Profiles of Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors Thomas S. Neuberger
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WHEN PRIESTS BECOME PREDATORS Profiles of Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors Thomas S. Neuberger Copyright © 2012 by Thomas S. Neuberger All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the media or longer excerpts intended to be used in legislative proceedings which are designed to lead to the enactment of legislation benefitting survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Thomas S. Neuberger Publisher Two East Seventh Street Suite 302 Wilmington, Delaware 19801 Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-615-64824-8 ii This book is dedicated to the many survivors of childhood sexual crimes in Delaware who were brave enough to overcome their adversity and challenge their powerful church despite the overwhelming odds and forces they faced. Their words and the experiences related here seek to educate the reader and protect today’s children. iii CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Douglas J. McClure, Sgt. U.S.M.C. 7 Chapter 2. Commander Kenneth J. Whitwell, U.S.N. 46 Chapter 3. James Sheehan 107 Chapter 4. The DeLuca Eight in Delaware Bankruptcy Court 142 John Doe Number Three 154 Mary Dougherty 164 John Vai 175 John Doe Number One/Felix Flanigan 184 John Doe Number Four 192 Michael Sowden 197 Michael Schulte 202 Chapter 5. The Trial of John Michael Vai 231 October 26 232 October 27 266 November 1 270 November 3 309 November 8 334 November 9 362 November 12 395 December 1 422 iv December 6, 7 and 8 423 Endnotes 428 Index 456 About the Author 468 Reader’s Notes 469 v Introduction On January 6, 2002, public awareness of the sexual crimes against children by Catholic priests, which had occurred for generations within the Roman Catholic Church, burst into the news starting in Boston, Massachusetts.1 Expanded public awareness of the scandal swept through Iowa, Kentucky, San Diego, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and other major areas in the United States and abroad, including Ireland and Germany.2 Governmental investigations followed, such as the September 20053 and January 2011 Grand Jury reports in Philadelphia4 and four reports by the national Irish government from 1995 to 2011, ending with its most recent Cloyne Report.5 Through the heroic efforts of two Delaware State legislators, Senator Karen E. Peterson (Democrat) and Representative Deborah D. Hudson (Republican), the Delaware General Assembly unanimously enacted the Child Victim’s Act of 2007. 10 Del. C. § 8145, which repealed the statute of limitations in civil suits relating to child abuse cases and provided a two year window in which victims could bring a civil action for personal injuries in cases previously barred by current law. Both before and after that remedial legislation, in the small state of Delaware alone, between January 2004 and July 2009, more than 160 separate lawsuits were filed in the state and federal courts arising from the crimes Catholic priests committed on children as far back as 1952 and as recently as 2006. Over 150 of those lawsuits involved the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, Inc. and Catholic religious orders of priests long active in Delaware, such as the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, the Norbertines, and the Capuchins. The methods and tactics used by the church and its lawyers to discourage, intimidate and coerce the survivors of its crimes on children and youth are universal and are noted herein. (The victims of such childhood sexual crimes prefer to refer to themselves as survivors and not victims.) The obstacles thrown up in Delaware by those who tried to prevent the restoration of these survivor’s respect and dignity need to be understood by all our elected representatives, the media, and the voting public who can demand reform from their state legislators. One purpose of this book is to educate and motivate the citizenry at large to see that additional laws are passed to give survivors of childhood sexual abuse the opportunity to seek judicial relief in our courts nationwide. To that end, this work incorporates the actual words and experiences of these survivors as reported in existing court records. Many other aspects of this crisis are poorly understood, if at all. For example, headlines and news stories fail to convey in detail the face of human suffering and the courage of those survivors of childhood sexual crimes who have come forward. Only attending a public trial or reviewing extensive video recordings of sworn testimony can provide some understanding of the magnitude of the personal anguish of survivors and their families, the tactics used by priest child abusers and their enabler bosses, the way religious dogma was perverted to enable these rogue priests to circumvent the family as a protective social institution for children, the mechanics of the psychological protective mechanisms of child victims, and the lifelong permanent emotional handicaps inflicted on survivors. These are all significant matters of public concern to our body politic, the public, and our legislators. Their political and social importance cannot be -2- underestimated. Previously this vital information has been under-reported and unavailable in accessible and understandable formats. The importance of the public’s need to know the full and accurate particulars of little known aspects of the child abuse crisis within religious institutions, which are found in judicial records, falls within the parameters of the United States Supreme Court’s 1975 decision in Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn: “In a society in which each individual has but limited time and resources with which to observe at first hand the operations of his government, he relies necessarily upon the press to bring to him in convenient form the facts of those operations. Great responsibility is accordingly placed upon the news media to report fully and accurately the proceedings of government, and official records and documents open to the public are the best data of government operations.”6 (Emphasis supplied) And so, along with educating and motivating the public, another goal of this book is to act as the press and accurately and exactly republish the content of obscure multi-faceted judicial proceedings which are necessary to better inform us about matters of political and social importance which the courts and legislators of Delaware have addressed.7 All these chapters are essentially fair and accurate verbatim reports of judicial trials, hearings and other proceedings taken directly from court records. At this time, the general public has no other convenient means of access to such material other than in book form since the media lacks the focus and the space for the task. On another level it is hoped that this work will contribute to the professions of medicine, nursing, psychology, anthropology, sociology, law, criminal justice, and journalism, by presenting the actual phenomenological experiences of survivors of child abuse. Instead of -3- presenting abstract quantitative studies of such individuals, it presents the lived experience of the persons in their own words, and is intended to deepen understanding of this phenomenon across academic and professional boundaries. It is hoped that this information will be invaluable for diagnostic and treatment purposes of adult victims of childhood sex crimes. Such victims rarely, if ever, tell a medical professional that they experienced a childhood sex crime which may be the source of their substance abuse, alcoholism, relational problems or other physical or emotional issues. With this information medical professionals may be assisted in making proper diagnoses and treatment alternatives may be enhanced. With the lived experiences related here, journalists and the media also will be better prepared to report on related crimes in other arenas, such as the 2011 Penn State University revelations of alleged child abuse by a football coach. Moreover, this work presents the moral courage of ten survivors who publicly withstood all the opposition and dirty tricks which the Roman Catholic Church could muster. The individual chapters of this book stand as independent stories of the bravery and fortitude of the survivors under scrutiny and typify the experience of the universe of survivors from the Delaware sample. The narratives of these ten heroes appear in their own words as given in actual court proceedings, without paraphrase or interpretation. To assist the reader, and for ease of reading, when “questions” and “answers” from actual witness testimony are presented, the “Qs” and “As” from the actual transcripts have been removed so as to present a narrative exchange between the witness and the questioning attorney. In cases where the Q and A format is unnecessary to present the testimony, it is omitted altogether and the responses of the survivor are simply presented in his or her actual words as they occurred in court proceedings. This book also fully documents the moral failures of the Diocese of Wilmington and two -4- of its religious orders of priests, as found in their own business records. The decisions of many Delaware Bishops, the ultimate local authority in the Roman Catholic Church religious system, to employ priests despite repeated warnings such as, “be afraid to take a chance on him,” also are explained. The code words and secret language used in church documents to record and identify which priests were child abusers are explained by a former priest who worked within the church medical and mental health system. The consequences of this form of child abuse have gone unrecognized, or have been misunderstood and under-reported. Not only do sexually abused children suffer long into adulthood, their families suffer as well.