When then-Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan sounded the alarm on
abusive priests, the Roman Catholic Church dragged its feet — but when
Dolan needed to protect tens of millions of dollars, the church acted
without hesitation, bombshell documents revealed Monday.The Vatican took only a month to give Dolan the go-ahead in 2007 to move $57 million into a trust in anticipation of an avalanche of sexual abuse lawsuits against the Milwaukee Archdiocese, which Dolan ran from 2002 to 2009.
But it took six years for Dolan to get the Vatican to defrock an out-of-control priest who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old boy.
The stunning revelations were contained in 6,000 pages of documents released Monday by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee as part of its bankruptcy proceeding.
In 2003, Dolan — now the cardinal in New York and arguably the face of the Catholic Church in America — wrote Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI, notifying him of the Rev. John O’Brien’s criminal conviction.
“After only a few visits they began to hug each other at the end of their time together,” Dolan wrote of O’Brien and the teen victim. “Shortly thereafter, in the basement of the church building, Father O’Brien and the boy had explicit sexual contact.”
O’Brien had been convicted three years earlier of sexual assault and served 18 months of probation. He had been removed from the parish, but was still in the priesthood.
In 2005, Ratzinger’s office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had not yet made a decision. Another adolescent had come forward to police and charged O’Brien with abuse, beginning when he was 14, documents show. O’Brien had met the boy while working as a teacher at St. Mary Springs High School in Fond du Lac, Wis.
“The potential for great scandal exists,” Dolan wrote.
In contrast, on June 4, 2007, Dolan sought Vatican approval to move $57 million from a cemetery fund into a trust.
“By transferring these assets to the trust, I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability,” Dolan wrote. Just one month later, on July 18, the Vatican agreed.
Critics have said the move was intended to hide cash from claimants.
In a statement, Dolan dismissed that charge as “old and discredited attacks.”
Dolan added he welcomed the release of the documents in the interest of transparency.
“It is my hope that the release of these documents will also help to show how the Catholic Church in the United States has become a leader in dealing with the societywide scourge of sexual abuse,” Dolan said.
Still, the reams of correspondence, depositions and internal church communications have revived questions about the church’s handling of sex abuse cases.
“Vatican officials move at a glacial pace, if at all, to protect kids from predator priests.
But they move with lightning speed to protect church officials from criticism and church money from victims,” said Barbara Blaine, the president of the Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests.
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Dolan on failure of the Vatican to boot an out-of-control priest: “The potential for great scandal exists. If Father O’Brien, while still in the clerical state, makes any inappropriate advances on any of these adolescent boys in whose company he has been observed, the outcry will be huge.”