‘These brave sisters made a report and the Vatican buried it,’ says the Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, a canon lawyer and chaplain in the U.S. Air Force. ‘Now they’re scrambling – damage control.’

News reports about African priests who sexually abused nuns have cast an unwelcome spotlight on the Vatican. Sisters in five religious orders sent detailed documents to Vatican authorities, who ignored them for years. On March 16, the National Catholic Reporter – an independent weekly based in Kansas City, Mo. – published a lengthy investigation that drew on reports by the sisters in scrutinizing a pattern in sub-Saharan Africa of women relegated to roles "culturally subservient to men." Another factor, according to the NCR, is that in "countries ravaged by HIV and AIDS, young nuns are sometimes seen as safe targets of sexual activity" by priests.

  Priests who impregnated nuns reportedly facilitated abortions. In one case, a priest presided over the funeral of a sister he impregnated, and who died having an abortion. Other news agencies quickly obtained copies of the documents and began follow-up reports.

  Sexual scandals in the church, once unthinkable, are no longer rare.

Scores of pedophilia cases involving priests drew heavy news attention in the 1990s. More recent reports about priests with AIDS have magnified questions about celibacy and institutional secrecy.

  News organizations tend to separate these issues from Pope John Paul II. The pope who performed so brilliantly on the geopolitical stage in the fall of Communism, after all, cannot be responsible for every single priest. But now Pope John Paul II’s style of governing is at issue. And as the pope’s handling of these issues draws attention, so do the opinions of a high-profile reform priest whose career underwent a 180 degree-turn because of a pedophilia scandal in Louisiana.

"These brave sisters made a report and the Vatican buried it," says the Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, a canon lawyer and chaplain in the U.S. Air Force. "The [Vatican’s] justification was ‘we’ll investigate but we want to avoid scandal.’ It’s an old line but they’ve tried it so many times. So now they’re scrambling – damage control."

  Doyle has watched a myriad of damage control disasters in the church. A Dominican priest with captain’s rank in the air force, Doyle, 56, is stationed at the military base in Tinker, Okla. For years he has grappled with concealment tactics by the hierarchy, first as an inside adviser, now as a whistle-blowing critic. His odyssey is a sign of the church’s crisis, writ large.

  In the 1970s, with a masters in theology from Aquinas Institute in Dubuque, Iowa and a canon law degree from Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., Doyle was working in the Chicago archdiocese, helping couples with marriage annulments. In 1984, Archbishop Pio Laghi, the papal ambassador, asked him to join the embassy staff in Washington as canon lawyer – a fast-track position for the Vatican diplomatic corps and to become a bishop.

  A few months into the job Doyle became immersed in the case of Gilbert Gauthe, the priest who molested dozens of children in several Cajun parishes. Gauthe was indicted in September 1984. Civil suits were filed against the diocese by several attorneys on behalf of abused children. When Lafayette attorney J. Minos Simon named Pope John Paul II as a defendant in a legal motion, Doyle got concerned. Suing the pope was a technicality; but the damaging headlines were a sign at the Vatican Embassy that church officials in Louisiana did not have a grip on the problem.

  Week by week, as similar cases surfaced in other states, Doyle saw that bishops had no clue on the magnitude of what was developing. He turned for help to Rev. Michael Peterson, a psychiatrist who founded St. Luke Institute, a clergy mental hospital just outside the nation’s capital in Suitland, Maryland. Meanwhile, Lafayette attorney F. Ray Mouton Jr., who was defending Gauthe on criminal charges, sought help from Peterson on a possible insanity defense.

  Although Mouton eventually discarded that part of his strategy, Peterson felt it beneficial to introduce him to Doyle. "When I first met Tom Doyle in the Vatican Embassy he knew nothing about pedophilia," Mouton says. "Within a short time he was one of the leading authorities and one of the only two priests I encountered in the country who were unafraid to acknowledge the problem and deal with it honestly. … Tom Doyle always did the right thing. He has never hesitated. And it cost him dearly."

  In 1985 Doyle, Mouton and Peterson collaborated on a 93-page report that was sent to every U.S. bishop. The document reviewed the legal, moral, medical and media issues at hand. The bishops ignored the report. In 1986, at a conference of canon lawyers in New Jersey (with a New York Times reporter in attendance), Doyle called pedophilia "the greatest problem that we in the church have faced in centuries." Doyle’s comment sent shock waves through the American hierarchy.

  "It’s not a coincidence that when he began to speak the truth he was removed from the embassy and [lost] his teaching position at Catholic University in canon law," says Mouton.

  As Doyle became a pariah, ostracized from the leadership within the church, news coverage increasingly focused on bishops who had concealed and reassigned child molesting clergy – a problem that the 1985 document predicted would happen without a policy for responding to the crisis. In the meantime, Doyle took his ministry into the military. On the side, he counseled families of abuse victims, and in time, he began to give legal testimony in their behalf against bishops.

  Doyle views the news from Africa as "probably a much more widespread problem" than indicated by the five reports by the nuns’ communities. "Equity between the genders that we have is not there in Africa. The country that takes celibacy most seriously [within the church] is the United States, and there are a lot of breaches here."

As Doyle lost favor with the hierarchy, his former boss, Archbishop Laghi, watched the news media pound the U.S. bishops for a series of cover-ups and scandals. When Laghi’s diplomatic tour in Washington was done, Pope John Paul II named him a cardinal.

  John Paul II brooks no dissent on internal issues of the church. Theologians who question ancient church teachings on sexuality are routinely forced into silence. Under a global screening process, no priest who has ever questioned the church’s opposition to birth control devices can hope to become a bishop.

  The pope who insists on unquestioning obedience has lost control of a problem that is tearing at the heart of Catholicism: clerical culture itself. In 1997, the Hartford Courant reported that nine former members of the Legion of Christ, a religious order begun in Mexico, had accused the founder, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, of sexually abusing them as seminarians in Rome in the 1950s and ’60s. The accusers, eight Mexicans and a Spaniard, included a priest, a literary scholar with a doctorate from Harvard, a lawyer, an engineer, a college guidance counselor, and a former university president. They said the molestations by Maciel left them with traumatic scars.

  Maciel, whom the pope has singled out as a "role model to Catholic youth," refused to be interviewed. He denied the accusations after the Courant published its report.

  The Vatican never responded to repeated requests for a statement – not even offering a "no comment." A Mexico City TV station subsequently aired a documentary in which the former Legionaries told their stories. Journalists in Spain and Italy raised more questions about Maciel and his shadowy religious order. The pope’s response, in 1998, was to name Maciel to a synod of bishops.

What explains such institutional behavior? Every one of these stories – whether in Africa, Rome, Mexico or North America – holds the mirror on a calcified power structure. Pope John Paul II has failed to address the breadth of these scandals. Bishops who serve him – and orthodox Catholic intellectuals who applaud the pope’s crackdown on questioning theologians – have little of substance to say when a scandal erupts.

  Meanwhile, a group of Catholic critics has emerged, commenting on these issues. They include, among others, Rev. Andrew Greeley; Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister; psychologist Sydney Callahan; theologian Margaret Farley; theologian Rev. Richard McBrien; psychologist Eugene Kennedy; therapist and author A. W. Richard Sipe; historian Garry Wills, the author of Papal Sin; and James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword.

  "It is now de riguer for the author of the attacks on the church to claim to be a Catholic in good standing," fumed Ralph McInerny, the Notre Dame scholar and novelist in a recent essay for the Web site Beliefnet on the phenomenon of such critics. "We live in the age of the anti-Catholic Catholic."

  McInerny blames a popular culture that embraced the sexual revolution, and Catholic intellectuals at odds with Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on birth control. But decay in clerical culture is not the product of its critics, whatever their views on church teaching.

  Sexual segregation is a cornerstone of ecclesiastical governing, a system premised on the authority of unmarried males. Each new media revelation exposes another layer in the honeycombs of sexual secrecy – another cover-up.

  The American priesthood is aging, while the number of seminarians has dropped 75 percent in the last generation. Numerous studies show that opposition to the celibacy rule accounts for the dwindling number of priests. Although Pope John Paul II has acknowledged a vocations crisis in Europe and North America, he has pointed to packed seminaries in the Third World as a sign of renewal. Reports of nuns in Africa raped by priests may – or may not – be an extreme example of a problem. But the Vatican damaged its own credibility in assessing the problem.

  On Feb. 18, 1995, Sister Maura O’Donohue M.D. of the Medical Missionaries of Mary gave a detailed briefing to Cardinal Eduardo Martinez, prefect of the Vatican congregation for religious life. Her memo cited "wide-spread abuses" of African nuns. Nuns who became pregnant were often forced out of their orders. The priests were routinely transferred to new assignments.

  In response to media questions, the Vatican spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, issued a curious statement. "Work is being done both on the training of people and the resolution of individual cases," he stated. "A few negative situations cannot make one forget the often heroic faith of the great majority of monks, nuns and priests."

  There is certainly heroic faith among many nuns and priests, but in the Roman Curia heroic faith seems in short supply. Why were the nuns’ reports ignored for six years? That the sisters leaked sensitive church documents to the news media is itself a moral indictment of the Vatican’s inner workings.

  In his new book The Unhealed Wound, Eugene Kennedy, a psychology professor emeritus at Loyola University of Chicago, explores the conflict between church teachings on sexual morality and clerical life. Kennedy, who was a confidante of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, considers Pope John Paul II a tragically conflicted leader. "Theoretically, he understands and defends the unity of the personality, even in his writings on human love and sexuality," he writes. "How is it that this brilliant leader casts all this aside in his theological practice, to view men and women as divided against themselves, spirit warring against the flesh, chastity ranked above marriage, and the Church ever and always right in judging sexuality because, in the argument that admits of no discussion, much less dissent, the Church as institution can never make a mistake?"

  Doyle echoes Kennedy’s concerns, though – as one might expect from a canon lawyer – with a more legal emphasis. "We don’t have a separation of powers in the Catholic Church, as in the U.S. with the legislative and executive branches and the courts," he reflects. "The church’s legal system was born in the Middle Ages when the monarchy was the only form of government."

  Without a form of checks and balances, he continues, "you certainly have the potential for corruption, and in fact you have corruption. …The celibacy issue is a major problem and they don’t want to lift the lid." .

Jason Berry’s books include Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children.