THE DIOCESE AND THE D.A.

Conte and the bishop have cut a deal

The church will open its files to the D.A. — but not to the public

It’s an elegant arrangement, this deal cut between Worcester County District Attorney John Conte and Bishop Daniel Reilly of the Catholic Diocese of Worcester. It’s also not all that surprising that they came to a deal. These are two powerful figures, one of church, the other of state, both Catholic, both accustomed to running their turfs on their own terms. Both are nearer to the ends of their tenures than the beginnings, or even the hearts. It may be the last defining drama for these men of authority and faith. At the very least, a deal prevents it from becoming a showdown.

To begin with, it’s a win for the D.A., and a big one. On Tuesday, March 12, it was announced that within two weeks, the Bishop’s Office will release to the D.A.’s office not only the names of past and present Diocese priests who have been accused of sexually abusing children, but all other information it has about those allegations. That will almost certainly include names of victims and other details vital to any prosecutions that may result.

The key to the whole deal is this: There will be no public release of the names of accused priests or any other details until or if there are any prosecutions. Not even the number of priests’ names under investigation will be disclosed; when asked, Conte simply laughs politely and says, “I’m not going to tell you that.

“Investigations are not public,” he says. “We are doing several investigations now and are continuing to do so.” 

It’s the perfect out for the bishop. Reilly has been under tremendous public pressure to release the names of accused priests — especially since the Boston Archdiocese agreed to hand over the names of 90 priests to authorities, and church  officials followed suit in cities across the country, including Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Until Tuesday, Reilly had kept to longstanding Worcester Diocese tradition and stonewalled on abuse accusations. Now that he has agreed to hand his information over to Conte, he no longer looks like he is protecting abusers. (Reilly has repeatedly declined to be interviewed personally by Worcester Magazine regarding this matter, although Diocese spokesman Raymond Delisle has been in contact with us on numerous occasions in the past few weeks.)

Yet Reilly still need not hang any of his priests out to dry (with the exception of Rev. John Bagley, a former Worcester priest from St. Mary’s Church in Grafton who was recently removed from his post after allegations involving sexual misconduct with a minor), as it has so long seemed he was trying to avoid. If any names are released, it won’t be by him and it won’t be until the D.A.’s investigators have built a case and filed charges.

He may also be able to avoid being in the hot seat for the hit that may be coming to the Diocese purse. It’s reasonable to speculate that no more than a few, if any cases, will be filed by Conte before Reilly retires (he hits the mandatory retirement age of 75 in May of next year). Before then, there might not even be public disclosure of how many accused priests there are on the hit list being put in the hands of the DA. And he may be gone by the time there are any announcements of settlement expenses such as Cardinal Law has been compelled to release (The Boston Archdiocese has announced it will spend up to $30 million to settle civil lawsuits in the case of de-frocked priest John Geoghan).

He can certainly trust Conte to be deliberate about releasing any of this information publicly. In his long tenure, the Worcester D.A. has become well known for his immunity to public demands for information he is not ready to release. Confidence is well-kept in that office (there aren’t many, if any, leaks from his staff as there may be in other jurisdictions) and Conte himself sets the terms for dealing with the press. Only he talks and only when he decides to. That can be frustrating for reporters; just ask Telegram & Gazette columnist Dianne Williamson, who has written about Conte’s reticence to often-hilarious effect. “The difference in other jurisdictions is like night and day,” she says. “Others have paid press people to keep the press and public informed of what’s going on. Conte, by contrast, issues press releases, many of them self-serving. The impressions the public forms are tightly controlled by him.”

It makes sense, then, that Conte ensured the deal would work well for his office as well as for the Diocese. He is the protector of the public trust and its safety, after all, and he has now won a very public tug of war with the bishop over this information. Although Conte says and has said for weeks that the Diocese was being “very cooperative,” he did give some hint that it took some work to come to an agreement. The week before the deal was announced, he told us the two sides were working together in “a step-by-step process” and added that he “wishes and wants more information.” Now he’s going to get it.

Don’t forget that D.A.s — or maybe it’s the public that does this — measure success by the rate of successful prosecutions. If the full list of names of accused priests was made public, not to mention details of such accusations, it could create a furor of demand that prosecutions proceed immediately, aggressively, and with a high resulting rate of conviction. So this way is much better for the D.A.’s office, and if it is smart and committed to the public interest, better for the public as well. By the time names are released, whether one by one or in lists, cases can be built behind the scenes. Prosecutions can be announced when there is confidence about the ability to win convictions — which often means not until victims are willing to cooperate.

This has been demonstrated in the past in similar cases. “A lot of the investigations and a lot of things happened in this particular area after we prosecuted a number of priests in the ’80s and ’90s,” Conte says. “We actually sent some clergy to jail. Fr. Kelley, Fr. [Joseph] Fredette, Fr. [Thomas] Teczar, and Fr. [Ronald] Provost (see “Predators among us,” page 11). As a result of that, I think, we had a surge at that time and now we’re getting the same thing.”

So the heat is off, for now. The bishop’s organization can continue church business, and will. Sermons are preached on Sundays and Catholics continue to worship. Fundraising for the 42nd annual Bishop’s Fund is beginning. The goal this year is to raise almost $4.5 million, a task that may be especially challenging right now. The Diocese will also host two major conferences in the days to come, one for women and one for men. The men’s conference alone, being held this Saturday, March 16, at the Centrum, is expected to draw up to 1,000 participants. Half that number is hoped for at the women’s conference on April 6 at the Centrum Centre. Two California speakers are coming in to address the subject, “Secrets of a Happy Family.” Bishop Reilly himself will celebrate a mass at the end of the day.

There is still one constituency to be heard from on the deal between the Diocese and the DA, but it’s the big one: the victims of alleged abuse — children and former children who say they suffered at the hands of priests, perhaps the most traditionally trusted figures of society — along with victims’ families and supporters. What they went through, the scars they live with, only they know. At the bottom of this affair is their pain. Once, in her column, Williamson, who has conscientiously covered this scandal since long, long before the current brouhaha, put it this way: “When a priest shamefully abuses his power, molests scores of innocent young children, and wreaks havoc on a powerful institution, someone other than God should characterize that “ministry” as what it is: an abomination.”

Looks like the someone, at least as far as Worcester is concerned, is D.A. Conte. It’s his job to prosecute criminal complaints, no matter that the accused are men of God. “That doesn’t make any difference,” he says. “None at all. Not from a criminal standpoint. We’ve prosecuted clergy in the past. As a matter of fact, I think we’re probably one of the first jurisdictions to do that.”

Conte describes the new agreement with the Diocese as all-inclusive, meaning the information he gets will pertain to past and present allegations. He stresses the point that his office will be guided by the law. “We are doing several investigations now and have been and will continue to do so,” he says. “The only active case that we’ve publicly announced at the present time is the case we’re doing in Bellingham [Rev. Paul Desilets]. If there are going to be prosecutions, of course they’ll be public.”

Even before the deal was announced, Conte was pursuing criminal cases involving allegations of abuse by priests. “We don’t have a lot of cases,” he said two weeks ago. “But we do have cases that we’re investigating.”

One of those cases is that of Rev. Paul Desilets, a former Bellingham priest. Bellingham is in Conte’s jurisdiction but is not in the Worcester Diocese. It is supervised from Boston, which gave Conte the chance to work with the Boston Archdiocese while he was negotiating with Worcester. It must have been a relative pleasure as, from the beginning, “anything we asked [the Boston Archdiocese] for, they have given us,” Conte says.

Naturally, Worcester Diocese spokesman Raymond Delisle defends his organization. “There is a tendency in the general public to assume that every Diocese is the same, and that Cardinal Law has supervisory authority over the Worcester Diocese,” he says. “This is not the case. The problems in the Boston Archdiocese are very different in scale and timing from the past problems of the Worcester Diocese,” he says. “When Bishop Reilly says, `We are not Boston,’ the simple fact is that we are not involved in these kinds of cases. The allegations of the past decade have involved past abuse from decades earlier with alleged victims who were already adults at the time that the allegations were received and often past the statute of limitations.” (More on that issue shortly.)

Unfortunately, this follows a decades-long history of the church protecting accused priests from public accountability. That’s got to be why, from the beginning, the D.A. made it clear that “we want all the names.” But for weeks before Tuesday’s announcement, it seemed that the only way the church was going to give out any information was in answer to specific questions on specific cases. (Again, the only priest to have his name newly released in the last few weeks was that of Bagley, against whom there is an allegation that refers back to 1967.)

According to Delisle, the bar was set at the point where a criminal complaint was made by victims. “Why didn’t they go to the D.A.’s office to begin with?” he asks. Why did they never file a criminal complaint? Why are people only filing civil complaints? There’s no way you can block someone from going and filing a criminal complaint, but they didn’t. And yet, it’s like, well, suddenly we’re stopping them from doing that. There’s no way to do that.”

Before releasing the names, Reilly made only one major public statement about the church’s response to the scandal. It was in the form of a pastoral letter sent out on Feb. 9 to area parishes. It expressed sadness, but no apologies. He urged “all clergy, religious, and lay employees, as well as all volunteers, to report any allegation of sexual misconduct to the Department of Social Services.”

The letter detailed different steps that are being taken to protect children but portrays the process as unfinished. The bishop mentioned the work being done at the Statehouse (see “Politics and strange bedfellows,” page 14), writing that “our revised policy on reporting allegations of sexual abuse of children will be reissued as soon as that law is passed in order to assure the faithful that we are following the procedures set forth in its amendment of Section 51A of chapter 119 of the General Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

Bishop Reilly did make a small, rather blunt, very revealing comment at a Mass on Ash Wednsday at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Collared by a reporter from the T&G, he was asked whether he would comply with Conte’s request. “We’ll let you know when we feel like letting you know,” he said. Apparently, he felt like it on Tuesday.

Phillip Saviano, who heads the New England Chapter of the Survivor’s Network of Those Abused by Priests, is one observer who’s completely unsurprised by Reilly’s attitude. “Well, I know that he’s been far behind what Cardinal Law is doing,” Saviano said before the deal with the D.A. was announced. “And I think, probably, through much of his career as a bishop, Bishop Reilly’s been used to doing whatever he damn well pleases. So, this must be an unusual experience for him.”

Saviano has been through this before. In 1992, he came out with his first public statement saying he had been molested by Rev. David Holley in Worcester. “And what that did was, it sort of opened the floodgates for a lot of other victims who came forward about a lot of other priests,” he says.

Victim cooperation will be key to the successful prosecution of any cases Conte may bring to court based on the names and details he gets from Reilly. He declines to predict how many cases that may be or when they might be filed. “It’s very, very difficult because until we complete the investigations we really don’t know if they’re going to amount to anything because what we’re dealing with here is an awful lot of old cases,” Conte says.

One critical question for each case or set of charges is whether or not the statute of limitations has run out. Only if it has not is prosecution possible. According to the D.A., the statute of limitations for rape is 15 years; for indecent assault and battery it’s six years. What makes it possible that some cases based on old charges will bear fruit is that the clock stops if a suspect leaves Massachusetts. So, for someone like Desilets, who left for Canada in 1984, the case remains open.

Not all cases are criminal, either. Some exist only as civil lawsuits filed in Worcester. There are also some, like that of accused priest Ronald Provost, that are subjects of both criminal and civil cases. Provost was convicted on Jan. 29, 1993 in Worcester Superior Court and sentenced to 10 years in MCI Concord, which was suspended, with five years probation.

During the civil trial of Provost, then-Bishop Timothy Harrington, Reilly’s predecessor, was compelled to testify. He claimed that he did not know of charges that Provost had been taking photos of naked boys. The jury agreed that Bishop Harrington and the Worcester Diocese were not negligent. It’s a precedent that Reilly must know well.

Reilly came to Worcester as bishop eight years ago. When he arrived, there were already allegations swirling around the diocese about sexual abuse cases. He has long held his silence.

That leaves Worcester Diocese spokesman Delisle, who may currently be the hardest working person in the city of Worcester, to represent the Diocese position on these cases. It can’t be comfortable, and his language often reflects that. “Our diocesan attorney has responded to the district attorney, noting that the Diocese will cooperate with his office on a case-by-case basis,” Delisle said before the agreement to hand over information was reached. “We are cooperating with the district attorney, as soon as any alleged victim decides to take their case to the authorities to file a criminal complaint.”

Sadly, all of this follows a long history of sexual abuse of children at the hands of clergy, not to mention the secrecy surrounding that abuse. In 1996, during a civil suit between Edward Gagne against priests Brendon O’Donahue and Peter Inzerillo, as well as Bishop Timothy Harrington, retired Bishop Bernard Flanagan, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester, evidence was reported of sexual misconduct by priests going back to the 1950s. There were also documents discovered portraying the religious leaders of the diocese as being aware to the abuse.

According to Delisle, the Worcester Diocese has not followed the church’s long practice of moving accused priests from parish to parish without revealing charges to parishioners. “Those involved in child sexual abuse [in Worcester] have not been returned to any priestly ministry.” In Inzerillo’s case, the diocese has said that he has remained an active priest because he has never been convicted of a crime and that the alleged abuse was against a 19-year-old man and not a minor.

One ray of hope is the attachment parishioners have to the church and to their priests. Bob George, a parishioner at Blessed Sacrament in Worcester, says that this scandal hasn’t changed his feelings at all. “No, we have a wonderful pastor, Fr. Charles Dumphy,” he says, going on to talk about Christian values. “Love your God above all things and love your neighbor.”

March 14, 2002  Worcester Magazine

aoconnor@worcestermag.com

Predators among us

The Worcester Diocese has been tainted by sexual-abuse allegations against priests whose names have reached the ears of the public. Following are a few examples.

• On Feb. 12 of this year, a Boston Herald article revealed that accused pedophile Rev. Thomas Kane, who had been “missing” according to the Worcester Catholic Diocese, was actually receiving a regular check from the church.

Kane was named in two child molestation lawsuits dating from 1993. He settled a 1995 lawsuit with Mark Barry of Uxbridge for $42,500. Kane also was notorious for his connection to the House of Affirmation in Whitinsville.

The House of Affirmation was a counseling facility where priests with problems would be quietly sent by the church for counseling. It had been founded only a few years before and had several locations across the country. The local one, in Whitinsville, was shut down after a scandal regarding its finances. Kane was right in the middle of that one.

“The House of Affirmation was founded for people who were struggling with the vocation. It wasn’t a sex counseling place or anything like that,” Ray Delisle, spokesman for the Worcester Diocese, says. “After Vatican Council II, there were priests who were struggling with whether or not their vocation still made sense to them. So, it was a place for them to go to be able to focus on that.”

Former Worcester Magazine co-editor Paul Della Valle reported in 1992 that Kane had embezzled a large sum of money from The House of Affirmation, which he helped found in 1973. There was no criminal case because Kane made an out-of-court settlement. The money that he was taking was thought to be going to support real estate investments. Among other properties, Kane was caught owning an inn in Isleboro, Me. (which he would later sell for $650,000), condominiums in Florida and Boston, and a Newbury Street pet store in Boston reportedly called Fish on a Lease.

Kane is currently reported to be in Mexico.

• On Feb. 10, 2002, a newspaper story appeared in Worcester concerning Rev. Thomas Teczar, who was accused of sexual abuse in a 1996 lawsuit filed in Worcester Superior Court. Through letters written from then-Bishop Bernard Flanagan to Monsignor David M. Elwood, it was reported, the Worcester Catholic Diocese knew it had a problem with Teczar as early as 1967.

On August 13, 1998, The Fort Worth Star Telegram in Texas detailed how Teczar arrived in that city in 1988 after spending a year in therapy at a House of Affirmation in California.

Bishop Joseph Delaney of the Fort Worth Diocese was quoted as saying he didn’t know about Teczar’s numerous allegations of sexual abuse when the priest was assigned there. “I am told that the bishop in Worcester wrote letters to other bishops detailing Fr. Teczar’s history,” Delaney said, “but I did not get that information.”

Teczar is currently 60 years old and living in Dudley, according to the Telegram & Gazette.

• Rev. Victor Frobas is another local Roman Catholic priest alleged to have sexually molested boys in the past. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article last Monday (March 11) saying that Frobas spent 25 months in a Missouri prison after pleading guilty in St. Louis County Circuit Court of molesting two boys, who were 13 and 15 at the time.

Frobas moved to Massachusetts in 1977, when he came to the House of Affirmation in Whitinsville. Reportedly, Frobas was at the House of Affirmation to be treated for pedophilia. At this time, the priest was assigned to St. Rose of Lima parish in Northboro, where he organized the altar boys.

The Post-Dispatch story says that in 1978, Barry Houle of Northboro and his parents told then-Worcester Bishop Timothy Harrington and the director of the House of Affirmation that Rev. Frobas was a sexual molester. “I told them exactly what he had done to me,” Houle told the paper. “Harrington said, ‘You don’t have to go to the authorities.’ He promised that he would deal with the matter. I never was an altar boy again. I found out much later that Frobas stayed several more months and molested more boys.”

When Frobas died at age 55 in 1993, he had both criminal charges and law suits pending.

            — A.O’C.

Politics and strange bedfellows

here’s a bill before the state Legislature that could force churches to report future allegations of abuse at the hands of priests.

At present, there is a double standard where the church is concerned. For example, if a schoolteacher knew what the bishop knew about charges of abuse and didn’t immediately call the police to report the allegations, that teacher could be prosecuted. But the law that exempts clergy from the “mandated reporting” of allegations of abuse may soon be changed. “Priests should be mandated reporters,” says state Rep. Vincent Pedone of Worcester. “Teachers have this responsibility. Doctors have this responsibility. So priests should have this responsibility. And if anybody in the helping professions doesn’t follow the law, they should be prosecuted.”

 The state House and Senate are considering two bills that would bring clergy under the umbrella of the law requiring people who come into contact with children through their profession to report any evidence of abuse. House and Senate leaders are meeting this week to try and work out the differences in the respective bills.

“Both the House and Senate are on the same page,” says state Sen. Cheryl Jacques (D-Needham), a former criminal prosecutor specializing in child-abuse cases, who sponsored the Senate version of the bill. “We both want mandatory reporter laws that make clergy subject to the mandatory reporting law like doctors.”

The major differences between the two bills involve the age of the victim and the “scope of the exclusion” of information gleaned through confession, or similar religious encounters.  State law now reads, “A priest, rabbi, or ordained or licensed minister of any church or an accredited Christian Science practitioner shall not, without the consent of the person making the confession, be allowed to disclose a confession made to him in his professional character.”

According to Jacques, the House version makes it voluntary for clergy to report any information that’s not protected by existing law. The Senate version of the bill, however, would force the clergy to report any information about abuse that is not learned in a confession.

Pedone says his reading of the existing law is that in order for information about abuse to be protected, it  “would have to be spiritual counseling or in the sanctity of reconciliation and confession.” However, “if this is Priest Joe Talking to Priest Sam and he says, ‘Yeah, I just grabbed that little kid walking down the aisle,’ that needs to be reported,” Pedone says.

Given the heat of events in Boston, Worcester, and across the country, the Legislature may soon produce a bill that increases the responsibility of clergy to report abuse.  Regardless of the final language chosen, however, legislators say the sanctity of the confessional will not be violated.

As for the Worcester diocese, spokesman Delisle says it is already complying with much of the spirit of the mandated reporting law. “Currently, if the allegation involves child sexual abuse [of] a minor, the allegation goes right to DSS,” he says. “It is also important to note that there are no pending cases or allegations against priests involving an alleged victim who is still a minor.”

            — A.O’C

direct link, To Worcester Magazine and this story

June 14, 2002