle said. “I had talked to a number of bishops and asked how we could help. They suggested this particular format,” Doyle said. “At that time, a lot of the bishops were just baffled by this whole thing because, very quickly, a lot of cases were popping up.”
The inch-thick dossier provided a comprehensive analysis of sexual problems among Roman Catholic clerics, legal advice, suggestions for clinical evaluations and treatment and aftercare planning for priests. Most important, it outlined a “confidential crisis proposal” that included a national-level strategy to help the church as an institution respond to victims and their families when reports of abuse surfaced.
Doyle said that in the mid-1980s, he and his colleagues wanted to see a national-level committee within the bishops’ conference that would “hire the best lawyers, psychologists and pastoral care people to get a state-of-the-art analysis on the problem and … how to handle it.”
The authors’ primary goal, Doyle said, was “making sure the response to the victims and their families was total compassion.”
Doyle said the bishops initially favored the proposal, but “something happened” in the conference.
“All of a sudden, (the initiative) just flopped and fell through,” Doyle said. “I never found out exactly why. The steps we had taken to get them interested in a special ad hoc committee all of a sudden were shut down. They didn’t want to deal with it on that level.”
Doyle said no committee or entity of the bishops’ conference studied the issue seriously. One bishop, Doyle said, dismissed the crisis proposal as calling for a “SWAT” team. Doyle said another bishop referred to him as an “agent of Satan.”
The bishops’ response to the report over the years “was consistently very condemnatory of what we had done,” Doyle said. He said “the bishops’ conference did not use the power and information it had to take a leadership position on the issue. They took a defensive position. They tried to cover up and control.”
Early on in the clergy sex abuse scandal, bishops were reluctant to speak publicly of incidents for fear of scandal. Later, on the advice of lawyers, bishops failed to speak out or make approaches to victims for fear of costly legal battles and settlements. Some also said they were reluctant to publicly address increasing incidents because of concern for due process and the rights of accused priests.
Msgr. Francis J. Maniscalco, secretary of communications for the U.S. Catholic Conference, said the independent report was “parallel to education work the bishops were already doing for themselves” and that to point to the report as a “crucial step” in the response to pedophilia “is to overemphasize it.”
Maniscalco said that to “just write off church behavior as a cover-up is to ignore the context of the rest of society where these kinds of things are happening.”
