News From Terre Haute, Indiana

Opinion

July 14, 2010

Stephanie Salter: Reporting on a church in denial is no easy task

TERRE HAUTE — The first thing almost anyone noticed upon meeting the Rev. Martin Greenlaw was his toupee. It was not a good one, dark brown and anchored atop his own lighter brown hair. Even parishioners at St. Paul’s Church who liked their pastor wondered why a Catholic priest needed a toupee; behind his back they referred to it as “road kill.”

St. Paul’s in San Francisco was my parish from 1989 to 2004. Today, 14 years after Greenlaw pleaded guilty in the first of two felony grand theft and embezzlement cases against him, I think of that grotesque hairpiece as a symbol, not only of Father Martin’s brokenness and corruption, but also of the Catholic hierarchy’s failure to see obvious trouble and protect its people.

The failure sprang from a superior and isolationist self-image that continues to bedevil church leaders, particularly amidst ongoing scandals of past sex abuse by clergy. The self-image was and is fed by a willful denial of reality and an almost paranoid defensiveness that, for decades, has made much of the hierarchy blind and deaf to pleas and alerts from laity, women religious and, occasionally, one of its own priests or bishops.

In the Greenlaw case, instead of recognizing and admitting that a damaged priest was in need of serious help, archdiocese officials looked the other way, discounted numerous warnings and allowed a bad situation to worsen. Only when they discovered that Father Greenlaw had stolen money from archdiocese coffers did church officials step in.

Even then, typically, they quietly filed a civil suit that was disguised to avoid detection by anyone outside the inner hierarchical circle.

Only luck (or Providence) caused that filing to fall into a newspaper reporter’s hands.

As I explained Sunday, I’ve been thinking about the Greenlaw case since reading of an allegedly similar wayward priest in Waterbury, Conn. Like Greenlaw, the Rev. Kevin Gray reportedly stole church funds — more than $1 million, according to police — to support a lavish, secret, very unpriestly lifestyle. To the Hartford diocese’s credit, its officials did not file a veiled civil lawsuit; they asked the Waterbury police to investigate Gray because his annual parish financial reports were virtually nonexistent.

The San Francisco reporter who happened upon the Greenlaw lawsuit back in the mid-1990s was Dennis Opatrny, a colleague of mine at the San Francisco Examiner. I joined Pat and Elizabeth Fernandez in reporting and writing a series of stories about the crimes of Martin Greenlaw and the even worse crimes of the influential monsignor he considered his mentor, Patrick O’Shea.

Whatever else Greenlaw did, he was never accused of sexually abusing minors. O’Shea, however, was, and he cost the San Francisco Archdiocese tens of millions of dollars in legal settlements.

Pat, Elizabeth and I were veteran journalists when we began digging with a local radio team into the Greenlaw-O’Shea saga in 1993. To this day, we still agree: No other story any of us has worked has presented such difficulty in obtaining and verifying information. The entire way, we were vilified by church officials for our efforts.

Like most journalists who turn their investigative tools on the Catholic Church, Elizabeth, Pat and I learned we were in good and frustrated company. Reporters all over the country shared similar accounts of looking into allegations of crimes and misdemeanors by clergy and church officials. One of the journalists was Jason Berry, who produced the first comprehensive exposé of a U.S. diocese, New Orleans, corrupted by both a sexually abusive priest and his superiors’ coverup.

From Berry’s reporting, which began in the early 1980s, came “Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sex Abuse of Children.” First published in 1992, the book estimated that about 400 Catholic clergy in North America had been accused over the previous eight years of molesting minors. That number today, by the church’s own count, is in the thousands.

Sometime in 1994, we Examiner reporters had a conference call with Berry. I asked him how the same pattern of crime and coverup could still be going on in city after city. (This was long before scandals erupted in Boston, Los Angeles, Australia, France, Latin America, Ireland, Germany and Belgium.) Elizabeth repeated a phrase about the institutional church we would return to, story after story, year after year: “When will they ever get it?”

Berry told us not to hold our breath. He commiserated with our accounts of hierarchical stonewalling and sources who insisted on anonymity because they were petrified of losing a parish job or of some other form of social retribution. He offered us some advice, too, which he said pained him as a Catholic to say:

“When you are dealing with church officials, operate on the premise that you are being lied to and then hope you are proven wrong.”

Several years later the investigative team of the Boston Globe, no doubt, realized the same lesson while producing a 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on that city’s long-hidden practice of shielding and re-circulating priests with multiple allegations of child sex crimes against them. Anyone interested in the anatomy of investigative journalism — or anyone who still believes the crimes-and-cover-ups of the church have been blown out of proportion — should read the Globe team’s book, “Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church.”

The Boston mess cost Cardinal Bernard Law his job, albeit with a golden parachute: He lives in semi-retirement in Italy these days, a member of the curia with a variety of positions, including titular Cardinal Priest of the American parish in Rome, Santa Susannah.

Our Examiner stories and other media attention helped contribute to the end of San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn’s stewardship in 1995, a consequence that still saddens me because Quinn has one of the finest theological minds in the U.S. Catholic Church. But he’d lost control of his three-county archdiocese.

Quinn’s replacement was William J. Levada. For a decade, until he was chosen in 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI to head an important Vatican office (and elevated to cardinal in 2006), Levada labored to straighten out the San Francisco Archdiocese and the diocese of Santa Rosa. While he tightened child protection policies and instituted financial reporting rules that helped prevent other Greenlaws or O’Sheas, Levada was typical of the hierarchy:

He refused to own the whole of the church’s role in its priests’ crimes, and he instinctively lashed out at the news media and other public prodders.

In a blistering letter to the Examiner editor in May 1996, Levada criticized a subheadline on a story about one of Greenlaw’s sentencings. A probation officer had testified that Greenlaw said he’d felt his crimes were more immoral than criminal and he’d told her “that other priests were misappropriating funds as well, inferring that it was more or less a common practice.”

The newspaper’s headlines reflected the probation officer’s report: “Thieving priest denies criminality/Greenlaw sorry but reportedly says clerics often steal.”

In his published letter, Levada demanded to know why such a statement should be “headlined in this article, impugning the reputation of over 500 hard-working, honest priests in this archdiocese?”

Referring to an assistant district attorney who’d said he hoped Greenlaw would “rat out on others” who might be stealing church funds, Levada wrote, “Is this the even-handed objectivity a community has a right to expect from the district attorney’s office? Or worse, is it perhaps evidence of an ill-disguised bias — anti-religious, anti-Catholic, anti-clerical or all of the above?”

That tendency to reach for and play the anti-Catholic card, to discount or attack the bearer of bad news, has poorly served church leaders for many years. So, too, has the hierarchy’s dependence on secular attorneys to stall cases for years and to employ every legal technicality at hand to wear down plaintiffs so they will give up and go away.

Last month, police in scandal-scorched Belgium barged into a bishops’ conference and held the men for nine hours while investigators confiscated church files for documents pertaining to sex abuse allegations. The tombs of two former archbishops were drilled. The pope called the actions “deplorable” and protested to Belgium’s ambassador to the Holy See.

The bishops garnered little sympathy from people who have grown weary of the disconnect between church leaders’ words and deeds. The volume and scope of Catholic scandal — sexual, monetary and cover-up — have left the hierarchy with a colossal credibility gap. The cops in Belgium mirrored an attitude many of us reluctantly have adopted toward most stewards of the church: They still don’t seem to get it, so we’re not inclined to afford them the benefit of the doubt.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

Text Only | Photo Reprints
Opinion
  • MET 051613 YOTR MURAL.jpg Mark Bennett: High-profile mural connects historical dots from city to river

    At 96 feet wide and 2 stories tall, the power, impact and value of the Wabash will be evident.

    May 19, 2013 2 Photos

  • EDITORIAL: Waging the ‘readiness’ campaign

    Almost every Hoosier who starts college intends to finish. Unfortunately, those who arrive on campus unprepared in key academic areas are far less likely to fulfill that aspiration.

    May 19, 2013

  • READERS' FORUM: May 19, 2013

    • Flawed reasoning on gun checks

    • A hint of things yet to come?

    • Are the ‘makers’ doing the ‘taking’?

    • The ‘Obamination’ is finally revealed

    • Pondering effects of Obamacare

    • Fantasizing on the ‘Apocalypse’

    • Another view of Hinduism

    • Great experience for HCMS students

    May 19, 2013

  • FLASHPOINT: A legislative session of missed opportunities

    Given the nature of politicians, grand claims of accomplishments and overblown rhetoric about “historic” efforts are to be expected at the close of any legislative session.

    May 19, 2013

  • RONN MOTT: Mushrooms = Hoosier happiness

    Someone wrote or said a few years ago a statement that would define the word “Hoosier.” According to this urban legend, a Hoosier is somebody dribbling a basketball around the Indy 500 while eating a fried, morel mushroom. It did not define me, at the time.

    May 18, 2013

  • EDITORIAL: Insult to an independent press

    Distrust of government secrecy has been elevated to an exceptional level with the disclosure the Justice Department covertly examined two months of Associated Press phone records to determine who leaked details to the AP about a foiled terrorist plot.

    May 17, 2013

  • READERS' FORUM: May 17, 2013

    Hinduism doesn’t deserve ridicule Shefali Purohit, Terre Haute

    May 17, 2013

  • Ronn Mott.jpg RONN MOTT: Israel’s Air Force

    Recently the Israeli Air Force bombed and rocketed a convoy leaving Syria going to Lebanon with rockets that were going to be used to attack Israel. It did not get there. It was destroyed.

    May 16, 2013 1 Photo

  • EDITORIAL: Noteworthy in the news: Dashing finish for the Sycamores

    It’s always thrilling to see Indiana State University’s athletic teams do well in high-level competition, and two specific teams rose to impressive heights last weekend in the Missouri Valley Conference outdoor track and field championships.

    May 16, 2013

  • Readers' Forum: May 16, 2013

    Moving Deming folks sounds ‘nuts’

    May 16, 2013

  • Readers' Forum: May 15, 2013

    Participants rise to the challenge: I would like to write a letter congratulating all the Wabash Valley Roadrunners that competed in the One America Indianapolis Mini Marathon.

    May 15, 2013

  • Ronn Mott.jpg RONN MOTT: Media merry-go-round

    Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows. That isn’t a unique phrase to this writer or to this era in time. But, when it comes to the musical chairs of broadcasting, it certainly applies.

    May 14, 2013 1 Photo

  • LIZ CIANCONE: Courts see a different appearance than cops

    Have you ever noticed the transformation between the arrest of an accused lawbreaker and the first appearance in court?

    May 14, 2013

  • READERS' FORUM: May 14, 2013

    ISTEP failure exposes flaws

    Community hasn’t changed its spirit

    Egregious threat to nation’s defense

    May 14, 2013

  • READERS' FORUM: May 13, 2013

    • Women’s group criticizes Bucshon

    • Let’s hope this doesn’t come true

    • Many get thanks for fest success

    May 13, 2013

  • MARK BENNETT: Life at face value: Mom’s simple advice still presents a valuable daily challenge

    Most moms don’t base their advice on scientific research.
    (Unless, of course, your mother is a scientific researcher. If so, carry a No. 2 pencil and take good notes.)

    May 12, 2013

  • EDITORIAL: Better monitoring needed to prevent local environmental messes

    The nasty, hazardous messes lurking in the community raise a bottom-line, red-flag question. Could these environmental problems have been monitored and, thus, prevented?

    May 12, 2013

  • GUEST COLUMN: Nursing more than medicine and bandages

    Being a nurse …  Like most nurses, I chose this profession because I had a strong desire to help others and no other career would allow me the opportunity to touch lives the way I have been able to through nursing.

    May 12, 2013

  • READERS' FORUM: May 12, 2013

    Vigo Youth Football, entering 45th year, seeks new support

    Media ignoring important case on abortions

    Proud to be old-fashioned

    Guns in school? What’s next?

    Promoting hate not a ‘brave’ act

     

    May 12, 2013

  • FLASHPOINT: Again in 2013 General Assembly, middle class generally ignored

    Last year, the people of Indiana entrusted the Republican Party with some of their most precious possessions.

    May 12, 2013

  • Ronn Mott.jpg RONN MOTT: ‘Raccoons II’

    In the Algonquin Indian language, raccoon means “working with hands.” They are really cute little fellows until they injure a child, or a pet, or leave feces around where you certainly do not want it.

    May 11, 2013 1 Photo

  • Readers’ Forum: May 11, 2013

    I  just wanted to express my disappointment at the lack of response shown by President Obama after the Boston Marathon bombings.

    May 11, 2013

  • Readers' Forum: May 10, 2013

    CANDLES event plants new seed: On April 26, CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center hosted an event called “Sowing Seeds of Peace: A Celebration of Spring” at the Apple House. Our purpose was to introduce people to our concept of forgiveness as a seed for peace.

    May 10, 2013

  • Ronn Mott.jpg RONN MOTT: ‘NRA Convention’

    At the recent NRA Convention in Houston, Texas, where the right-wing political hot air almost lifted the convention's building off its foundation, the NRA trotted out the forever yours political dame of the right wing, Sarah Palin. Sarah did not disappoint.

    May 9, 2013 1 Photo

  • EDITORIAL: Memo to U.S.A.: You can ‘SPPRAK’ just as we do in Vigo County

    Our kids, truly, are ‘Making a Difference’

    May 9, 2013

  • Some words in praise of boring government — Indiana’s

    A conservative Republican governor has super majorities in both branches of the legislature. One might suspect such one-party government leads to major changes in public policy. This did not happen in 2013 in Indiana.

    May 9, 2013

  • EDITORIAL: Doc’s prescient prescription

    Viewed through a 2013 prism, Doc Bowen’s response to the AIDS epidemic looks merely prudent, routine.

    May 8, 2013 1 Story

  • RONN MOTT: ‘Heritage gone’

    The last high school I attended was being torn down just a few days ago. I didn't learn about it until I saw classmate Dick Mills on television and a display he had put together about State football championships in the middle 1930's. I began elementary school with Dick Mills. That was Matthew South Elementary School on South Sixth Street in Clinton, Indiana. After seeing Dick on TV, it dawned on me that all schools I had attended in Clinton have been torn down.

    May 7, 2013

  • LIZ CIANCONE: We always want more than we need

    Washington seems more preoccupied with the unemployment rate than they are about the constant stalemate. Still with thousands out of work and the unemployment rate hovering somewhere between 7 percent and 9 percent, it does deserve more than a passing nod.

    May 7, 2013

  • FLASHPOINT: Indiana lawmakers reinforced school safety mechanisms

    Nothing is more important to me than the safety of my children. Every parent has felt that instant, apprehensive rush when their child plays too close to the street or falls down while playing soccer and it is our responsibility as parents to implement every safety mechanism we can muster to protect our kids.

    May 6, 2013

Latest News
Community Calendar
Loading…
Events by eviesays.com
TribStar.com Poll
AP Video
Coffee Run Leads to Hatchet Hitchhiker Arrest Probe Begins After Conn. Commuter Trains Crash NTSB Begins Investigation Into Conn. Train Crash Conn. Commuter Trains Collide; 60 Go to Hospital Fmr. IRS Head Insists No Politics in Targeting Lotto Fever Sweeps the Country Raw: Texas Gov. Flies Over Tornado Damage NM Mom Chases Down Child Abductor Raw: Driver Ejected From Truck, Over Bridge Raw: Obama Sits Down With Elementary Kids CDC: Fecal Bacteria Common in Swimming Pools Raw: Gun Scare Mars Cannes Film Festival Dying Man's Blinks Lead to Murder Conviction Raw: Germany Protestors Picket Barbie House China, Others Want What's Under the Arctic Ice Officials Arrest Man in Idaho in Terrorism Case Horse Saved From Slaughter, Goes on to Win Big One Million Evacuated As Cyclone Hits Bangladesh $1 Million in Jewels Stolen at Cannes Film Fest Raw: Crash Sends Car Into Fla. Pool
NDN Video
Twiggy, the Water Skiing Squirrel Sailor Surprises His Mom At Her CU Denver Graduation Ceremony Official: ‘Amazing’ No One Was Killed In CT Train Crash Lotto Fever Sweeps the Country Coffee Stop Leads To Arrest Of YouTube Sensation Wanted For Murder Bearded Dragon Reunited With Owner Marine Reunited with Warzone Companion Raw: Crash Sends Car Into Fla. Pool Beyonce Is Pregnant! SF baseball player overpaid $500,000 RETURNS money -- and team says KEEP IT $1 Million in Jewels Stolen at Cannes Film Fest Dad returns from Afghanistan, surprises family during Rays' first pitch See Jennifer Lopez's New $10m Hamptons Mansion Woman tricked into taking abortion pill Emma Watson Goes Pantless IRS scandal: Republicans seek to tie Obama to agency's woes Play of the Day: Flipping to Safety Pregnant Kim Kardashian Squeezes Her Swollen Feet Into Stilettos Top Videos of the Week: Angry Taco Bell Guy, Glacier Moves on House, Dog Hates Baths Cindy Crawford Stuns At Cannes
Parade
Magazine

Click HERE to read all your Parade favorites including Hollywood Wire, Celebrity interviews and photo galleries, Food recipes and cooking tips, Games and lots more.
  • -

     

    March 12, 2010

activity
Real Estate News