1) Dal sito dei Salesiani risulta essere morto un certo
www.sdb.org/index.php?ids=12&sott=2...le&cerca=+Cerca20/01/2011 P. Nugent Francis Edward 89 ICP
2) Dal sito dei Salesaini della regione Piemonte risulta la morte del prete a Torino:
https://sites.google.com/a/31gennaio.net/icp-news/defunti-1P NUGENT
Frank
TO - A. Beltrami
20/01/2011
TO - A. Beltrami
89
3) L'istituto A. Beltrami dei Salesiani si trova a Torino:
www.cylex.it/azienda/salesiani-don-...mi-6926138.htmlSALESIANI DON BOSCO-ISTITUTI SALESIANI VARI- CASA A. BELTRAMI
*
Viale THOVEZ ENRICO. 43
10131 TORINO , PIEMONTE
Telefono: +39-(011)-6601046
GEO: 45.054379, 7.703285
4) Sul sito dei preti accusati di pedofilia c'è un certo
www.bishop-accountability.org/pries...lastName-N.htmlNugent Frank 1956 P Settled Salesian
Woman complained that Nugent abused her and 2 of her brothers. Told order in 1994. Nugent sent for therapy and reassigned. Woman complained again to order in 1998. Filed suit which settled in 1998 for $250K. Also named in suit filed by 4 former students at a junior seminary.
La traduzione di google: Traduzione da Inglese verso Italiano
Donna si lamentava che Nugent abusato di lei e due dei suoi fratelli. Per Told nel 1994. Nugent ha inviato per la terapia e riassegnati. Donna si lamentava di nuovo ordine nel 1998. Archiviato tuta che si stabilirono nel 1998 per $ 250K. Anche chiamato in causa promossa da 4 ex-studenti in un seminario minore.
5) Gli articoli alle accuse contro Nugent:
www.bishop-accountability.org/news3...AbuseVictim.htmbuse Victim Is Suspicious about Timing of Apology
By Andy Newman
New York Times
April 11, 2002
Susan Gallagher received another e-mail message two weeks ago from the lawyer for the Salesians, the Roman Catholic order of the priest who had sexually abused her and two of her brothers in New Jersey and New York more than 20 years ago. It read like many others the order had sent her.
The lawyer, Richard Beran, wrote that the Salesians had taken all necessary steps to keep the priest, the Rev. Frank Nugent, now 80, away from children. That the Salesians would report clerical abuse in Massachusetts, where Father Nugent had also worked, when and if the state passed a law requiring it. And no, he said in response to a request from Ms. Gallagher, the Salesians would not release her from the confidentiality agreement that went with the $250,000 settlement they paid her in 1998.
The e-mail message that arrived five days later, on April 2, might have dropped from a different planet. It was from the Salesians' regional vice provincial himself, and it was an abject apology, the first Ms. Gallagher had received in the eight years since she first told the Salesians about Father Nugent's abuse.
The vice provincial, the Rev. James Heuser, apologized not just for the harm done by Father Nugent, but also for "the further pain you have experienced by our seeming failure to grasp the seriousness of your claims," which "only exacerbated the harm already caused you by Father Nugent himself."
He is now "being supervised in seclusion," Father Heuser wrote. He said the civil authorities in New Jersey and New York would be told of Ms. Gallagher's accusations.
In addition to a blanket admission of wrongdoing and regret like those issued by many Catholic officials in recent weeks, the Salesians, an international order of 34,000 priests and nuns whose stated mission is "to improve the lives of poor, innocent children," have begun the delicate process of extending personal mea culpas to individual victims of sexual abuse.
Father Heuser said in an interview on Tuesday that he wrote to Ms. Gallagher, 42, now a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, after spending part of Easter weekend reading over her letters and messages to the order, in which she described her pain and pleaded for the Salesians to come clean.
"I thought to myself, for her own sake and for her own ability to heal, I should write a letter apologizing," he said.
The day after he wrote to Ms. Gallagher, Father Heuser wrote in a news release -- prompted by an allegation that a Salesian brother had abused a boy at a Florida boarding school in 1987 -- that the order was "deeply sorry" for its mishandling of abuse cases and would institute reforms. Father Heuser said he had written personal letters to other victims, though he would not say how many. "We're trying to come to terms with the fact that some of our members have violated young people in grievous ways," Father Heuser said. "We need to be penitent."
Ms. Gallagher's lawyer, Stephen Rubino, attributed the Salesians' policy shift to the swift pace of events in the temporal world.
"They would have to be truly deaf, dumb and blind if they didn't realize after the last 90 days that they had to change, for their own survival," Mr. Rubino said. "They're doing the right thing because they've been hauled into the court of public opinion and been convicted. So this is an expression of remorse much like a person who is about to be sentenced in a criminal court."
Still, Mr. Rubino, who has handled dozens of clerical abuse cases, said he had never seen such an "unreserved admission of concern" as the one Father Heuser sent Ms. Gallagher.
In the mid-70's, according to Ms. Gallagher and several of her old friends, Father Nugent used his position as director of the Salesians' Don Bosco Preparatory High School in Ramsey, N.J., to serve as an all-purpose enabler for a group of wayward, mostly poor teenagers from the nearby town of Waldwick, including the Gallaghers.
They said he turned a stone house on school property into a sort of Plato's Youth Retreat, stocking it with vast amounts of liquor for parties, encouraging under-age couples to use it as a love nest.
At the center of Father Nugent's circle, Ms. Gallagher said, was her older brother Patrick, who was probably 12 when Father Nugent met him at a youth camp the priest ran in Ellenville, N.Y.
Ms. Gallagher said that Father Nugent lavished tens of thousands of the Salesians' dollars on Patrick, one of seven children of a perennially broke alcoholic single mother, paying for anything he wanted, like a trip to Europe, motel rooms for trysts with his girlfriends and endless beer.
Susan, four years younger than Patrick, was also on Father Nugent's A-list. She says he took her shopping often, bought her dinner at fancy restaurants and gave her hundreds of dollars to buy marijuana for herself and her friends, stuffing tightly folded bills into her pants pockets.
For Patrick, the price of this largesse was years of sexual abuse, Ms. Gallagher said. When Susan turned 14, she said, Father Nugent, a short, roly-poly man, started in on her, making her perform oral sex on him.
Patrick's older brother, Brendan, 48, who owns a bar and lives in New Orleans, said Father Nugent molested him once, too.
Over time, Ms. Gallagher said, Father Nugent lost interest in her, but not in Patrick. Eventually, Brendan said, Patrick began pushing Father Nugent away, but in 1980, while drunk, he drove a car owned by the Salesians into a pond and died. He was 25.
In 1994, long after the deadline for filing criminal charges, Ms. Gallagher finally told the Salesians about Father Nugent's abuse of Patrick. They removed him as director of a youth retreat in Ipswich, Mass., sent him to rehabilitation and paid for Ms. Gallagher's psychotherapy.
But in 1998, Ms. Gallagher learned that the Salesians had put Father Nugent in charge of the finances of a youth camp in Newton, N.J. Enraged, she told them about her own abuse and started legal action. The Salesians quickly settled with her.
Meanwhile, Father Nugent continued to live at the Salesian residence in Orange, N.J., teaching theology to college-age seminarians. Last year Ms. Gallagher learned that he had been asked to say a novena -- nine days of prayers and religious devotions -- near Scranton, Pa.
The Salesians, Ms. Gallagher believed, just didn't get it. "Imagine that a predator raped your daughter over a 10-year period," she wrote to Mr. Beran, the lawyer, in February. "How would you feel if you had to see that rapist placed on the altar year after year, provided with a position of religious honor, and selected to serve as a spiritual guide for younger priests?"
Shortly thereafter, the Salesians removed Father Nugent from the seminarians' residence. They will not disclose his present whereabouts, but one of their lawyers, Seth Taube, said, "He has been placed, without a car, in a location that is not near any youth facility, under the constant supervision of two other Salesians who are under instructions that he's not to go out."
As for Ms. Gallagher, she is not sure what to feel now.
On the one hand, she said, the apology lifted some of the burden that victims always feel -- that they are somehow to blame. On the other hand, she said, "it seems like they're only trying to cover themselves, and because they were finally left with no other choice. All around, what victims everywhere have faced for years on end is stonewalling and refusal. So this change is abrupt and profound, and somewhat mysterious. And not in a religious or spiritual way."
www.bishop-accountability.org/news3...nk_Nugent_1.htm Prosecutor Names Priest Suspected in Old Ulster Abuse Case
By Anthony Farmer
Poughkeepsie Journal (Poughkeepsie, NY)
May 2, 2002
The Ulster County District Attorney's office has identified — but cannot prosecute — a member of a religious order who allegedly abused a boy and the boy's sister while on a religious retreat in Ellenville two decades ago.
Ulster District Attorney Donald Williams said the Rev. Frank Nugent, a member of a Roman Catholic order, was identified by an attorney for the Salesians order. The lawyer contacted Williams' office with the allegations two weeks ago. The statute of limitations has expired on the case, Williams said Tuesday.
According to Williams, Nugent met the boy and girl while working at a high school in northern New Jersey, and that's where most of the alleged incidents of abuse occurred.
Nugent's "priestly faculties" have been removed and he is "not functioning" as a priest, said the Rev. James Heuser, vice provincial of the Salesians in the eastern United States. Nugent is in seclusion and under close supervision, Heuser said.
"We're trying to come to terms with the fact that some of our members have harmed the young," Heuser said Wednesday. "We're trying to take the steps that are appropriate to amend those situations as best we can and ensure they don't happen again."
The order reached a cash settlement with the alleged victims, but Heuser would not disclose the amount. The Archdiocese of New York has complied with the request of district attorneys in the region to turn over any files on priests accused of sexually abusing minors.
Thoroughness queried
But Williams has been concerned that the files turned over by the archdiocese did not include members of Catholic orders. Williams said he has identified several religious orders with connections to the county.
In some cases, allegations of abuse may have been made to a clergy member's religious order, rather than the archdiocese.
"We are writing to all the religious orders, making the same request of them," he said.
Archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling said the orders operate independently of the archdiocese, so the archdiocese wouldn't necessarily have such information. But the archdiocese is checking to see if it may have any pertinent information and will turn it over to authorities, Zwilling said.
www.bishop-accountability.org/news3...ed_Puello_4.htm Salesians Sued in Sex Case
4 Men Say They Were Molested at Seminary Nearly 30 Years Ago
By Gary Stern
Journal News [Westchester County NY]
October 1, 2002
Four former students at a junior seminary run by the Salesians claim in a civil lawsuit that they were repeatedly sexually molested by members of the religious order while living at the seminary between 1969 and 1973.
The lawsuit contends several Salesian officials then working at the boarding school for would-be priests in Goshen, Orange County, knew the abuse was taking place. One plaintiff, Joseph Lemme of Monmouth County, N.J., said details of his abuse reached the Rev. Emilio Allue, then seminary director and now an auxiliary bishop in Boston, whose only action was to dismiss Lemme from the seminary because he "was not priest material."
The suit includes as defendants the Roman Catholic order itself and two top officials of the Salesians' New Rochelle-based eastern U.S. province, contending that the Salesian hierarchy failed to protect those in its care. The Salesians' worldwide mission is to serve children in need.
"The plaintiffs are concerned that nobody else be subject to these kinds of assaults," said Marcia Goffin, a Manhattan lawyer representing the plaintiffs. "The Salesians deal with children. We want to ensure that the defendants over whom they still have authority no longer deal with kids. And we want the Salesians to recognize what happened to our clients."
The suit seeks an unspecified amount of damages. It was filed in state Supreme Court in White Plains Sept. 5.
The four plaintiffs, who came to the Salesian Junior Seminary as teenagers from devout Catholic families, stayed in touch but never discussed the abuse they endured, said plaintiff Michael Egan.
"You're always afraid of it," said Egan, now a minister in Middletown, near Goshen, for the Church of Christ, an evangelical Protestant denomination. "You were helpless at one point in your life, a victim, and you don't want to bring that helplessness back. I hid it for many years with alcohol and drugs and didn't sober up until '93."
Egan said that it was the media coverage of the Catholic Church's evolving sex-abuse scandal, particularly a lawsuit against a Salesian priest, that got the former schoolmates talking early this year about abuse and, finally, what had happened to them.
"I'm not in it for the money," Egan said. "We want to help other people, get people to open their eyes, listen to their kids."
A priest at the Salesians' provincial office, which oversees the order's operations east of the Mississippi River, referred questions to the order's lawyers.
Seth Taube of McCarter and English, the firm representing the Salesians, said the statute of limitations has long ago run out, and the case should be dismissed as untimely.
"The Salesians' comment is that although they appreciate that the plaintiffs feel that they are in pain, the Salesians feel that these allegations took place so many years ago," he said.
Goffin said that while the charges are old - as have been many of the allegations that surfaced this year against priests - the Salesians have a responsibility to answer them.
"We think the world has come to recognize that, in these circumstances, there is something to examine," she said.
The plaintiffs, in addition to Egan and Lemme, are Angelo Zaccagnino of Westchester County and Vincent Oberlander of Monmouth County, N.J. Zaccagnino, according to court papers, was serving as an altar boy at Our Lady of Rosary Church in Port Chester, a church affiliated with the Salesian order, when he was recruited to enroll in the Salesians' junior seminary.
All four plaintiffs, according to court papers, were recruited to the junior seminary by the Rev. Frank Nugent, who is also listed as a defendant. The Salesians reached a settlement in 1998 with a Massachusetts woman who charged that she and her two brothers were sexually abused by Nugent.
Zaccagnino, Egan and Lemme also charge that they were sexually abused by a former Salesian brother, George Puello, often in their beds at the seminary. The lawsuit alleges that a dorm supervisor and two brothers knew that Puello was regularly going to Zaccagnino's bed.
The suit also contends seminary officials knew that Puello often took Lemme off the seminary grounds. Puello took him to hotel rooms, according to the papers. When Lemme told a priest about the abuse, and the priest told Allue, Lemme was dismissed from the seminary, according to the suit.
Oberlander and Egan also were abused by a priest, the Rev. Richard Matikonas, who promoted "studies" on masturbation to take advantage of the students, the lawsuit claims.
Matikonas and Nugent are believed still to be members of the Salesian order, Goffin said. Puello is no longer a member, she said.
In August, leaders of Catholic religious orders agreed at an annual conference that abusive priests should be removed from ministry, but not kicked out or defrocked. It was a less harsh position than that taken in June by diocesan bishops, who voted that abusive priests should be defrocked in some cases.
In April, a Salesian priest, the Rev. William Burke, was removed from ministry at the Marian Shrine in Stony Point after he was accused of molesting a teenage boy in 1987 in Florida. The Rev. James Heuser, vice provincial of the Salesians' eastern region, said then the order had sometimes failed to protect young people.
"We are sorry for the sexual misconduct of some of our members, for the unspeakable violation of the young whom we have harmed rather than served," he said then.
Heuser and the Rev. Patrick Angelucci, provincial or head of the eastern region, are named as defendants in the junior-seminary case.
www.bishop-accountability.org/resou...tAndDefiled.htmDevout and defiled
While male victims of predatory priests dominate the headlines, abused girls and women suffer in silence
By Mary Papenfuss
Salon
January 9, 2003
www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/01/0...e/index_np.htmlIt wasn't until Terrie Light had children of her own that she revealed her darkest secret: She had been raped, at the age of 8, by a priest in the rectory of a church in the Oakland Diocese.
"It was a violent, sadistic attack. I kept it inside of me for years," says the 51-year-old mother of six. "When my oldest son turned 7, I couldn't ignore it any longer. I was a good Catholic girl -- obedient, respectful. I always felt guilty because I was pretty. I tried not to be attractive because I thought that being attractive was somehow sinful. I think a lot of sex abuse victims were good Catholic girls."
Light, the Northern California representative of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), who eventually reached an out-of-court settlement with the church, hopes a new California law suspending the statute of limitations on sex abuse will give others like her the courage to finally come forward and begin to shift national attention in the burgeoning clerical abuse scandal to include a hidden but major population of victims -- women.
Abuse survivors, along with their attorneys and psychologists, say that sexism and social conditioning, magnified many times over within the Catholic Church, have led to the trivialization of harm suffered by women who have come forward to finally report abuse by priests. At the same time, these same factors have caused women to be ashamed -- and keep silent -- about their experiences.
"There's no question that abuse of women [by priests] has been vastly underreported," says A.W. Richard Sipe, a former priest and psychotherapist who has studied priests' sex lives for more than 30 years. "There's a tremendous bias against women in the U.S. -- and the world -- and a tremendous callousness about sexual abuse against women."
No secular organization has statistics on the total number of people abused by priests; the most complete numbers are held by church officials, who aren't sharing. But attorneys and survivor networks estimate that from one-third to over a half of all victims of sexually abusive priests are women. And criminal cases filed in the last year in Los Angeles County involve approximately the same number of male and female victims.
Gary Schoener, a Minneapolis psychologist whose Minneapolis Walk-in Counseling Center has worked on more than 2,000 cases of clerical sex abuse, says the majority of clerical abusers that he and his staff deal with (from several denominations) victimize girls and women. Yet, he says, public perception is that far more males are abused, and that the harm they suffer is more serious than what females experience.
"Women and girls are every bit as much at risk as boys and men," says Schoener. "But the sexual abuse of a boy is treated far more seriously, and is considered a far worse offense. Men are regarded as too strong to be victims; their victimization is somehow more shocking to the public. Women are expected to put up with more.
"The press also tends to cover -- and the big damage awards go to -- the boy cases," he adds. "The altar boy cases tend to make better copy -- they're more salacious."
Schoener says notorious, headline-grabbing cases of "gross mismanagement" in places like Boston, where predatory priests were moved from one parish to another and given easy access to large numbers of altar boys, tend to distort the real picture of sex abuse in the church.
To begin with, women appear less likely to report abuse, says Schoener. The shame of sexual abuse is similar for both genders, but women tend to be "trashed" by church officials and supporters as being seductresses, he says. "We have seen girls as young as 10 portrayed as sirens." Reporting sex abuse also tends to have more serious ramifications for a woman's marriage.
"A lot of men blame their wives for abuse and are shocked by the sexual history," says Schoener. "Societal preoccupation with virginity at the time of marriage cuts across many cultures. It's mind-bending."
An important factor in the underreporting by women, and their greater emphasis on shame, says Schoener and others, comes from the idea that women in the Catholic Church toil in the shadow of Eve. Just as Eve is portrayed by the church as being responsible for original sin and leading Adam astray, so too are tantalizing teenage girls characterized as responsible for some priests' downfall.
"The church is so dominated by men that there's a tendency to portray girls as provoking the crimes against themselves. The depositions read like rape cases used to: Did you enjoy it? What were you wearing?" reports Susan Gallagher, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Gallagher won a $250,000 settlement after being sexually abused at the age of 14 by the Rev. Frank Nugent, a priest who ran a youth camp in Ellenville, N.Y., for the Salesian Catholic order. Nugent also worked at the Don Bosco Preparatory High School in Ramsey, N.J. He was later transferred to Massachusetts. "There's also a homophobic view that sex with girls is somehow more natural, that some of these priests were just being red-blooded American men."
This attitude was epitomized by Cardinal Francis George of Chicago when he spoke out last spring against a zero-tolerance policy for sexually abusive priests. Indicating that sex between priests and teenage girls is somehow more forgivable, he said: "There is a difference between a moral monster like [Boston priest] John Geoghan and a priest who, perhaps under the influence of alcohol, is involved with a 17-year-old girl who returns his affections. Both are crimes, but in terms of the possibility of reform, they are very different sets of circumstances."
Adult women who have been abused face the toughest fight of any, Schoener believes. Their abuse by priests -- often during spiritual or marital counseling sessions -- wins little public attention compared to abuse of children. In addition, they are often held responsible for the relationship.
The pattern of lawsuit filings also shows that suits tend to be filed primarily on behalf of men, according to several attorneys. Jeffrey Anderson, a St. Paul, Minn., lawyer who is considered the nation's predominant litigator in Catholic clergy sex-abuse cases, says that of the 700 cases he has filed, about two-thirds of the victims are male and one-third are female. That's the opposite ratio of sex-abuse cases in the general population, where two-thirds of the victims are female and one-third male.
"Women have been discouraged culturally, and especially by the Catholic Church, from reporting abuse," says Anderson. "Often, when they go to a church leader to talk about an assault, they are rebuked rather than helped." Anderson's own daughter was assaulted at age 8 by a former priest -- during therapy. "I had no idea until I had been doing this work for 10 years," he said. "She suffered for years in silence and shame." His daughter's perpetrator was successfully prosecuted, he said, but "she still wears the scars very painfully."
Many of those who are convinced that abuse of women by priests is vastly underreported still suspect that, overall, more males than females have been abused by priests, primarily because priests have more access to boys after Mass and in sports programs. "It's easier for priests to spend time -- and time alone -- with boys," says Gallagher.
In fact, many abusive priests are alleged to have attacked children of both sexes, which is evidence that opportunity is a key factor when it comes to which children are victimized. "Of thousands of cases across the country that I'm familiar with, a significant number of priests abuse both boys and girls," says Sipe. "It's a question of who they can get their hands on."
Gallagher said her older brother, Patrick, was repeatedly abused by her abuser. Patrick, who Susan said had become suicidal because of the abuse, died at 25 in an accident driving a car owned by Nugent's order, the Salesians.
The public impression that abusive priests preyed only on boys hasn't just caused abused women to feel pushed aside. It has provided fuel for a drive on the part of conservative Catholics to rid the priesthood of gay men, who, Sipe estimates, make up about a third of the priesthood. The focus on boys is encouraged by the Vatican, says Sipe, and is seen to provide convenient scapegoats -- gay priests -- for a problem that has nothing to do with the issue.
In the Vatican's first comments about the developing American scandal last spring, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, chief spokesman for Pope John Paul II, said gay men should be barred from the priesthood. "People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained," he said.
The public perception that sex-abuse victims in the church are almost exclusively men is so distorted, says Gallagher, that men who attend SNAP meetings are surprised to find women there -- and women are astonished that they are not alone in a sea of men. This sense of isolation only serves to keep women silent about their abuse, says Gallagher.
Gallagher says that even when women have the courage to come forward and publicize their abuse, they are often shunned. She says she has protested repeatedly about the lack of coverage of female victims of priest sex abuse. She took her complaints to the Boston Globe, which spearheaded coverage of the Boston priest abuse scandals, but the paper, she said, failed to cover her story despite several interviews. Gallagher then turned to the New York Times, which did run a story about her abuse.
Meanwhile, a Globe ombudsman responded to Gallagher's complaints, saying that a story about female victims of priest sex abuse was on its "to-do list" and that "a four-person reporting team can only do so much." The Globe finally did a story on Dec. 27 about female victims in the Boston Archdiocese -- almost nine months after the Times.
"If by [the Globe's] own admission as many as a third of the victims are female, I don't think a single story does it," says Gallagher. "The press has to keep up coverage of female victims so that more people come forward. I told my story because I thought it would do some good -- that others would see Father Nugent's name and come forward. He was working for years with children."
Gallagher says she knows victims so mortified by their experiences that they're "waiting for their parents to die" before they'll come forward. Light says she was relieved when her attacker died. She remained frightened of him even into adulthood. "These priests seemed almost supernatural to us when we were children," she said.
The amount of fear, shame and self-loathing experienced by victims of abusive priests has tended to be the same regardless of the victims' genders, says Schoener. And the patterns of abuse also are similar. Attorney Michael Meadows of Walnut Creek, Calif., says he consistently finds eerie parallels in the cases of male and female clients.
"It's uncanny how similar these cases are," he says. "These kids were abused at 12 or 13. They're singled out by priests as being from broken or troubled homes. They're least likely to have someone to turn to. Then it gets buried for years and years. Their lives deteriorate. At some point in their late 20s or mid- to late 30s they hit rock bottom. That's when they confront what happened to them, but under the statute of limitations it's usually too late."
The statute of limitations often means that cases are lost before they're even filed because of a "technicality," says Meadows. "These people have lives with a deep, dark secret for years. It doesn't mean these people suffered any less because time has passed. These are some of the most psychologically damaged people you can imagine."
But the new California law, the first of its kind in the nation, has suspended the statute of limitations on all sex-abuse cases in the state for one year as of Jan. 1, 2003. The law came before the California Legislature last summer at the height of the Boston scandal and passed without opposition. Last month, church officials in California issued a letter to priests and parishioners warning them of an expected flood of lawsuits.
"Some of these lawsuits may involve the revival of already settled cases and some may involve alleged perpetrators and witnesses long since dead," said the letter. "Under those circumstances, it will be difficult, if not impossible to ascertain the truth." Church officials have indicated they're willing to settle many cases without a court fight.
Jeffrey Anderson is joining with attorneys Dave and Larry Divron in Stockton, Joe George in Sacramento, and Ray Boucher in Southern California, to file some 250 suits in California during the coming year. "We expect more as victims see their abusers' names in the press and continue to come forward," says Divron. The chances are good that many women will be among the plaintiffs.
Meadows, who plans to file seven cases representing clients ranging in age from 30 to 52, welcomes the California law and says financial compensation does help, but doesn't go far enough. "It's one small step on the road to recovery," he says. "But there'd be nothing better than to see some of these guys behind bars.
"You read the documents and it's the same over and over," he says. "Abusive priests were moved from one church to another with no word of warning to anyone. You wonder, where was the one man of conscience looking out for the kids?"
About the writer: Mary Papenfuss is deputy senior editor of the Life section of Salon.
www.bishop-accountability.org/inter...r_Interview.htmInterview of Susan Gallagher
Professor of Political Science, University of Mass., Lowell
Co-Director, Coalition of Catholics & Survivors
Survivor of Clergy Sexual Abuse
Fall 2004
Interviewer: High school student Billy Doyle, Reading MA
Can you tell me about your childhood?
I grew up mostly in New Jersey and came from a big, Irish Catholic family – seven kids – and was raised by a single mother. My father left us when I was three years old and my mother raised us on her own, working low-wage jobs, so it was a hard childhood.
Where were you among the seven kids?
I was the youngest. So the oldest kids knew my father. They lived a different life. He was an up-and-coming executive, and we were pretty well-off, and then when he left we just sunk into poverty.
And you probably don’t remember what the change was like…
No. I have very vague memories of him. But my older brothers and sisters were highly aware of it. And also because we grew up in a parish more than a town. We went to a Catholic school in a suburb. It was a poor town in a rich area. We were seen as the kids from the broken home. It was very difficult that way. In the Catholic community then, nobody was getting divorced, and my mother would never refer to herself as divorced – she always said she was separated. In that community, we were singled out. We weren’t seen as trashy, I have to say, because we were all very smart and well-read and did well in school, but as pathetic, like charity cases.
Part of that whole deal was that this priest came into our lives and he took me and my older brother Patrick and he started giving us money. We became financially dependent on him. My mother really could not afford to feed us, and she would never, ever, ever go on welfare or ask for anything, even if she had no money, so we became financially dependent on him.
You knew him from the parish?
He was a vocations director. In those days, the church started focusing on boys when they were in eighth grade. One route to the priesthood was to go to a seminary high school, so he was basically recruiting two of my brothers, Brendan and Patrick, for the priesthood. If they had agreed, they would have gone to a sleep-away seminary high school in New York State, but they both didn’t want to be priests. My brother Patrick was actually a juvenile delinquent. My brother was on that road. [Laughing] He would break into houses and pour ketchup all over the tables. He was really looking for attention and help.
Father Nugent started to give Patrick money with the idea that he wouldn’t steal if he had money. So it started out with just a little bit of money.
My brother Patrick and I, even though he was four years older than I, looked almost exactly alike. He was girlish; I was boyish. We looked like twins. People often couldn’t distinguish us from one another. He had long hair; I had short hair. We had the same exact face. There’s no other way to describe it – we just looked exactly alike. So Father Nugent started to focus on me in addition to Patrick. He was a very, very mentally ill person. He needed treatment. He needed to be institutionalized.
Could you tell that as a child?
We couldn’t. We were kids. We grew up in an environment where nothing was ever explained to us. The attitude was, “If you don’t know, then you don’t deserve to know” – about everything. So we didn’t really understand what was happening. We knew that it was bad. But we also went from being some of the poorest kids in town to some of the richest kids in town. When I was in fifth grade, Father Nugent started to give me twenty dollars a week, and then the amounts increased. When you’re getting sixty dollars a week and you’re in eighth grade, that’s a lot of money. He also bought us food and clothes and gifts and ski equipment – stuff we would never have otherwise. And Patrick just took it. Patrick had several cars and he went around the world – he just turned it into this amazing thing. Father Nugent stole tens of thousands of dollars from the church. We weren’t the only kids. There were other kids in New York City who were in this group that he took on trips and gave gifts to and took out to dinner all the time and on shopping sprees.
Do you know or suspect that he abused those other kids as well?
Yes, I know he did. He [Nugent] was like someone who never grew up. He was like an unpopular kid who was trying to buy friends. You know how kids will say, “I just got a new toy. Come over my house”? Same thing. And we also made it clear to him we’d never hang around with him unless he gave us a lot of money. He really wasn’t entertaining or funny or smart – he had nothing to recommend him except he had money. And he knew that Patrick and I had no way out, and the other kids--same thing. The other kids were even poorer. They came from New York City. One of them had no parents and was just living like an orphan in an apartment in the Bronx. Another came from a family of twelve living in a tiny apartment – really poor kids. But throughout the 1970s, my brother Patrick was this guy’s main focus.
So in the town, we had tons of money. And this was at a time when drugs were freely available. So Father Nugent would also give us money for drugs. So we were known as bad kids. Everyone saw us with him all the time, so the other parents in town would not let their kids hang out with us because of Father Nugent.
The other parents knew that Father Nugent might have been abusing you?
I think some people knew and others didn’t. It was an age in which nobody had any terms to describe it. You would not even be able to say it. It was a sin to even think about it. It was a sin to have any thoughts related to that part of the human brain, so if you even thought of it, you’d be committing a sin. People knew and didn’t know. Like my mother. She knew that Father Nugent … I would come home with so many bags from shopping that I wouldn’t be able to get in the front door. She knew that she couldn’t stop it.
Did you know that this was not right?
I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t say why. The other thing is Father Nugent started to give me alcohol when I was nine years old, and when he started to give me money for drugs, I would buy pot. I didn’t go to high school, actually. I just stayed home and I read all the time. I loved reading and I love education.
I don’t really remember a lot of my adolescence. I just don’t remember it. So that was also part of it. Everything was in a haze.
Why do you think that is?
I think it was the only escape I had. I don’t drink anymore, but I’m an alcoholic. I come from a line of alcoholics. Alcohol was my only solution, and it was my problem already. I’d drink and I couldn’t stop. Now I haven’t had a drink in almost nine years. Everyone in my family – the whole older generation – was an alcoholic. There weren’t any responsible adults on the scene. And we were allowed to do whatever we wanted. My mother often worked six days a week from eight in the morning until nine at night. And we were all incredibly energetic. We were the rule-breaking type people. So it was interesting. My older brothers and sisters were sort of like hippies, very counter-culture. So the house was unlike any other. There were no parents on the scene. Kids would come over and we’d say, “You’re allowed to do anything you want in this house. You want to burn down the house? Go ahead.” We would literally start fires. It was crazy. We would set the lawn on fire just to see what would happen. We’d write our names in the lawn with gasoline and light it. So it was a very crazy time that we thought was free. We thought, “This is freedom.” One of the things with people with a past like mine is that you really don’t realize how bad it is until you look back.
What was your relationship with your mother like?
She was very overwhelmed by her situation. In the culture of that time, if a woman like my mother couldn’t keep hold of her husband, it was her fault, no matter how bad he was. He [my father] was a terrible alcoholic, violent… But her job was to hold onto him and she failed, so she regarded herself as a failure. And she took refuge in work. She just worked as a secretary. She had no power in her job. She wasn’t paid very well. But she really respected working hard. And she respected anyone who had a job, no matter what the job was. She was also a real Democrat. Her obituary says she was a Democrat. She was a very traditional, Franklin D. Roosevelt, “government-should-help-people”, “we-should-live-in-a-fair-society” Democrat. She couldn’t raise her family, but she was committed to civil rights. She was somebody who, had she lived in a different time, would have been a very different type of person. She wouldn’t have had seven children and wouldn’t have been so overwhelmed in a situation she couldn’t handle.
I felt sorry for her. In retrospect, I wish she had taken better care of us. But I also understand the burdens that she had to carry.
What were your siblings doing as you grew up?
They were all leaving the house. Since my mother was working all the time, the oldest were supposed to take care of the younger kids. When I was ten, my sister Anne, who was my second oldest sister, who was kind of the main care-taker, went away to college. So they all left the house. My mother was an alcoholic, and as her kids left, she drank more and more and more, and that’s because she had a little more money. So she sort of deteriorated as they left the house, and everything got worse and worse and worse. She died when she was 68. She died of lung cancer but she would have died of alcoholism.
It’s pretty amazing to me that your siblings and you were able to go to college.
The main value in our house when we were growing up was intelligence. No matter what, you wanted to be smart. What you had going for you was that you were intelligent. Everyone in the family was very smart. Everyone read all the time. That was the thing that distinguished us. There were other families in the town that were single-parent, very poor families, but the thing that distinguished us was that we always had books in the house. We had all the great literature of the world in the house. Everyone was a reader, and even though we caused trouble, we all distinguished ourselves in school.
How’d you afford college?
Scholarships. Father Nugent and I had a mutual parting of the ways when I was sixteen. I was sick of him and he was sick of me and I was getting too old. He usually dropped kids when they were about sixteen. He didn’t drop my brother. My brother Patrick was the worst off among my family. He was drunk all the time. Father Nugent gave him money, so he didn’t need to work. So I turned away from Father Nugent and went to college. I was seventeen when I went to college. I got scholarships. Even though I didn’t have a high school diploma, I got into every program I could get into and really excelled in college.
What college did you go to?
I went to a small state school: Ramapo College. And actually it affects me now because I got a very good education at a small public college. I became a visiting student at Columbia University. I would never have been able to do that, because I didn’t have a high school diploma, so I was a visiting student. But I knew that if I was going to go to graduate school I needed to have recommendations from Columbia professors. So I got my diploma from this little state school, but I hooked up with professors from Columbia and that allowed me to do very well when I applied to graduate school.
I was also helped by my college professors, who were the first responsible adults I had ever met. They intervened in a huge way to help me.
You said you value education and intelligence. Was this before or because of your college experience?
I always wanted to read. Reading was like a drug when I was growing up. My house was very violent and chaotic and I could just read to get away from it all. Also we didn’t have a TV for a long time, so we were forced to read. My brother threw the TV down the stairs, and that was the end of that. And it actually really helped because I read and read and read. Also, when I didn’t go to high school, one of my reasons was I really loved reading, and I just wanted to read novels. It was like I didn’t have time to go to school because I had so much reading to do.
How did you transition from your life after college and grad school to your involvement with the Coalition of Catholics and Survivors?
Like a lot of victims, I couldn’t come forward or do anything about this part of me until my mother died, because it would be like accusing her of failing to take care of me if I ever said anything about it. Also, my brother’s death was directly related to the abuse. He told everyone what was happening. He was very old at the time for a Nugent victim, and everyone couldn’t take the news. He just cried and cried and cried. So he drove a car owned by the church into a pond. We don’t know if it was suicide – it was a suicidal act, that’s all we can say. So that made it even harder to come forward, because it would be like blaming my whole family for my brother’s death, and that would just be terrible. I always wanted to do something about it, because I knew he [Nugent] was hurting other kids. Right after my mother died in 1992, I heard specifically that he was abusing kids. He had been transferred after my brother died from New York, where he was serving, to Massachusetts, to Ipswich. And I heard from his friends that he was abusing kids in Ipswich. I was living at the time in New Jersey. So that’s when I first came forward [1993-1994]. I wasn’t going to do a lawsuit or anything; I just wanted to tell the church to keep this guy away from children. Their response was, “We will destroy you if you say anything in public.” This was their rationale: “The good accomplished by the church far exceeds any harm done to you or your brother.” I wouldn’t stop. I’m pretty known for never stopping. [Laughing] So I kept on writing them letters. And then a very crucial thing happened: I got sober. I stopped drinking.
When was that?
That was in 1996. So it took me a long time between first coming forward and then getting sober. It was part of the process. For the first time, in 1993-1994, I was writing to the church. Then, by 1996, I was still a well regarded graduate student, but I was drunk all the time. I was near the end of my PhD program. That’s when I stopped being able to pull off this double life of being a very good student and being drunk all the time. Luckily, I got help. People intervened to help me. So in’ 96 I got sober with the help of a program. And I just happened to get my first academic job in Massachusetts. Father Nugent was still living in Ipswich. So I kind of stepped up my efforts since I was living nearby. I was also afraid of running into him. I was afraid to see him.
Why were you afraid of him?
He was so creepy. After my mother died he actually called me. I couldn’t believe it. One of the things that scared me was that nobody was keeping this guy in check. He could come over and there would be nobody to stop him. Even though he’s 5’1”, little runty guy, he was just so sick that I never wanted to be in contact with him. When he called me, I said, “OK OK thanks a lot bye.” In 1994 or 1995, over two years after my mom died, I thought that I didn’t need to do any more about Father Nugent because the church told me they put him in a program of treatment. So I thought, “This is great. He’s being treated. He’ll never have access to children again. My job is done.” And I really felt great. I thought, “I am different from all the adults in my life. I intervened. I protected children. I’ve taken some action.” And then I found out in 1998 they did send Father Nugent to treatment, and then they transferred him to New Jersey and they made him the administrator of a children’s camp. They put him in charge of finances at a children’s camp. I just went crazy. So I did a lawsuit, which they settled within a few months. The whole time I had been writing letters. I was really lambasting the church for knowingly exposing children to this danger. So they settled the lawsuit. They gave me $250,000 and they asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement, which I did, with the understanding that they finally paid me $250,000 …. I thought, “OK, they’ll keep Father Nugent away from children, because if they don’t, it will cost them so much money.” But they didn’t. Instead they moved him into a youth center. They moved him into the same building as a youth center. And even though he was getting old, he was celebrating mass, he was living in a youth center, he was teaching courses on how to become a priest. He was a known pedophile. In 2002, ___ I was writing to the church all the time and saying, “Keep up your end of the bargain. I’m sick of this.” And they were saying, “We won’t release you from your confidentiality agreement.” They implied that if I spoke out in public, they would try to get the money back from me. I didn’t have it anymore. So then the scandal broke, and that’s when I really started to argue with the archdiocese of Boston, because Father Nugent was serving in the archdiocese of Boston. So in April 2002_______ I started to call the Boston Globe and the archdiocese of Boston within days of the first articles on Geoghan, because I thought, “You should know about this other guy, who has even more access to kids because he runs a retreat house in Ipswich.” _____ for 15 years. That’s a long time. The first group that I found that was willing to really speak out in public and that understood the depth of the crisis and how big it was your mother [Anne Barrett Doyle], Lori Lambert, Joseph Gallagher, Susan Renehan – this was the first group I’d met that was actually trying to solve the problem. Every other group was trying to manage it, or they wanted to be around forever by becoming permanent groups, whereas the Coalition of Catholics and Survivors, it seemed to me, came together because of this crisis and their aim was to do everything they could to solve it. They were really the most practical people I had met. And they weren’t worried about ____ They weren’t Voice of the Faithful. They were determined to deal directly with the abuse crisis and solve the problems with the church at hand.
So what were the logical ways that they tried to deal with the crisis with?
Publicizing it. Right when I was meeting them, they organized the candlelight march for the Ford family. They also wanted to reach out beyond the church community ____ to whoever would pay attention to the crisis. Also, your mother and Joe Gallagher were the first Catholics that I met that had the proper reaction, which was complete outrage. They couldn’t believe that _______[switching tapes]___ like Susan Renehan, who really had this victims’ perspective. They allowed themselves to be changed by her. I was really struck by that. Other Catholics I had met were trying to put the crisis into their same old mindset, whereas Joe and your mother and Lori Lambert are different people now. They really have changed. At the same time I met them, The New York Times did an article on Father Nugent, and lo and behold, just days after refusing to release me from me confidentiality agreement—I was actually dealing this whole time with the Salesians of Don Bosco. The Salesians of Don Bosco is the religious order—When they realized The New York Times was going to do an article – this was after they refused to release me from my confidentiality agreement and refused to remove Father Nugent from the youth center in which he was living, refused to stop him from saying Mass, refused everything – all of a sudden when they find out that an article is going to be published in The New York Times, they write me this email apologizing abjectly , releasing me from my confidentiality agreement, they removed Father Nugent from where he was living, they placed him under the constant supervision of two other priests – this was a complete turnaround, because of the New York Times article. So from that I realized that what the Coalition of Catholics and Survivors was doing, which was publicize not only in the church context but in general what was happening, that that’s the best way to go, that’s the most effective avenue of change. That was in 2002. I think it’s amazing that the Coalition of Catholics and Survivors has been able to do what it’s done – it’s only five people. We say, “It’s an ‘umbrella group,’” whenever people ask us who’s in it. And I think it makes sense that your mother has now moved to Bishop-Accountability.org, because all we can do is document what happened and hope that sooner or later those documents are going to make a difference.
And you are probably not Catholic anymore.
No. In fact, I’m anti-Catholic. I don’t respect the religion. I actually want to get a bumper sticker that says, “The Reformation was a good beginning.” [Laughing] Because I think this could really be a time when the church is becoming an anachronistic institution. Somebody can’t just put on a hat and expect people to bow down just because he has a hat on. So I think the abuse crisis is symptomatic of a larger historical change that’s ongoing. All kinds of people are less willing to accept authority. The bishops now are asking people to choose between a dictatorship in which they decide what you should believe and democracy in which people live according to their own consciences. In the end, the bishops are asking people flat-out to make that choice.
When you were a child, did you agree with the Catholic doctrine?
I believed it, and I really wanted to be good. I thought that Father Nugent was a bad person. I thought he was morally bad, specifically because when I was eleven or twelve, Father Nugent wanted to promote sex between teenagers. And I thought that was wrong. And I told him, “That’s wrong.” I said, “Father Nugent”— [Laughing] I always called him Father Nugent. He always wanted to call him Unc – he had these stupid nicknames he made up: Nuge—And I would say, “Father Nugent, they’re not married.” I was just a kid, and I believed in the church. I didn’t want to be a nun; I wanted to be a saint instead. I was so ____ this almost magical refuge. I thought that Christ was watching me, and that Christ would understand if I did anything wrong – like I’d be smoking by myself in the woods and think that Christ understood. [Laughing]
When I wanted the church to be the moral institution that I felt that it should be, it disappointed me every time. Now, the church is responsible for thousands of crimes, and it’s only tried to hide it. They told me straight-out, “If you speak out, we will destroy you.” That’s been their policy. Just two weeks ago, I was talking again to the vice-provincial of the Salesians, and the guy just told me straight-out, “All our actions are determined by legal liability. We have to do whatever the lawyers tell us to do.” And at the end of this long conversation where I was asking this guy to reach out in Massachusetts, because I know there are victims in Massachusetts of Father Nugent who are too scared to come forward. At the end of this conversation, I actually asked this guy, “If you saw a baby on fire in the street, would you put the baby out? Or would you consult with a lawyer first?” And the guy was like, “I don’t know what to say.” He was so ineffective. And that’s what happened to me is these people who are very ineffective and I think would fail in any other walk of life were given power by this institution, given power over the lives of families and their children, and they failed. And now they’ve failed to take responsibility for their failure.
The church is declining at a rate that is so quick. The fact that O’Malley is closing all the parishes is just the clearest evidence. The church is shrinking. People aren’t going. There’s a 75% drop in seminary enrollments. There are no priests to say the Masses anymore. Who would want to be a priest in this time? I think that we’re witnessing historical change. _____ We’re watching its death throes now.
Even though I’m not really Protestant either, I believe in God and I believe in spirituality and I believe in helping others as the main principle. What happened to me, I think, is part of a larger historical shift. Father Nugent had a previous generation of victims. I even knew their names. They were in their 50s. I believe he molested them when he was newly ordained. They all stayed in contact with him and they all remained his friends. And the older victims from my generation are still probably his friends to this day, and they’ll never come forward. But I think the next generation after me, they’re not ready to come forward yet, but the ones from the 90s, they will come forward. I hope that they will get some sort of justice. I don’t know if they will.
From what you’ve told me about the other victims and your own story, it seems you weren’t really mad at the church until…
In 1980, that’s when my brother died, Father Nugent said the Mass. But everyone knew it was inappropriate. Everyone knew that this was weird and were just going along with it. The idea that it was OK was over. It wasn’t like any of us would ever go to Mass in any other context at that point. There’s a part of me that was always mad at the church because Father Nugent’s fellow priests knew what was going on, and they would look at us disapprovingly. There’s a part of us, and that’s one of things about if you’re a kid and you’re being abused, even though you’re helping your perpetrator keep a secret, you also want someone to come to your rescue. You want someone to rush in and stop the whole thing. You don’t know why you do – you just do. So there was a part of me that wanted those other priests to, instead of just scowling at us, actually stop it. Especially because my brother was so troubled and so needed help, and Father Nugent was always there to prevent him from getting any kind of help. So everyone in my family was mad at Father Nugent and the church for seemingly helping Patrick down the road to destruction.
But I thought the church was kind of irrelevant, and I thought it was my own private thing. I didn’t think it was the church – I thought it was just Father Nugent and his superiors. I thought, “These are bad men.” I didn’t really care about the rest of the church. I didn’t know. I had no idea that it was so widespread. Since the scandal broke, it’s like everyone in my family has been touched in other ways. So you have my case, and my brother’s case. In the parish where we grew up, abusers have been removed. My oldest sister worked for an orphanage in the 70s that’s being investigated for facilitating abuse. My other sister moved to San Francisco and became part of this whole crowd of people that were friends of a molesting priest. That priest is a notorious molester and has now been maybe even arrested. So everybody in the Catholic context has been touched in one way or another. We didn’t know how systemic it was. We didn’t know.
You said that you and Father Nugent decided mutually to split. Do you think you could have done that earlier if you had wanted to?
Well, I did it when I was 16. I still needed money. I don’t want to overstate my awareness, but I was always complaining to Father Nugent that he was immoral. I was always saying, “This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong.” And I wouldn’t be that clear on what was wrong or why it was wrong, but I just would say it was wrong. Because I had my brother’s example in front of me, and he was so clearly—He smelled, and he was drunk all the time. And he was a stupid drunk. He would go into a bar, and he was a little guy – really little, skinny – and he would insult some big guy and get beat up. He was always smashing cars, always being arrested,. And he would be living in the woods or living in a hotel. He was so lost and we blamed Father Nugent. And we did blame Father Nugent. So when I was 16, Father Nugent was sick of me complaining, and I was sick of him hurting Patrick. And it was easier for me to complain on behalf of Patrick. That was the easier thing to do.
Actually, this is really dumb. I started this store in my town. It was a plant store. And he brought me enough to get started: all the plants that I needed. I think I had five customers. [Laughing] It didn’t work. So then the store closed. I went to college. I started living off scholarships, and I had a waitress job. The money part was playing a huge role in this. Patrick and I referred to ourselves and the other victims, the whole abuse thing, we never spoke of it, we never were clear about it, but we would refer to it as being “on the payroll.” So when somebody new would come in to the group, we would say, “Is she on the payroll?” and we knew what that meant. After I fell out of touch with Father Nugent – he would have usually the same number of girls and the same number of boys – I was replaced by a girl, who then was “on the payroll.”
I know that recently you became interested in the case of Paul Edwards.
Yes.
Can you tell me about that?
Paul Edwards reminds me a lot of my brother. He’s very sweet and means well, seems like somebody who’s overly trusting. But because they did to Paul Edwards what they threatened to do me. They said to me, “If you speak out, we will destroy you.” And they didn’t. I got a specific and public apology, and an admission of guilt. That’s what I finally got out of the church. And I thought, “Everybody will get this now.” Nobody’s gotten it. The fact that they successfully destroyed Paul Edwards with false information drives me crazy. I can’t believe that you have this powerful institution that if they want to they can just destroy someone. So I’ve always always. always stood up for Paul Edwards.
My mom also told me that you recently decided to withdraw?
It’s obsessive. It’s so big – the church is so huge – and there’s so many crimes. And you hear about these traumatic crimes. You read these things like this priest in the Midwest is hanging altar boys upside down and torturing them and you’re like, “Oh my God. I can’t read anymore.” It’s so horrifying, and there’s so little appropriate reaction. I already kept on thinking for these two years that something’s gotta push them over the edge, and finally the whole criminal justice system will step in and say, “This institution has got to be supervised.” It hasn’t happened. I’m withdrawing. One is I don’t want to say it’s hopeless, because I think over time change will come. But in the meantime, for a lot of people, I think we just have to accept this wrongdoing the same way you accept a death in your family: It’s wrong. It’s unjust. It will never be made right for you. I don’t want this to run my life. I went through this phase where it really was my whole entire conversation. I started to focus all my scholarly work on it. Everything started to be focused on uncovering the crimes of the church and broadcasting their wrongdoing. Now I just need to pull back and realize that I’ve made a contribution, but if I let them run my life and my consciousness, then it’s as if I will never recover.
What were your thoughts towards the church when you split from Father Nugent and in the following years?
Well, it’s more like they became irrelevant. I don’t even remember when I stopped going to church. The church as an institution just became irrelevant. Just in my context, ___, I never heard an intelligent sermon when I was growing up. And now I’ve actually met some really brilliant Catholics, but at the time it was so boring and seemed so empty and superficial, like religion was like a strip mall – there was nothing to recommend it. And then I also became interested in philosophy. I was consumed with ideas. My main subject is really political theory. I loved intellectual history. I started to read Marx and be completely radical and anti-religious, “let’s have a better world right now”. I always was idealistic. Through all this I’ve been very idealistic. I thought of getting involved in politics. I started to get involved in anti-nuke groups and go to graduate school and thinking, “We can make a better world by understanding history better.”
But I always had in the back of my mind that Father Nugent was hurting other kids. I always knew it. So I felt guilty. I felt misplaced guilt. I felt that I should have intervened on behalf of my brother, even though he was four years older and I really couldn’t have. I always felt bad that when he spoke out, I said nothing. I did like the rest of my family and we just pretended we never heard it.
When did he start to speak out?
Probably ‘77 or ‘78.
Was that after you had…
After I had moved away from Father Nugent.
What was your relationship with Patrick like at that time?
I felt sorry for him. He was just a lost person. We were crazy together. He would say, “I gotta go to 7-11.” And then we’d be on our way to 7-11 and he’d say, “Do you want to go to Florida instead?” And I’d say, “OK.” And we’d go to Florida. We’d call my mother from the New Jersey Turnpike to just say, “We’re staying at Beth’s house.” And we would go to Florida and get totally sunburned and come back. He was really immature. Not that I was the paragon of maturity, but he was more immature than I was. And he was always in trouble. He wrecked at least ten cars – spectacular accidents – before he finally died. And I was mad at him because he would always show up drunk. And I was drinking myself, but he was like the designated drunk in the family. So it was a mixture of feeling sorry for him and being mad at him.
Patrick also at the end of his life was—He’d be walking down the street in broad daylight in Manhattan and he’d say, “Oh, I need to take a piss.” And he would just do it. We’d be on Broadway. I would be running away in horror, and he’d be like, “What’s wrong?” He became somebody who almost couldn’t live.
But Patrick was somebody who was always asking for help. The way I described him was he was like a car alarm going off over and over and over again, and nobody paying any attention.
In 1992 you started writing letters. Before 1992, what…
I was very codependent with my mother. I lived with her on and off throughout graduate school. I was in her house. She would give me money, because I would be running up a $600 phone bill. I was very irresponsible. We were together in this very codependent, very mutually self-destructive relationship. I would describe myself in those days as “Mom’s manager.” So if any of the other kids wanted to get to mom they had to go through me. So I was very close to her. One of our unspoken agreements was we would never ever ever talk about Father Nugent.
What years were you in grad school?
I took time off in between undergrad and grad, so I think it was from 86 to 96. So I took ten years because I was working all these jobs, dealing with my insane family, living partly in New York City. I was just very very very slow.
What years were you at college?
79-83. I’m still in contact with my professors from college because they helped me so much that I became friends with them after I graduated. In particular there’s this one – she’s an art historian. Her name is Carol Duncan. She probably influenced me more than anyone else in my life. I’d had teachers who told me I was smart and I was bright or whatever. But she really told me what I needed to do in order to succeed. And she didn’t doubt that I could. One of the interesting things was: she stayed my professor. She didn’t become my friend. She was just my professor. She made it clear that she wasn’t going to become my friend until I graduated. So she was the first person I knew that knew how to maintain boundaries. [Laughing] She was incredibly inspiring. She was brilliant, funny, wonderful teacher, great writer. In a way, just to impress her, I got a 4.0 average. Everything I did was to impress her. Now I’m friends with her. She’s just great.
In 1992 you started writing letters to the church because you didn’t want Father Nugent to hurt more kids. What was it that made it snap for you then?
After my mother died, I realized that I didn’t want to be like her. Before that, I thought it was OK to just drink and drink and drink. But then I realized, “I want to be a responsible adult.” I really did. I wanted to be someone who would not look at weak people and children being harmed and do nothing. I wanted to distinguish myself from the adults in my family. One of my first acts was: OK, if I want to be a responsible person, this is the first thing I need to do. And I didn’t tell them. I didn’t say that I was abused by Father Nugent. I just told them about my brother. And I was very vague. I said that Father Nugent was a bad person and a danger, but I was very very vague about it.
www.bishop-accountability.org/news/...fe_AfterThe.htmountability.org
After the Fall
Church Makes Changes, But Critics Cry "Not Enough"
By Lauren Wolfe
February 24, 2005
Long Island (NY) Press
In December, the Rockville Centre and Palm Beach, Fla. dioceses together gave more than $100,000 to a Florida man who says he was abused by former priest Matthew Fitzgerald. Years ago, allegations against Fitzgerald on Long Island led the late Bishop McGann, then in charge of the Rockville Centre Diocese, to transfer the priest around LI and eventually, in 1989, to sunny Florida—supposedly because the priest had allergies. Fitzgerald moved to Florida, and promptly began to abuse again.
The settlement with the Florida victim highlights the problems profoundly embedded in the Catholic Church's past: the movement of abusive priests around the country like so many chess pieces; the cover-up that basically enabled further abuse.
But the settlement also shows what the church is beginning to do differently.
For one thing, the victim did not sign a confidentiality agreement, so the December settlement and the abuse that led to it is all public knowledge. In addition, triple-digit payouts without such an agreement may be considered a sign of increased openess. Perhaps even more dramatic, Rockville Centre's Bishop William Murphy has agreed to write a letter of apology to the victim.
Slow Pace of Change
Three years since revelations surfaced that Catholic priests had sexually abused children for decades and gone unpunished, many people are examining what kind of progress the Church has made toward ensuring such heinous acts aren't repeated. With the release last week of the second annual national audit on U.S. dioceses, commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Church critics and boosters both have fresh material to scour. The report found that 96 percent of dioceses audited are completely in compliance with the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, a series of policies for dealing with victims of sexual abuse, set down in 2002 in Dallas by the USCCB.
Yet critics charge that the audits meant to check each diocese's compliance with sexual abuse policy are just part of a PR campaign, a scheme to mask the continued use of confidentiality agreements and the questionable treatment of abuse survivors.
The pace of change tends to be slow in such ancient institutions. It is an old organization, set in its ways, some would argue. Give it some leeway. The Church's harshest critics, on the other hand, are outraged by what they see as continued stonewalling.
And many are caught in the middle, wondering whether what they're seeing is slow progress or none at all.
At the same time that the Church released its own audit report, bishops announced a separate report that indicates 1,092 new accusations of abuse by at least 756 Catholic priests and deacons were made in the past year.
Even all the changes the scandal has brought about within the Church—more apparent openness, more discussion, more scrutiny—don't seem to be enough for some people. There exists a kind of no-win situation for both the Church and its detractors: The Church continues to lack much of the laity's trust, and much of the laity is still not getting what it wants from the Church.
Self Examination
In a well-publicized attempt to monitor itself, the Church employed the Gavin Group, a Boston-based compliance auditor, to determine if each diocese has complied with the Dallas Charter. But many people don't like the idea of the Church conducting an internal investigation. The audits are organized by the bishops, paid for by the bishops and based on information provided by the bishops.
"Bishops designed the rules of the ball game, dictated who plays, chose the umpire and then they proclaim, 'We're winning!'" says David Clohessy, head of the National Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), in disbelief.
Yet self audits are "normal business practice," responds Kathleen McChesney, executive director of the bishops' Office of Child and Youth Protection and previously the third-ranking member of the FBI (a past that does not escape the attention of those who perceive a kind of organized secrecy in the Church). Seen by victims' groups as a possible ally in the land of the tight-lipped bishops, McChesney admits there are challenges with her mission to bring the dioceses in line with the charter. For instance, she notes that openness and transparency are required in the charter, but that there is no definition of what those things mean.
Another possible blind spot with the audits, she says, is that her mission is to evaluate if policies have been put in place—not whether they have been effective.
"If there were more than two people in this office we could [monitor effectiveness]," she says, clearly frustrated. Besides herself, only one other person oversees child and youth protection in 194 dioceses and eparchies (dioceses of the Eastern Catholic Church).
The biggest challenge McChesney has faced regarding the audits, however, was pushing for their continuance. Earlier this year, she says, there was murmuring among the bishops that perhaps the audits should stop. Audits are time-consuming and costly, they argued.
McChesney says, "I think they were needed to make the bishops do what they needed to do."
Yet when so many dioceses come out of the process with lots of praise and little admonishment—as Rockville Centre has done twice—skepticism remains strong among the Church's critics.
"Worse Than Nothing"
Susan Gallagher, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and a survivor of priest abuse, even questions whether the audits are better than nothing.
"I think it's worse," she says, "because the public gets the idea that something positive is happening and children are safe, when in fact we have multiple molesters unsupervised."
Tom Myles, a director of LI's Voice of the Faithful, worries that the names of priests who did or did not pass required background checks are not being released. Also, victims were interviewed by the Gavin Group at random, leaving potential gaps in knowledge that could affect the group's assessment.
Myles says such procedures merely clear the way to blindly charge into the future: "We're trusting the pastor again who we trusted in the past."
And only some dioceses, such as those in Milwaukee, Baltimore and Tucson, have chosen to publish the names of accused priests on their websites, while many, such as Rockville Centre, choose not to.
At the same time, the Rockville Centre diocese came forth last month with some numbers. Diocesan officials reported that eight LI priests have been laicized (defrocked), three have been ordered to stand trial, 10 were suspended, and two more were cleared. These are 23 accused priests that Bishop Murphy says had allegations against them substantial enough to warrant further investigation.
But the 23 priests were not named by the diocese. While Church supporters see the disclosures as steps toward openness, critics claim these kinds of occasional disclosures can create a dangerous smokescreen.
Even with the disclosure of numbers, victims' advocates worry that without publishing the names of the accused (which Rockville Centre does not do), abusing priests cannot be monitored outside the hierarchy, and could therefore potentially continue to abuse.
Marci Hamilton, chair of public law at Cardozo Law School in Manhattan, says this kind of semi-progress is par for the course with the Church. "Whatever they don't want to reveal," she says, "they sit on it."
Buying Secrecy
Ever since it came to light that the Church often enters into confidentiality agreements with victims, critics have charged that these deals are bribes: Victims agree not to name their abuser or talk about their cases in exchange for more money than they would receive otherwise.
Not in Rockville Centre. In July 2003, Bishop Murphy declared that the diocese would not enter into any confidential settlements, "precisely because I do not want anyone to misinterpret a desire to help the suffering as some kind of 'hush money.'"
But Rockville Centre is not the norm. Confidentiality agreements are coming into play even more now as the scandal subsides, says Gallagher. She's disturbed that the exchange of money for silence continues to this day.
According to the recent national audit report, only "a small number of dioceses and eparchies entered into confidentiality agreements" during 2003. Yet Gallagher and others consider this statement suspect, mainly because of one bizarre re-tally. In October 2004, the Manchester, N.H., diocese reported that it had entered into "26 confidentiality agreements during this period." Then, the new national report summary by the USCCB says of Manchester, "The diocese has not entered into any confidentiality agreements during this period."
Gallagher estimates that at least 144 agreements were signed nationally during the audit period, calendar year 2003.
"Confidentiality agreements actually caused the whole crisis in the first place," she says. "It was the secrecy that caused priests to keep molesting."
Many victims still face the choice between catharsis via exposure or catharsis via counseling paid for with settlement money. In this era of seemingly greater transparency around clergy abuse, Clohessy of SNAP says he suspects that what happens in most dioceses is that the Church delicately conveys to the victim or victim's attorney that more money will be provided for counseling if the press stays out of the case.
"Church damage-control efforts are getting increasingly sophisticated," Clohessy says. National attention to the scandal has made the Church more aware of its public image, he argues.
For some victims, however, the greatest goal they have is to excise the pain from their abuse by speaking out about it. Dave McGuire, 38, a survivor originally from West Hempstead who now lives in Los Angeles, says he would not sign a confidentiality agreement because "talking about [the abuse] carries a much greater reward than any kind of compensation would." McGuire wants enough money from the Church to pay for his therapy, but he also wants to be able to let other people know what happened to him.
"If it is confidential, no one will ever know about it without criminal prosecution," says Hamilton at Cardozo. And criminal prosecution is unlikely in most of these cases, because that usually requires testimony from the victim—in most cases children. Added to that, statutes of limitations, which often come into play when talking about crimes against minors, are very difficult to challenge, especially in states with strict laws like New York.
Why Take The Money?
Victims who take money from the Church are often called hypocrites by Church supporters. Yet abuse survivors who do sign confidentiality agreements to get more money have their reasons.
"It's very hard to say no to a quarter-million dollars when you're in debt," says Susan Gallagher.
Time and again, victims' groups point to what happens when someone does not sign a confidentiality agreement, like the founder of New England SNAP, Phil Saviano. He refused to sign one in the 1990s, and only received $12,000 from the Church.
Hence Rockville Centre's $100,000 settlement stands out as a large payout for a diocese that doesn't demand a vow of silence. Victims in the Worcester, Mass., diocese, which like Rockville Centre does not enter into confidentiality agreements, have been offered "settlements that were in the several-thousand-dollar range; some were under $10,000, some were over $10,000," confirms Ray Delisle, a spokesman for the diocese. Such paltry sums discourage lawyers from even taking these cases.
It's not just about the money, victims and lawyers submit. "Sometimes victims want to make a point and only want a little money," says Hamilton. She does recognize, though, that if the Church pays a high price for its wrongs, perhaps that penalty, in addition to publicity, will prevent such abuses in the future. "You'll never deter a church from doing this again if the price is so low," she concedes.
But accepting money from the institution that you believe hurt you can be complicated, Gallagher says, especially if a confidentiality agreement has been signed. Later, she admits, "It does make you feel like a prostitute."
Gallagher signed a confidentiality agreement when she settled her case in 1998. She had sued her abuser (who had also abused her two brothers), the Rev. Frank Nugent, and the order of the Salesians, a religious order with its headquarters in New Rochelle that integrates its priests within different dioceses. Her lawyer told her to expect maybe $15,000 without a confidentiality agreement. Once she signed one, she got $250,000.
Gallagher now wishes she had not accepted the agreement, which did not prevent her accused abuser from being around children.
"They sent me this money and then they moved him into a youth center," she says of the priest.
Eventually, Gallagher says, the Church released her from her agreement, after the diocese got a call from a reporter at The New York Times, which let the Church know she was ready to break it anyway. She decided to speak to the press because of what she calls the Church's failure to live up to its end of the arrangement in dealing with Nugent.
Gallagher's case illustrates the one trump card that victims hold, even if most of them don't know it. To date, there has been no penalty for breaking a confidentiality agreement. The general consensus is that the Church chooses not to go after these victims because it would look petty. No advocate the Press spoke to could cite a single instance where there were repercussions for a victim who broke their agreement.
For some victims, money is no object. Melanie Little, a Garden City lawyer, represents 25 abuse victims. She has been battling the Rockville Centre diocese in what she calls a "very drawn-out process." None of her clients, she says, would enter into a confidentiality agreement if asked (which they would not be at Rockville Centre), despite what she says is an aggressive fight put up by the Church to keep the cases from going to trial. Even if they get less money in the end, for Little's clients, skipping the agreement and heading to trial is worth it.
"This is a last resort for them," Little says. "They really just want to be heard and understood."
Hoops To Jump Through
Victims see the Church's efforts to block communication, money or access as just another kind of intimidation. This is the where the Church's good intentions become obscured by its own bureacracy and survivors feel re-victimized.
McGuire, the former West Hempstead resident and a survivor, receives money from the Church for his therapy. But it isn't always easy to get.
"My experience was that they certainly set the bar high and I had to jump through some hoops to get stuff," McGuire says.
He says that 13 years after his abuse occurred at the hand of the Rev. Eugene Vollmer in the Rockville Centre Diocese, he is doing better. In the intervening years, though, McGuire became addicted to drugs and was suicidal. He comes from an Irish Catholic family, where his uncle was a Jesuit priest and the Church was considered untouchable. "The shame was big enough for me to try to kill myself over," he says.
When he approached Eileen Puglisi, the victims' advocate at the diocese, in August 2004, McGuire says he found himself being challenged by her as to how a three-day hospital stay after a suicide attempt could cost $4,000. McGuire wanted to include this cost in the money the Church gives him for mental health treatment.
Shelley Lotenberg, a spokeswoman at Nassau University Medical Center, says $4,000 is probably a fair estimate, considering that without medications or X-rays or anything added, a bare-bones hospital stay runs about $1,000 to $1,200 a night.
But McGuire felt yet again mistreated by the Church: "Submitting for reimbursement for this turned into me having to explain myself to them," he says. In his opinion, this is another barrier set up by the Church hierarchy to keep victims from getting what they truly need to heal.
Sean Dolan, a spokesman for the diocese, said on behalf of Puglisi that there is a process in place for dealing with issues "related to the care and treatment of sexual abuse," but declined to comment on specific cases, in order to "keep the confidentiality of the victims."
Victims look for this kind of privacy protection, and praise it when they get it, as McGuire readily does. But for those who are frustrated at the pace of progress within the Church, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato's maxim to "never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow" is easier said than done.
"There's no denying there's a lot of activity and motion," says Clohessy. But, like so many others, he doesn't see that much has changed in three years other than the consistency of the smoke and the shape of the mirrors.
"Motion doesn't equal forward motion," he says of the Church's efforts. "Activity doesn't equal progress."
Edited by GalileoGalilei - 24/1/2011, 14:33
