More Like Opus Boner
The attorneys who defend accused priests are not strategic masterminds.
[a note on content: this piece is about the continuing sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church and will discuss it at length. If you are reading the email version of this piece, it may be truncated for length and you can link to the full piece on Substack by clicking on the title of the piece.]
To make a bold statement, I’m not thrilled with the Catholic church’s recent track record on world-historical moral crises. Take the pandemic - we’ve already seen plenty of commentary from bishops and media on how the pandemic wasn’t that big a deal. A Catholic contributor for The Federalist, Carol McKinney, even wrote a piece arguing that churches needed to stay open at any cost, a piece that included the verbatim section header “Sacraments Are More Important Than Mortal Life.” Diocese pushed back against public health measures and capacity restrictions, claiming that their religious freedom to have churches at capacity trumped, you know, people not having to die of a virus. The bishop of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio, had a case like this before the Supreme Court back in November, and the Court decided in the diocese’s favor, so now churches can stay open, with no capacity restrictions, and people can stay inside for an hour and sing their hearts out and just hope the respiratory virus thing works itself out.
On top of that, take the protests for racial justice that have been going on across the country since this summer. A lot of bishops and Catholic media were on the wrong side of that, too, decrying property damage and ignoring the gross injustices that got us to this point. Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, put out a letter decrying “looting,” and didn’t sign on to the USCCB’s statement acknowledging that the church wasn’t doing enough to combat racism. And yet he still had a better take than the appalling neo-conservative or openly fascist shit running at outlets ranging from First Things to Church Militant, who believed the Black Lives Matter movement was in the pocket of, respectively, Big Marxism or Big Antichrist.
Most recently, of course, we just had an armed insurrection at the Capitol building, an unprecedented attack that threw the Catholic church’s institutional support of Donald Trump over the past four years into sharp relief. Priests across the country supported Trump from the pulpit and Catholic media whipped up the outrage to the point where prominent Catholic activists, personalities, and bishops were openly questioning the election results, supporting the “Stop the Steal” cause, and in some cases even showing up on Capitol Hill on January 6th. An easy example is Father Frank Pavone of Texas, whom I once described, accurately, as “not an especially complex figure in Catholicism, and if I were writing him as a character in a screenplay, I might not even give him a name and just go with ‘Priest Who Loves Trump’.” Pavone wanted to formally work for the Trump campaign and his bishop wouldn’t let him because it was explicitly political activity - Pavone even hired a lawyer to argue that working for a presidential campaign did not count as ‘political activity’, which was somehow unconvincing - and after the insurrection (AFTER it!) still praised Trump on a radio show as “the greatest political leader we've ever had”.
So things aren’t great right now for the Catholic church in America. A lot of the clergy and media are picking the wrong side - and the losing side - in these battles, and we pray that they will learn some sort of lesson from this. The problem is that I don’t think they will, and I’m basing that on their response to a previous world-historical moral criss. Plenty of people, including me, have written about the church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis in the early 2000s, and how, as became clear in 2018 when the scandal crested again, bishops everywhere did what they could to protect their own power and status at the expense of victims. They claimed that accusations were overblown or made up, they did some tricky legal maneuvering to protect diocesan funds, and basically none of them, ever, lost their jobs or faced real consequences for what they did, even professional consequences.
What I only recently learned was that there was also a lay movement in the church that picked the wrong side in this fight, that went out in the world in 2002 and said “actually, priests did nothing wrong” and started organizations to actively resist reforming the church in the wake of the abuse crisis. Most strikingly, there was a nonprofit legal firm dedicated to providing attorneys for accused priests, those attorneys ended up getting some national attention in 2019, and at a friend’s recommendation, I looked into them and found a fascinating story about a little-known part of church history.
Part of the reason that this story is so fascinating is because it’s difficult for me to get my head around mounting a defense for a priest accused of sexual abuse; I don’t have the same capacity to forgive as my God or other members of my church. But accused priests face criminal charges, civil suits, and even Vatican canon law disputes, and through all of that, they probably should have an attorney with them helping them understand what’s going on and defending them, whatever our feelings about the accused. These cases are, as you would expect, not ones that a lot of attorneys want to take, and they don't involve men that a lot of people want to defend.
I wanted to understand these attorneys better, to see if they were top-tier litigators who may have felt conflicted about the cases they choose to take on, but knew that they needed to step up and defend their clients’ rights. Or, perhaps, they were men who have seriously examined how justice works in the church, and who had been able to grasp the capacity for mercy that remains out of my reach. But, as it turned out, they were actually a bunch of barely-replacement-level idiots who chased after whatever cases they could get and used the abuse crisis as a flimsy excuse to embezzle money. Oh, and the other part of the reason why the story is interesting is that all of the names I mentioned up top as people currently steering the church in the wrong direction - Nicholas DiMarzio, Carol McKinley, Timothy Dolan, Frank Pavone, First Things, Church Militant - happen to have ties, some of them very direct ties, to this group. So let’s meet the men behind Opus Bono Sacerdotti.
CHAPTER ONE - POBODY'S NERVERTS
The nonprofit legal aid group Opus Bono Sacerdotti (literally “the work for the good of the priesthood”) congealed as part of a larger movement of lay-led groups forming in response to the early-2000s Boston Globe reporting on the abuse scandal. You may already be familiar with groups like the Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) or Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), who are still assisting victims with knowing their rights, getting their cases into court, and fighting for church reforms that will prevent these abuses from ever happening again. However, there was also a cluster of lay-led groups that arose in response to these reformers who spread the much less popular message of “actually maybe the problem is you for noticing the crimes?” These groups were named things like “Voice of the Ordained” or “Faithful Voices” because, first and foremost, they were bad at coming up with new names. Voice of the Ordained, formed by priests and sympathetic laity, actually had some acceptable goals: they wanted to make sure bishops were being held to the same disciplinary standards as priests, and they wanted investigations to be handled in a timely and transparent manner, and they wanted to make sure priests knew how to look out for and report cases of abuse that they witnessed from their brother priests. But, VOTO also had some more questionable goals; as the Washington Post reported, one of their key messages to priests was “guys, don’t ever say shit to the cops or your bishop”:
“Duffell emphasized that Voice of the Ordained also believes in justice for victims of sexual abuse. "We're very much concerned about the victims. I think most priests are," he said. But a leading victims group, the Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said it was troubled that no victims were invited to address Voice of the Ordained's first meeting and that one of the speakers, a canon lawyer, advised the group's members not to say anything, even to their bishops, if they are accused of sexual misconduct.”
That canon lawyer, Father William Varvaro, spent most of his address tap-dancing on the line between “priests shouldn’t abuse people” and “if you abuse people, here are some steps you can take to make sure you don’t accidentally incriminate yourself.” A member of the laity who claimed to be an abuse victim disrupted that meeting claiming that the canon lawyer’s words were “a map to cover up crimes”, which seems kind of hard to dispute. The Post also reported on the lay group Faithful Voice, which also arose in the early 2000s.
“Faithful Voice, a lay group, was formed in the Boston area this year to support [disgraced Boston Cardinal Bernard] Law and to oppose Voice of the Faithful, Call to Action, Women's Ordination Conference and other organizations seeking fundamental changes in the church. It has prodded at least five bishops to bar the rival Voice of the Faithful from using church facilities in their dioceses. "Please don't make us into supporters of pedophiles," said [Carol] McKinley, Faithful Voice's spokeswoman-”
Sorry, I need to interrupt the block quote here and just say that McKinley is off to a really great start on her statement.
"Please don't make us into supporters of pedophiles," said McKinley, Faithful Voice's spokeswoman. "We want to see the victims helped, we want to see them healed, we want to see justice come to them. I don't see any difference between us and Voice of the Faithful in our view of the sex abuse scandal. The difference really is, they see this as a cause for structural change. We don't."
McKinley, who also once asked in an NPR interview “what kind of a country are we living in where there are more voices demanding justice for al-Qaida terrorists than for Roman Catholic priests?”, would go on to write, by my count, at least four different hard-right Catholic Republican blogs, titled CatholicPunditWatch, throwthebumsout2010, The Tenth Crusade, and Magisterial Fidelity, and most of her content was re-posting stories from very bad website LifeSiteNews and making weird incoherent comments about secret gays working at YOUR schools. Faithful Voice’s website, which is still up, includes a blog post called “Lucifer the First Liberal”:
“Here is the liberal principle in its first expression: Man alone should decide good and evil apart from God. While many understand liberalism as a freedom for certain political equality and civil rights, more fundamentally liberalism is a freedom from the moral law and the teaching authority of the Church. One cannot speak of "Catholic liberals" without contradiction, or at the very least, equivocation. Liberalism, like socialism and Communism, has been condemned by Pope after Pope in the social encyclicals. If we are tempted to minimize the evils of this error, we would do well to remind ourselves that Pope Leo XIII presents Lucifer to us as the original liberal.”
So when McKinley states that Faithful Voice and reform-minded groups all shared the same views on the abuse scandal, I’d counter that groups like VOTF or SNAP thought that the church needed to actually make ‘structural changes’ to, you know, stop this from happening ever again, and the other groups were digging in their heels to keep the power structure of the church exactly the same and resist these LIBERAL reforms, so that bishops could continue to cover up cases of abuse; as the 2018 Pennsylvania Grand Jury and McCarrick reports would confirm, these coverups kept happening, all of the time, everywhere. Faithful Voice may not have wanted to appear as supporters of pedophiles, but that was the impact that they ended up having.
That brings us to Joe Maher, the Michigan Catholic who co-founded Opus Bono Sacerdotti (OBS). Maher is also quoted in a lot of the news stories from this period, and appears to have been a pretty reliable media contact whenever the paper was looking for a counterpoint to “this sex abuse scandal seems bad”. A Reuters story on Cardinal Bernard Law, leaving his archdiocese after getting branded as the main villain of the Boston scandal, included this:
"Joe Maher, a Detroit businessman who has become a national advocate for priests accused of abusing minors, said Law should not have bowed to public pressure. "He should have stuck with it and discerned the truth and took action," Maher said on Friday. "For him to resign was a real blow to Catholics everywhere, since they looked to the crisis in Boston as the focal point of the crisis in the United States.""
Maher saying that he hoped Law would have "discerned the truth and took action" feels a little like O.J. Simpson vowing to find "the real killer"; Cardinal Law, of course, would go on to rob a sports memorabilia dealer at gunpoint in a Vegas hotel room in order to get some of the artifacts back from his glory days on the Niners.
Maher eventually teamed up with his old business partner and his pastor to start OBS as a legal lifeline for accused priests, and an outlet to reassure Catholics everywhere that the crisis wasn’t that bad, actually. Here’s the “some things to consider” list of callouts on OBS’s front page from 2004:
“One-half of the accused priests in the National Review Board Reports had only one accusation against them. SNAP says this shows that the number of victims is underreported. We think it is more likely an indication that many of these accusations are false.
Calling accusations "credible" or "substantiated" or "substantial" is terribly unjust, because in most cases there has not even been a finding that there was "probable cause" to believe these accusations. Usually the standard of proof has been a "reasonable suspicion." That is a far cry from proof, as any American could tell you. If that were the standard in the secular world, the police could declare you guilty and lock you up without a trial. In effect, that is what has happened to accused priests. Based on a suspicion, they have been publicly disgraced and deprived of their ministry.
Behavior which is included as "sexual abuse" in these figures includes someone feeling uncomfortable about a hug they received from a priest. There is no distinction between serious misconduct and the relatively innocuous.”
None of these feel great to read in 2021, from “maybe the abusers are one-and-done guys” to “some people say the cases are underreported, but have you considered that they’re overreported?” to “why would we consider holding priests to a higher standard than your lay sex offender?” to “it’s okay if they make you feel physically uncomfortable sometimes”. OBS, though, was not just a place where Maher could say stupid shit, they were a legal outfit. William Varvaro, the priest in the earlier block quote who was telling his brother priests not to say shit to the cops, became one of several legal advisors to the group as they started taking up cases. And we can learn a lot from which cases they decided to take early on.
CHAPTER TWO - A CRIME SOMEBODY ELSE NOTICED
In a 2002 interview with the Detroit Free Press, Maher clarified that he had no problem with a "zero tolerance" policy for criminal activity on the part of priests:
"The problem in the past is that bishops used that discretion to reassign problem priests without adequate safeguards, he said. "The church has always had zero tolerance when it comes to priests who've done things wrong," Maher said...Maher wants the bishops to keep the option of returning some priests -- accused of isolated, long-ago infractions and with good records since -- to limited ministry outside parishes."
In addition to being weird and kind of unclear as to what Maher thinks is an appropriate post-sex-crimes career, this statement is also contradicted by pretty much everything Maher said and did with OBS over nearly two decades. Maher's first client, according to the Associated Press, was an associate pastor at his own parish, accused of sexually assaulting a member of the choir:
"The 48-year-old parishioner who accused [Fr.] Houndjame of rape said [Pastor Eduard] Perrone’s response was to protect the church, testifying in court that he told her, “Just walk by him and ignore him.” Perrone responded to the charges against Houndjame by asking the congregation to support the priest in his time of crisis. Joe Maher was among those who were moved by Perrone’s plea for help."
Other parishoners came forward with similar accusations against Houndjame; some of those accusations weren't included in his trial, Houndjame was eventually acquitted, and Maher and Perrone saw an opportunity to keep helping accused priests. Perrone appears to have never removed Houndjame from ministry, even when there were multiple outstanding allegations against him, and generally doesn’t seem like a great pastor if he’s telling a traumatized parishioner to “just walk by him and ignore him” shortly before turning around and telling his congregation “hey this priest needs our help, he’s been falsely accused”. The OBS team would go on to find even worse people to defend.
Another client from OBS' early days was Robert Burkholder - pictured with Maher in the clipping above - whose story was detailed in the Free Press and also got the attention of the Washington Post. The Post called out that Maher never knee-jerk assessed his clients' innocence or guilt before taking their cases, which I suppose is his perogrative; the piece left unsaid that Maher should perhaps have done more to check whether his clients had previously confessed to horrible crimes and given the worst possible reasons for doing them:
"In Detroit, Maher said he does not attempt to determine whether a priest is innocent or guilty before providing financial help from Opus Bono Sacerdotii. The group, which he said has raised $100,000 and applied to the Internal Revenue Service for charitable status, is assisting the Rev. Robert Burkholder, who returned to Michigan from retirement in Hawaii this month to face charges of molesting a 13-year-old boy in 1986. In an interview published by the Detroit News in August, Burkholder, 82, admitted that he had had sexual encounters with "maybe a dozen or two" boys between the ages of 11 and 14, but contended that they were consensual. "It takes two to tango," he said. "Some of the accusations are true, but so what? I was a priest -- a good priest -- who had a weakness."
Father "It Takes Two To Tango..So What?" - again, a phrase he used to describe his sexual assault of children as young as 11 - ended up serving a prison sentence of about a year. My initial reaction to reading that Post piece was that Burkholder should have died in prison. That's not very Christian of me, and it's a challenge, every time I read stories like this, to imagine how God would look at and forgive people who do truly awful things. Then I think about how Burkholder appeared to have no remorse for what he did and was in retirement in Hawai'i when he was summoned to court, and I think that there's probably some sort of workable middle ground between "dying in prison" and "retiring to Hawai'i" that we should pursue in cases like this.
Part of OBS' defense of Burkholder and others like him was that these crimes happened so long ago that everyone should just chill the fuck out, and that the justice system was just caught up in the hot new trend of "prosecuting clergy sex criminals" for "stuff they definitely did and in most cases admitted to doing". This Bob Loblaw-style "why should I go to jail for a crime somebody else noticed?" defense was, as it turns out, very attractive to clergy in the early 2000s. Priests nationwide turned to OBS for legal defenses, and the organization would later claim to have represented over 8,000 accused men. By 2016, annual donations to OBS totaled over one million dollars. Some priests, determined to be abusers by their diocese and permanently removed from ministry, would go on to volunteer for OBS, providing legal advice, rides to the courthouse, and places to crash for their fellow abusers. Father William Varvaro and another canon lawyer named Father David Deibel became regular legal advisors for the team. And then higher-profile and much dumber Catholic clergy started to get in on the action.
CHAPTER THREE - MERCY HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT
Many bishops and other well-known clergymen spoke in support of OBS' work. The highest-profile support that OBS received from the hierarchy probably came from Cardinal and Fordham professor Avery Dulles, who became a formal “theological advisor” to the group early on, and also helped connect Maher and team with powerful officials in the Vatican Curia. We haven't really examined Dulles very much in G.O.T.H.S., but the next prominent OBS theological advisor was Father Richard Neuhaus, and we've definitely looked at him before, and we've certainly looked at First Things, his shitty magazine for neocons, several times over the past year. Do we know whether these had a point of view on OBS? Yes, because they wrote about them, multiple times, in the pages of the magazine as they discussed the abuse crisis more broadly. Here’s Neuhaus calling them out by name in February 2004 as one of "a number of groups [that] have sprung up to help priests who may be subject to unfair treatment," and here he is in June 2004 using them as a data source to lament the plight of abusive priests:
"Others who have been closely tracking these developments, such as the Detroit-based Opus Bono Sacerdotii, an organization of lawyers helping accused priests, estimate that more than a thousand have been removed. As one priest told the Board, “It’s like being divorced by your wife, fired from your job, and evicted from your home all at once.” And all this without any effective channel of appeal.”
Dulles was also a regular contributor to First Things and had his own thoughts on the abuse crisis in 2003 - he would have been a theological advisor to OBS when he wrote this - such as “maybe the crisis is actually not that bad compared to lay Catholics getting divorced, and also let’s leave reform to the bishops, guys”:
“The immoral behavior of Catholics, both lay and clergy, is a cause of scandal and defections. Under this heading I would include not only sexual abuse of minors, which has been so extensively publicized in recent years, but sex outside of marriage, abortion, divorce, alcoholism, the use and marketing of drugs, domestic violence, defamation, and financial scandals such as falsification of records and embezzlement. The morality of Catholics all too often sinks below the standards commonly observed by Protestants and unbelievers. Self-evidently these and similar reforms ought to be undertaken under the leadership of the bishops...Laity are in some places organizing against bishops and seeking to apply fiscal pressures and negative publicity as means to bring about what they see as reforms. This situation makes for new problems, likewise calling for reform. The Church cannot be made to function like a political community, with adversarial parties contending for supremacy.”
If the laity weren’t going to drive reforms in the church, if they were feeling betrayed by their bishops and the institutions of that church, what were they going to do after the abuse crisis? Dulles’ solution was simple: shut up and maybe just fix yourself:
“Where existing institutions prove clearly inadequate, institutional reform has a claim on our consideration. But it is less important and fruitful in the long run than personal reform, which requires purification of the heart from pride, sensuality, and lust for power. Where there is a humble and loving spirit, combined with firm faith and stringent self-discipline, institutional reform will be at once less urgent and easier to achieve.”
This seems like a very bad response to the abuse crisis, and one that has aged very poorly, but Neuhaus and First Things were also, I guess we’ll say, brave enough to put forward their own theory on how the abuse crisis happened. Neuhaus didn’t have to do this: as a reminder, the USCCB did commission a years-long study in the 2000s in order to better understand the roots of the abuse crisis. One of the major findings of that study was that gay sexual orientation was not correlated to the likelihood of a priest being an abuser, and meaningfully addressing the crisis required mentally separating “being gay” from “abusing children”. That was a study completed by actual social scientists at John Jay who showed and published their work. Richard Neuhaus is an asshole who used to work on the George W. Bush campaign. Let's check whether Neuhaus, in the pages of First Things, went with the actual study or just trusted his gut for no reason: "the overwhelming majority of cases, most observers think 90 percent or more, involved adult men with older teenage boys. The word for that is homosexuality, but among the bishops, it seems, that is still the disorder that dare not speak its name.”
Look, I have hindsight and these guys don't (mainly because they're both deceased), so roasting Neuhaus and Dulles for terrible opinions that didn't seem as terrible at the time could be unfair. But know that First Things continues to push this maybe-we-don't-need-real-reform line today when it's laughably wrong, and that this outlet, considered one of the more serious and intellectual journals of right-wing religious thought, continues to publish laughably wrong opinions about everything, perhaps most notably when they downplayed the severity of a pandemic which has now killed over four hundred thousand Americans. Conservatives still look to FT for arguments, even though they were wrong back then and they are wrong now, about many different things. And “the people that screwed up on the abyse crisis are still around guiding our thinking today” happens to be a defining feature of the contemporary Catholic church.
Neuhaus and Dulles weren't the only prominent Catholic archconservatives who supported the work of OBS and helped get their message out. Maher would also frequently do radio interviews on Catholic stations and lectures at Catholic foundations that were part of the Ave Maria Network, which, of course, is run by original G.O.T.H.S. subject, Trump campaign advisor, and pizza theocrat Tom Monaghan. But I also wanted to check out darker, weirder outlets to see what they were saying about OBS at the time.
Specifically, I had to see what Church Militant was saying about these guys, and I knew they would have something to say, if for no other reason than Church Militant and OBS are both based in the Detroit suburbs. Weirdly, although Church Militant is a far more toxic (and bizarre) outpost for right-wing Catholic opinion than First Things or the Ave Maria Radio Network, they actually were more critical of OBS than First Things was. It was, presumably, a tough call for Church Militant, as they had to decide between "defending our idea of the institutional church at all costs" and "denouncing anything that we think is gay". Ultimately, the site's “write ‘GAY SEX’ in big letters whenever you can” principle won out:
And separately, Church Militant reported on these cases and, more broadly, the sexual abuse crisis in the Detroit archdiocese with other, uh, colorful language:
Overall, did right-wing Catholic guys know what they were getting into when they supported OBS? OBS advertised a lot of services that were, while not to my personal taste, acceptable and in their own way, Christian: they made sure priests knew their rights ,and they communicated with and ministered to incarcerated and accused priests, often when nobody else would. That's not a ministry I think I could ever do, but visiting the imprisoned is still a corporal work of mercy, and they still did it when other people wouldn't. It's possible that Maher and team were acting out of a truly radical sense of divine mercy.
It's possible, but it's unlikely, because OBS was very upfront about why they were doing everything, and mercy had nothing to do with it. OBS, in their public-facing materials and legal strategies, didn't say "these men need mercy and ministry", they said "too many people are making false accusations". OBS didn't say "this man was wrongfully accused and he needs a defense", they said "he definitely did it but he shouldn't face consequences." They didn't say "we're working hard to rebuild your trust and make sure this never happens again," they said "we're going to ignore the actual research done on what caused this and actively resist any reforms that will prevent this from happening again." Conservative media took these messages and ran with them because it conformed to what they already believed about what was best for the church's reputation, victims be damned. Former clients, abusive priests themselves, found a professional home in the organization that defended them at all costs, and put out the message to the public that these priests did nothing wrong. One OBS message that was not public-facing, though, was "we're using the sexual abuse crisis as an excuse to embezzle money from you," which is what Maher and team were doing, which I know because of a state AG investigation, which started because Maher's daughter blew the whistle on him.
CHAPTER FOUR - SPITE
Mary Rose Maher is shown in the above AP photo, holding a smaller photograph of her as a child with her parents. Her dad, Joe Maher, appears to be cosplaying as some sort of non-canon Catholic character from the Asterix the Gaul comics. In 2017, Mary Rose wrote to Michigan’s attorney general that “a simple investigation into the Michigan non-profit charity Opus Bono Sacerdotii would bring to light the millions of embezzled dollars, years of mail fraud, and the constant systemic abuse of donations.” She was correct.
Joe Maher started OBS when Mary Rose was a child, which means she had to hang out with all of the accused abusers that her dad kept bringing through the house; OBS' original client, Fr. Houndjame, even crashed at the Maher's place when Mary Rose was 10 years old and Houndjame was being accused of rape by multiple women. In the years since, Mary Rose has started her own organization dedicated to rooting out abusive priests and supporting abuse survivors, "spite" being one of many perfectly acceptable reasons to fight for a better Catholic church.
But Joe Maher's questionable parenting was not the issue that the state AG investigated. Maher and team were dishonest when they solicited donations, as they weren't providing all of the services advertised, and some of their their testimonials weren't from previous clients as much as they were loose amalgams or completely made up. And the money they did raise wasn't all going to legal fees:
"Maher and Ferrara had violated state charity laws by using donated funds to cover such personal expenses as sushi lunches, chiropractor visits and power tools to work on their homes, according to a cease and desist order filed by Michigan’s attorney general. Over the years, as the group grew richer — financial records show donations increased from $73,000 in 2002 to $1.3 million in 2016 — Maher’s pay soared from $40,500 to $212,000. Ferrara’s rose from $16,300 to $316,000."
In fairness to Maher, I’ve never worked in the nonprofit sector and it’s possible that quintupling your own salary and heading to the chiropractor on the company dime are standard practice. And even though OBS appeared to be mainly a front to help Maher embezzle funds, he also used the organization to help other Catholics embezzle funds. In the late 2010s, OBS branched out from defending priests accused of abuse to defending priests accused of some more white-collar crimes. One of their more high-profile clients was Jonathan Wehrle, who, allegedly and hilariously, embezzled millions from his parish to build himself a giant mansion that the local paper described as "two-story, stone-facade...eight bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, a library, wine cellar, indoor swimming pool and wood-paneled elevator. The 11,300-square-foot home boasts granite counter tops, limestone fireplaces, walnut hardwood floors, crystal chandeliers and stained-glass windows." And while that house sounds pretty sweet, this case might move OBS' mission fully out of "responding to a crisis" and into "just defending the absolute worst priests we can find".
OBS was an embarrassment to the church and to everyone involved. It excused, enabled, and doubled down on the worst of the church’s clericalism, and fought against justice for the church’s victims, ultimately to line the pockets of a bunch of assholes in Michigan. In a just world, the people who ran the organization, the people who spread its message, and the people who endorsed it would all be ridiculed out of public life. But guess what.
CHAPTER FIVE - THE NEW CRISES AND THE SAME PEOPLE
As a result of the state investigation, Joe Maher was forced out of OBS leadership and is permanently barred from running a nonprofit in the state of Michigan. He has responded predictably, and has started what appears to be a functionally identical organization with a different name, like he’s WorldCom or something.
It’s called Men of Melchizedek, which does exactly the same things as OBS, lists its primary office in Michigan even though it’s incorporated in Indiana, goes by the acronym MOM, and literally positions itself as a mother figure to accused priests, because OBS' one failing was that it wasn't Oedipal enough:
“Our mission is not about enabling. That would be a travesty of justice to those authentic victims who have truly experienced abuse at the hands of a greatly disturbed priest, which in a very few cases was even criminal. Rather our mission is about authentic witness and prudential support. And, what mother wouldn’t remember those who helped her sons in their most desperate hour? Because of the threatening and dreadful reality that every Catholic priest today is vulnerable to allegations that can be made against him, even from decades ago – true or false – we at MOM are quite literally overwhelmed with urgent requests for help.”
I believe OBS still technically exists - although they’re a lot lower-profile now and tarred by the state investigation - and it’s fun to imagine Maher frantically calling all of his clients trying to get them to leave OBS and come to the new organization like a Jerry Maguire for alleged sex criminals. The official chair of Men of Melchizedek is Father David Deibel, who used to be a canon law advisor for OBS.
Deibel, as it turns out, is representing some interesting clients right now. Perhaps his most well-known client is Father Frank Pavone, the Trump-loving priest I called out at the beginning of this piece. When I said that “Pavone even hired a lawyer to argue that working for a presidential campaign did not count as ‘political activity’, which was somehow unconvincing”, Deibel was the canon lawyer making that unconvincing argument:
“Speaking with [Catholic News Agency] April 20, Pavone’s canon lawyer, Fr. David Deibel, disputed the notion that Fr. Pavone was engaging in partisan politics. “I would take issue with the word ‘political activity,’ the phrase,” Deibel said. “Affirming the Church’s teaching” on faith and morals “comes with the ordination to priesthood, and the ordination to diaconate, and of course is ultimately supervised in a particular church by a bishop,” he said. Pavone’s talking about abortion and politics “is not political activity,” he added.”
Even Catholic News Agency was not having it, since they referred to Pavone’s not-political activity as “talking about abortion and politics”. Deibel has represented Pavone in all of his pissing matches with his bishop over the past decade; there have been several pissing matches, as you would expect from a priest who openly cheered an armed insurrection against the United States government because Donald Trump lost an election.
Pavone is likely Deibel’s most notorious client, but he’s not Deibel’s funniest client. That has to be Father Christopher Senk, a pastor in Florida who, incredibly, is accused of bilking one of his parishoners, an elderly heiress with dementia, out of tens of thousands of dollars, presumably by doing gross sex stuff like Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor in the 2006 Superman film, and you’re welcome for making you remember that scene. The investigation of Senk began in 2017, and closed in 2019 with Senk’s bishop removing him from ministry for a year.
So, generally, Deibel does not appear to have a high win rate on his cases. But this is a guy who used to defend predators, and now defends insurrectionists and scam artists. Did Deibel support clients like these because he believed in mercy for the unjustly accused? Or does he just love shitty priests doing shitty things?
Speaking of shitty priests doing shitty things, one of the OBS co-founders, Father Eduard Perrone, ended up in a bizarre story all his own. In 2019, as repoprted in the Detroit Free Press, he was accused of child sexual abuse by two different victims, and the Archdiocese of Detroit found the allegations credible enough to remove him from ministry. The man who ran the parish where OBS was born had finally been brought down by his own abuse allegations.
Except...maybe he hadn’t been? One of the victims later adjusted his testimony, although the adjustment didn’t make Perrone look much better; the victim walked back an earlier rape accusation and accused Perrone instead of groping and fondling him. But Perrone ended up suing the detective on his case for defamation as a result of the changed testimony, and won. The detective who investigated Perrone ended up paying him a settlement of $125,000, and Perrone is hoping to leverage that settlement into a convincing piece of evidence for the Vatican and archdiocese to reinstate him as a pastor. Since everything in the Catholic church moves at a glacial pace, this hasn’t happened yet, which gave the story time to get even weirder. Church Militant ran a story on fifty former altar boys signing a petition in support of Perrone, a surprisingly benign ending to a sentence that started with “Church Militant ran a story on fifty former altar boys”. Twenty members of Perrone’s old parish, who are absolutely sure that he is innocent, sued the archdiocese for millions of dollars, claiming that the arch had set up a frame job on Perrone - remember, the pastor who told a parishioner to walk past her rapist and just pretend he wasn’t there - because the arch didn’t like Perrone’s conservative and traditionalist views. Now, there were still other allegations against Perrone, and it does not seem like the arch of Detroit was acting in bad faith when they removed him from ministry, but it is possible that the priest who co-founded an organization dedicated to cheating abuse victims out of justice, may have ended up on the wrong end of an injustice himself.
Looking at other contemporaries of Joe Maher and OBS, I already mentioned that Carol McKinley, the blogger who founded one of the O.G. priests-did-nothing-wrong groups, is still around and still writing. She was never a very good writer - the Federalist piece from 2020, on how Catholics should be willing to die a preventable death, or endanger vulnerable people around them so they can keep going to Mass, is one of the few pieces from McKinley’s career that doesn’t just repost an angry story about kids reading Harry Potter with weird homophobic annotations (I originally looked into writing a full-length piece on McKinley, but...there’s not enough there). Most of it is a Wikipedia-level summary of what “sacraments” are instead of some sort of legal argument. The actual legal argument for keeping churches open was pushed by Brooklyn bishop Nicholas DiMarzio in his recent court case. I mentioned DiMarzio at the top of this piece, and while he did not work for OBS or sit on their board, he did once provide them with a testimonial for their website to tell everyone that OBS was doing a great job “with all the help that you give to priests”:
Bishop DiMarzio’s other connection to Joe Maher and legal services for accused abusers, of course, is that he may want to avail himself of those services right now, as two different people have recently alleged that DiMarzio sexually abused them as children earlier in his career. DiMarzio denies the allegations, but he’s currently being investigated by his metropolitan archbishop, Timothy Dolan of New York. But maybe Dolan is going to direct DiMarzio to reach out to OBS for their services, because as it turns out, Dolan also once provided a testimonial for OBS’ old website, thanking them for “your solicitude for those priests who may be especially hurting at this moment due to their past mistakes and behavior”:
Dolan, of course, doesn’t have a great track record with handling abusive priests under his umbrella, and more stories that make him look bad seem to keep coming out (the most recent one is from January 15th of 2021).
You can see the problem here. Two decades ago, the American church faced an unprecedented crisis of morality, confidence, and leadership. There were Catholics in the hierarchy, in media, and in the laity, who did all the wrong things in response. They stuck up for people who had admitted to horrible things for horrible things for horrible reasons, tried out a “pobody’s nerfect” legal defense to try and help abusers escape punishment, and then kept most of the funds they raised for themselves. And all of the people who did those things, supported those things, or amplified those things are all still around, and they’re also doing all of the wrong things in response to the nationwide cry for racial justice, to a pandemic killing four thousand Americans a day, to a group of white nationalists killing people in the Capitol, to the continued sexual abuse crisis in the church because hey that crisis is still around, too. When you don’t have accountability for the people who let this crisis happen and grow, none of those crises end. That doesn’t make me feel great about how the current wave of crisis is going to turn out for the church.
EPILOGUE - POST-NOTHING AND PRE-CONVERSION
I’m not going to fix the abuse crisis in this epilogue, and I’m sorry if you read all the way to the end of the piece expecting that. The church took some measures in the 2000s to address the crisis; those measures partially worked, although they obviously didn’t fix everything. There is still a great deal to do and consider when it comes to seminary formation, oversight of bishops, empowerment of the laity in diocesan structures, financial transparency of the church, and countless other areas about which I know pretty much nothing.
But one thing I know is that a prerequisite to fixing any of the fuckups is that the people who fucked up have to admit that they got it wrong, or face some sort of consequences for getting it wrong. The story of Opus Bono Sacerdotti is the story of how that doesn’t happen in the American Catholic church. It certainly didn’t happen in the original Boston abuse crisis. Cardinal Bernard Law got promoted to a cushy job in Rome and Joe Maher lamented that he didn’t stick around to, uh, get to the bottom of things. It didn’t happen in 2018 with the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, where the bishops responded to widespread systemic coverups throughout the hierarchy by setting up a more convenient reporting hotline, while all of the implicated bishops kept their jobs. It didn’t happen when the McCarrick report came out in 2020; the bishops talked about it at their conference for 40 whole minutes and now everyone has forgotten that it happened.
I’ve been thinking about conversion a lot lately, and my first piece from the new year was about conversion. Conversion is an important part of living a Catholic life - or of living a human life in general - but there are splinters of Catholicism in the country right now that don’t leave any room for conversion, or any sort of humility or self-reflection or consideration of change or really anything except constant unceasing barrelling forward towards oblivion.The most extreme version of this is what Father James Martin described in America earlier this month:
“The invasion of the U.S. Capitol was seen by many rioters not simply as a political act but a religious one, in great part thanks to the moral framework fostered by too many Christian leaders...Those who broke windows, trampled on journalists, terrified legislators and destroyed property likely felt they were doing something holy. Why wouldn’t they? This was a fight against evil. After all, that is what a cardinal, a small number of bishops and many more priests, aligning with self-appointed social media champions of “real Catholicism,” had been telling them for months. They heard it from the pulpit, they read it in parish bulletins and they saw it on social media...Ironically, priests and bishops who count themselves as pro-life helped spawn a hate-filled environment that led to mayhem, violence and, ultimately, death.”
The priests and bishops who questioned the election results, who said Trump was the only moral choice, who spoke at “Stop the Steal” events, none of them have walked that back, none of them have said “maybe we got this wrong, maybe we should change how we think about things.” We all need to convert as part of life, we all need to look around ourselves, understand our place in the world with humility and selflessness, and make changes to who we are and what we do based on that understanding. Nobody gets this perfectly right all the time, but you’re supposed to try. And Catholics aren’t going to do it if our leaders can’t even show us an example of how it’s done.
We are not in a post-insurrection church because the insurrection is still going on and the church is still fucking it up. We are not in a post-pandemic church because the pandemic is still going on and the church is still fucking it up. We are not in a post-George Floyd church because we are still demanding that the church hears George Floyd’s voice, and the church is still fucking it up. And we are not in a post-abuse-crisis church because the crisis still hasn’t ended. It appears that we are in a pre-conversion church, in a church where the men in charge have not yet realized that we are not in 1950 anymore, that the world is different, that groups that the church has traditionally shunned or ignored aren’t really willing to take that anymore, and that a lot of things in the church have gone very wrong over the past few decades, and that there may be an expectation of accountability for those wrongdoings. But the men who run the Catholic church just aren’t close to getting that, and what we’re left with are millions of miserable and disappointed Catholics. In the worst-case scenario some of those Catholics turn to other, weirder, darker authorities in the absence of a church that actually works, and we end up literally destroying ourselves. We need a church that works, with some level of contrition for the times they fuck up, and some willingness to start the process of conversion.
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.
Sources used for this piece include:
Allen, John L. “Campaign Builds for Rethinking Zero Tolerance on Sex Abuse.” National Catholic Reporter, 11 Feb. 2011, www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/campaign-builds-rethinking-zero-tolerance-sex-abuse.
Associated Press. “Unmarked Buildings, Quiet Legal Help for Accused Priests.” New York Post, Associated Press, 29 July 2019, nypost.com/2019/07/29/unmarked-buildings-quiet-legal-help-for-accused-priests/.
Baldas, Tresa. “Detroit Catholic Church Parishioners Sue to Get Back Ousted Priest Accused of Molestation.” Detroit Free Press, 15 Feb. 2020, www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2020/02/13/eduard-perrone-priest-molestation-accusation/4653853002/.
Baldas, Tresa. “Suspended Priest Wins $125K from Cop for Defamation: She Framed Me.” Detroit Free Press, 17 Aug. 2020, www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2020/08/17/priest-wins-125-k-defamation-suit-against-detective-she-framed-me/5584440002/.
Burke, Daniel. “Accused Catholic Priests Left in Legal Limbo.” National Catholic Reporter, Religious News Service, 6 May 2010, www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/accused-catholic-priests-left-legal-limbo.
Cooperman, Alan. “Out of Zero Tolerance New Support for Priests.” Washington Post, WP, 13 Oct. 2002, web.archive.org/web/20040811162933/www.opusbono.org/10132002post.htm.
Crumm, David. “Catholic Leaders Still Say Abusers Will Be Removed .” Detroit Free Press, 12 Nov. 2002, web.archive.org/web/20040811163234/www.opusbono.org/11122002freep.htm.
Dulles, Avery Cardinal. “True and False Reform.” First Things, Institute for Religion and Public Life, 1 Aug. 2003, www.firstthings.com/article/2003/08/true-and-false-reform.
Feuerherd, Peter. “Florida Bishop Sanctions Popular Pastor Accused of Exploiting Heiress.” National Catholic Reporter, 11 Apr. 2019, www.ncronline.org/news/parish/florida-bishop-sanctions-popular-pastor-accused-exploiting-heiress.
Feuerherd, Peter. “Investigation, Removal of Florida Priest Divides Parish.” National Catholic Reporter, 28 Mar. 2017, www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/investigation-removal-florida-priest-divides-parish.
Guidos, Rhina. “Embezzlement Trial Postponed until next Year for Michigan Priest.” National Catholic Reporter, Catholic News Service, 7 Aug. 2018, www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/embezzlement-trial-postponed-until-next-year-michigan-priest.
Guidos, Rhina. “Trial Pending for Priest Accused of Embezzling $5 Million from Parish.” National Catholic Reporter, Catholic News Service, 25 July 2018, www.ncronline.org/news/people/trial-pending-priest-accused-embezzling-5-million-parish.
Hadro, Matt. “Pavone: With Transfer Pending, Campaign Work a Matter of 'Conscience'.” Catholic News Agency, Catholic News Agency, 22 Apr. 2020, www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pavone-with-transfer-pending-campaign-work-a-matter-of-conscience-85144.
Hippler, Arthur M. “Lucifer, the First Liberal.” Faithful Voice, 3 Mar. 2003, www.faithfulvoice.com/hippler.htm.
Linderman, Juliet, et al. “Priests Accused of Sex Abuse Turned to under-the-Radar Group.” Crux, Associated Press, 29 July 2019, cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2019/07/priests-accused-of-sex-abuse-turned-to-under-the-radar-group/.
Martin, James. “How Catholic Leaders Helped Give Rise to Violence at the U.S. Capitol.” America Magazine, 14 Jan. 2021, www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/01/12/capitol-riot-congress-trump-catholic-bishops-james-martin-239697?fbclid=IwAR3Ln4qFfOV3ceY2CWU2C6tdhPdPBoDCfy4oEuvI3CAEw461wqfd9HAwBvA.
McKinley, Carol. Commentary: Church Allegations Unjust, 'Sensationalized', WBUR, 26 Apr. 2010, www.wbur.org/news/2010/04/26/church-commentary-carol.
McKinley, Carol. “MA Gov. Targets Churches For Shutdown He Didn't Apply To Home Depot.” The Federalist, 19 May 2020, thefederalist.com/2020/05/15/mass-governor-targets-churches-for-shutdown-rules-he-didnt-apply-to-home-depot/.
McNally, Jay. “Fr. Perrone's Suspension: A Political Hit Job.” Church Militant, 4 Aug. 2019, www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/fr-perrone-a-political-hit-job.
Montero, Douglas. “PRIESTS TOLD: GET A LAWYER.” New York Post, New York Post, 4 Oct. 2002, nypost.com/2002/10/04/priests-told-get-a-lawyer/.
Neuhaus, Richard John. “In the Aftermath of Scandal.” First Things, Institute for Religion and Public Life, 1 Feb. 2004, www.firstthings.com/article/2004/02/in-the-aftermath-of-scandal.
Neuhaus, Richard John. “The Catholic Reform II.” First Things, Institute for Religion and Public Life, 1 June 2004, www.firstthings.com/article/2004/06/the-catholic-reform-ii.
Niles, Christine. “Opus Bono Raising Money for Priest Charged With Gay Sex Assault.” Church Militant, 21 July 2018, www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/opus-bono-sacerdotii-raising-money-for-priest-charged-with-gay-sex-assault.
“Opus Bono Homepage.” Opus Bono Sacerdotii, 2004, web.archive.org/web/20040802014221/www.opusbono.org/.
Pullella, Philip, and Greg Frost. “Cardinal Law of Boston Quits.” Reuters, 14 Dec. 2002, web.archive.org/web/20040811163640/www.opusbono.org/12142002freep.htm.
Ryan, Dick. “Priests Voice Range of Concerns in Effort to Organize in New York.” National Catholic Reporter, 25 Oct. 2002, www.natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives/102502/102502g.htm.
Schmitt, Ben. “Priest Convicted of Sex Abuse.” Detroit Free Press, 2 Nov. 2002, web.archive.org/web/20040811163848/www.opusbono.org/01022002freep.htm.
Walker, Bruce. “Opus Bono Shake-Up After Michigan AG's Investigation.” Church Militant, 18 Apr. 2019, www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/questions-remain-in-catholic-charity-reorganization.