Lawyer vs. Vatican

St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson has filed hundreds of lawsuits against Catholic church officials on behalf of sexual-abuse survivors. His critics label him a zealot, and some claim he’s only in it for the money. But a recent Supreme Court decision has Anderson one step closer to his ultimate end: a chance to hold Rome—and the pope—directly accountable for covering up the abuse.

Photo by Joe Treleven

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OUTSIDE THE GIANT semi-circular window behind Jeff Anderson’s desk, a crab-apple tree is just starting to bud on this April morning, its leaves not yet big enough to break up the light streaming into his downtown St. Paul office. The attorney, 62, sits at his desk, silent and ramrod straight, poised over a file of old letters. His eyes are red and wet.

The letters Anderson is reading were written in 1995 by a man known publicly only as John Doe 16. Addressed to the priest who molested Doe as a child and to the priest’s superiors, the letters make for raw, gritty reading. In 1963,

Father Lawrence Murphy became the headmaster of a Milwaukee Catholic boarding school for the deaf, where he sexually abused as many as 200 boys. Many had been sent to the school because there was no one in their life who knew sign language. But Murphy did, and often he served as the boys’ only conduit to the outside world.

“You were all I had,” Doe wrote in one letter to Murphy. “No one at home signed. I could not communicate with them. I turned to you and what did you do? You molested me, that’s what. You took advantage of a lost little boy who had no one else.”

In 1974, a number of students who had been abused by Murphy threatened to make their stories public. Instead of defrocking the priest or turning him over to law enforcement, Milwaukee church officials quietly moved him to Superior, Wisconsin, where he went on to abuse again. In 1996, after several of Murphy’s victims filed new suits, the Archbishop of Milwaukee wrote to the Vatican several times, asking for guidance. Murphy, who admitted to abusing 34 boys, including Doe, also wrote, saying he was in poor health and asking for lenience. In 1998, Rome intervened, to protect the priest, who died a few months later.

Alongside the letters on Anderson’s desk is a copy of a manila envelope given to him by Doe. It’s addressed to a Vatican functionary, and a U.S. Postal Service return receipt with “Cita del Vaticano” stamped on one side proves that the missive was received. But Doe never got a reply.

Anderson has filed literally thousands of lawsuits on behalf of sexual-abuse survivors, but when he got John Doe 16’s correspondence earlier this year, he immediately recognized its importance. The letters told one story—one about a pedophile given power over children—but the return receipt told another, this one about the lengths to which Rome would go to cover up serious crimes. The enormity of the suit Anderson is filing this morning is hard to fathom: He is suing the Vatican for covering up the abuse. The official who intervened in Murphy’s case was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
 

IN THE HALLWAY outside Anderson’s office, it’s bedlam. The phones haven’t stopped ringing since the day before, when he sent out a press release promising to reveal a landmark suit at an early afternoon news conference. His staff is fielding hundreds of calls from reporters around the world, all jockeying for an exclusive on the day’s news, hoping to break the story.

Today’s story will build on a bombshell that Anderson dropped a few weeks earlier, in March, when he turned over a damning paper trail uncovered in another lawsuit to the New York Times. Those documents revealed that Ratzinger knew about Father Murphy, but intervened to protect him. The Times’ front-page story ignited a media maelstrom that has yet to abate. A satellite truck has been parked more or less continually on the street outside Anderson’s office ever since, broadcasting frequent press conferences about new developments around the globe.

Anderson closes John Doe 16’s file and slides it to the side of his desk. A few minutes later, he gets the call he’s been waiting for: The Milwaukee lawyer with whom he’s been working is on the line to say the suit against the Vatican has been filed. It’s official. It’s 10:10 a.m.

The door to Anderson’s office flies open and people begin rushing in and out of the room. The attorney’s first need is some basic intelligence on the judge to whom the case has been assigned. His staff gathers tidbits from calls and the Internet: The judge was a Bush appointee—potentially bad; but he is also on the board of a child-abuse prevention group—excellent.

At 10:20 a.m., Anderson asks his IT person to post the complaint to the firm’s website alongside the documents turned up in his earlier suits involving Murphy. He’ll put the really juicy new stuff, the correspondence between the plaintiff in this lawsuit and the Vatican, up at noon.

Soon thereafter, church officials fire back, issuing a statement to the press calling the lawsuit a propaganda stunt. “While legitimate lawsuits have been filed by abuse victims, this is not one of them,” it says. “The lawsuit represents an attempt to use tragic events as a platform for a broader attack.”

To hear Catholic leaders tell it, Anderson is a grandiose crusader. His true aim is to attract a steady stream of potential plaintiffs so he can enrich himself while destroying the Holy See.

The church is right: Jeff Anderson has filed thousands of cases, and won a number of them with large settlements attached. But in the process, he’s also become convinced that a culture of silent complicity has been encouraged by Rome, and that the church hierarchy must be brought to heel. Lawsuits have served Anderson well in his effort to engage the Vatican, but the truth is that, for years, the impact of bad press has often been the biggest arrow in his quiver.