As a young man studying for the priesthood, Patrick Wall imagined
life as a professor and football coach at a Catholic university.
It didn't work out that way.
Two decades later, Wall has not only
left the Catholic Church, he has become one of its most tireless
opponents.
He's an ex-priest, driven from ministry by the feeling that his
superiors used him to help cover up sex abuse by other clergymen.
And he's using the training he gained as a priest to work with victims of abuse who want to take the church to court.
Since 1991, Wall says he has consulted on more than 1,000 abuse
cases, helping lawyers pick apart defenses mounted by dioceses from
Alaska to Australia.
Now a senior consultant at the law firm of Manly and Stewart in
Southern California, Wall spoke to CNN on the sidelines of a recent
conference for legal and religion scholars at Cardiff Law School in
Wales.
In Philadelphia, where four priests and a Catholic school teacher
were indicted on sex abuse charges earlier this year, Wall says he is
helping the district attorney build an unprecedented criminal case not
only against the clergy, but against an archdiocesan official who
supervised them. The priests – one of whom is the church official – and
the teacher have denied the allegations.
The case is potentially historic. Wall doesn't know of another case
where a U.S. prosecutor has gone after an official at the top of the
church hierarchy as well as the suspected abusers themselves.
Prosecutors are trying to convict a vicar – the man who supervised
the priests in the archdiocese – with child endangerment because they
say he allowed suspected abusers to have contact with young people.
The case raises the possibility that a high-ranking church official will end up behind bars.
Wall hopes the threat of prison time will change the way American
bishops respond to abuse allegations in a way that civil lawsuits have
not.
"In the civil cases, we have taken over $3 billion, but you're not getting a lot of change in the system," he says.
There has been more than a decade of intense focus on abuse by
priests across the United States and Western Europe, plus lawsuits,
investigations, and Vatican statements, including instructions to
bishops around the world just last month to come up with an abuse
policy.
And even so, Wall says, priests are still abusing children.
"I'm working on stuff that happened in the summer of 2010," he says. "It's the same old sodomy."
A life-changing assignment
Wall was studying to be a priest at Saint John's Abbey in
Collegeville, Minnesota, when there was a life-changing knock on his
door one morning after breakfast.
At his door that day in 1990 was the head of the abbey, Abbot Jerome Theisen, with an assignment, Wall says.
Wall, then 25, was to move into one of the freshman dormitories at
the university associated with the abbey.
The abbot wanted him to become
a faculty resident, a staff position that involved keeping an eye on
first-year university students in college housing. He was to make the
move immediately, that very morning.
Wall knew why.
"Starting in 1989, we started getting hit with lawsuit after lawsuit"
from people alleging that priests had abused them, Wall says. He says
the abbot told him that credible abuse accusations had been made against
the man Wall was to replace.
Brother Paul Richards, a spokesman for Saint John's Abbey, said that
the monastery and university had no record of why Wall was asked to work
in the dorm. Abbot Theisen has died, Richards added.
Saint John's Abbey adopted a policy on sexual abuse and exploitation
in 1989, it says on its website, saying that made it “among the first
institutions to adopt” such a policy.
Wall, for his part, says the abbot's request put him on the road to
becoming what the church unofficially calls a "fixer," a person who
parachutes in to replace clergy who have to disappear quickly and
quietly.
One of Theisen's successors, Abbot John Klassen, issued an open
letter of apology in 2002, saying that "some members" of the monastic
community had engaged in "abusive sexual behavior with people in our
schools and parishes."
A lawsuit was filed earlier this month against Saint John's by a man
who says he was abused in the 1960s by a priest who later served as
abbot between Theisen and Klassen. The abbey says it was “shocked” by
the charges against the late Abbot Timothy Kelly, who died of cancer
last year.
It says it is investigating the claims against Kelly, calling them
“the first allegations that Abbot Kelly violated his vows or was an
abuser.”
Wall plans to testify in that case, he told CNN.
"In the fall of '92 we had another 13 [abuse] cases come through,"
Wall says. "They pushed up my ordination" by a few months, Wall says, so
he could step into the shoes of another priest who had to vanish.
Understanding the damage
It was after his ordination, Wall says, that he began to understand
the trauma that abusive priests were inflicting, not only on their
victims but on victims' families and communities.
As a new priest, Wall started hearing confessions of victims'
relatives who blamed themselves for the abuse, telling Wall "I should
have known, I should have seen the signs."
A heavy-set man who laughs easily, Wall still looks like the
linebacker he was in high school and college. He peppers his speech with
words like "dude" and casually refers to people who he thinks have done
something stupid as "morons."
But relating the confessions of victims' relatives, Wall's cheerful demeanor hardens.
"I'm telling them, 'You haven't committed a sin,'" he says.
Wall says that child abuse isn't like other injury cases, such as car
crashes, in which a victim might be 10% at fault. Instead, he says,
"100% of the blame is on the perpetrator."
Over the next four years, Wall says that the Archdiocese of Saint
Paul and Minneapolis sent him to four more places in Minnesota where
priests needed to move out fast.
He learned a lot. Wall says he saw that there was a budget for
handling cases of priestly sexual abuse as far back as 1994, eight years
before the scandal blew up nationally with revelations about abuse in
Boston, Massachusetts.
The archdiocese could not immediately confirm
that, but spokesman Dennis McGrath said he would not be surprised if it
was true, saying the archdiocese had been a leader in helping victims of
abuse.
Wall did what the church told him to do for as long as he could, he says, but his doubts continued to grow.
"I followed the party line," he says. "But it's pretty hard to follow
the party line when you don't think the party line is moral any more."
The breaking point came in 1997. Wall was in Rome, studying for a
master's of divinity degree. His abbot called from Minnesota to tell him
he was being posted to the Bahamas.
It was not the dream job it might sound like.
Wall says that the Bahamas was where Saint John's was sending priests
it had to keep away from people because of abuse allegations. Richards,
the abbey's spokesman, flatly denies the charge.
"I basically was going to be a prison warden," Wall says.
"Without much planning, I said, 'Basta cosi,'" he says, lapsing into
Minnesota-accented Italian meaning, "Enough of this."
Wall had decided
to leave the priesthood.
The abbot did not take that well, Wall says, warning that he would
never make it in "the real world," that he would not be released from
his priestly vows and that the order would bill him for the master's
degree it had sponsored for him.
The tab for the degree was about
$48,000, he says.
Richards denies those allegations.
"It has never been the abbey's
practice to require payback for education from members of our community
who have left," he says, "and it was not the case with Pat Wall."
Wall says the abbot's threats did not change his mind.
"All it did is piss me off even more," he says. "I left without a plan in December 1997."
Insider knowledge
Wall says he went home to Lake City, Minnesota to live with his
parents, then bounced from job to job for nearly five years. He got
married and had a daughter. He made good money as a salesman in Southern
California but says he found the work as intellectually stimulating as
"shovelling dirt."
And then, in 2002, the California state legislature did something
that would change Wall's life.
The state opened a one-year window to
allow victims of clergy abuse to sue the church, even if the if the
statute of limitations on the case had already expired.
Wall's eyes light up as he discusses the moment.
The law did not specifically target the Catholic Church, Wall says,
noting that some rabbis were sued as well.
But Catholic organizations
were by far the largest group of defendants.
Still, suing a Catholic diocese was no easy task. "The litigation
demanded a level of expertise that had never been needed before," Wall
says.
Because of his religious training in canon law, as the Catholic
Church's rules are known, Wall had that expertise. He knew how and where
the church kept records. He knew where money came from and where it
went. He spoke Italian and Latin.
In his first case, he testified against the Roman Catholic Diocese of
Orange, California, challenging its claim that it did not know the
Franciscan friar at the center of abuse allegations.
Wall insisted that the archdiocese and any priest in it would have
easy access to church records saying who the Franciscan was and who had
jurisdiction over him.
The case settled out of court, Wall says.
The Diocese of Orange declined to comment for this article, as did
the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which is the defendant in several cases
currently involving Wall’s firm, Manly and Stewart.
Jeffrey Lena, a lawyer who represents the Vatican in the United States, also declined to comment.
But Jeff Anderson, a Minnesota-based lawyer who specializes in suing
the Catholic Church on behalf of abuse victims and filed the suit
against Saint John's Abbey, is full of praise for Wall.
Anderson calls Wall “an extraordinary researcher, academic and hands-on voice of experience from the inside.”
He praises the former priest's “courage,” and says he is a “powerful,
insightful source of information based on his own personal experience
and his study of the phenomenon” of abuse.
An old problem
Wall argues that the problem of abuse by priests is far older than anyone in the church admits publicly.
The earliest church records concerning sexual misconduct by priests
come from the Council of Elvira, he says. That synod took place in what
is now Spain in the year 309.
There was a treatment center for abusive priests in Hartford,
Connecticut, as far back as 1822, Wall says, and the Vatican issued
instructions to American bishops on how to judge and punish accusations
of criminal acts by priests as far back as 1883.
Wall provided his translation of the 1883 instructions to CNN. They
do not refer to any specific crimes, but refer to “abuses” and “evils.”
They set out how to investigate, judge and punish crimes by priests,
laying out rules such as the examination of witnesses in private, and
the opportunity for the accused to know the charges and to respond and
appeal.
The Philadelphia district attorney's office declined to comment on
assistance it is receiving from Wall, saying it was prevented by court
order from discussing the case with the media.
But Wall says that years of seeing how the Catholic Church handles
abuse cases have convinced him that the church will not solve the
problem itself.
He says he's not impressed by new instructions from Rome last month
giving bishops around the world a year to come up with procedures for
handling allegations of abuse.
"It's a Circular Letter," he says, using the official church term for
the document. "That means it's for the circular file. Bishops are going
to throw it away."
Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops revised its 2002
charter around dealing with sex abuse allegations to reflect the
Vatican's new standards.
Wall believes the Catholic Church will survive this scandal.
"It's going to fix itself," he says.
"The institution is going to become radically smaller" as people
abandon the church, he predicts. "The loss of membership, the problems
in the criminal courts, the statements from the pope - these are all
good."
Perpetrators need "access, power and money" in order to commit crimes
and get away with them, Wall argues.
A smaller, weaker Catholic Church
won't be able to provide those things, making it less of a haven for
abusers, he says, which will lead to a cleansed institution.
In the meantime, Wall says, the church should give up trying to handle abusers internally and let the law step in.
He recommends that the church "completely get out" of child
protection, hand over all its files to civil law enforcement, and make
bishops sign a legal oath every year that there are no perpetrators in
the ministry - which would open them to criminal prosecution if they are
found to have lied.
"Otherwise," he says, "I'll be prosecuting priest sex abuse cases for the rest of my life."