A contextual anaylsis on the stories being told, the justice being served, and the wounds being healed almost 50 years later.
This blog post is going to be different than the ones you’re used to seeing. Whereas our other posts have been more in the style of a devotional, this post is going to be giving more information about faith-based abuse. Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of devotional-style blogs, but we also want to tell survivors’ stories. We want to uncover the abuses that have been hidden for years, and we want to make sure justice is served and victims are satisfied. That’s just one of the things that this blog intends to do.
To give some context though: the “Y” in our name stands for youth. The majority of us are college students, some in nursing school, some in liberal arts, and I am a science and business major. One of my classes required a “contextual analysis” of a performance, or presentation, or something along those lines. I jumped at the opportunity to put my research and knowledge of clergy sexual abuse into practice. So this blog is basically my paper for that class. I’m analyzing and providing context to the presentation that investigative reporter Chris Ramirez did for our Faith-Based Abuse Conference in 2019. You can watch the full conference here: https://youtu.be/Qa6HjIA_6CQ
I add important context to the problem of clergy sexual abuse in general, the history of it not only nationally but specifically in New Mexico (where the conference took place), and the impact it has on victims. This is a traumatizing subject, so I encourage you to take breaks, take deep breaths and take care of yourself. I want this blog to provide hope, hope that justice for things done decades and decades ago can be reached, and also I want to provide awareness to people who might not be aware of the scope and size of the problem of clergy sexual abuse. So I pray that this post will help you.
Time Is Up
Many people in New Mexico are at least vaguely familiar with the problems that the Catholic church has had with Priests who sexually abuse their parishioners, especially in recent years as more and more victims tell their stories, and as media outlets like the Boston Globe make shocking headlines of the problem and cover-up. Their series is the most widely known thanks to their excellent reporting and the fact that a major motion picture was made based on their groundbreaking story. However, many people in New Mexico are unaware that what happened nearly 2,000 miles away in Boston, has hit very close to home. Many people do not realize the impact it has on victims, that their soul may be killed because the person charged with protecting it, instead abused it, and Many people are unaware that time is of the essence when it comes to these cases. Chris Ramirez’s presentation on Shattered Faith finally brings the scandal and abuse of the Catholic Church in New Mexico into the spotlight. He tells a story that has waited over 50 years to be told as the abusive priests are finally brought to justice, and the victims are granted some measure of restoration. It may have been decades ago, but the time has come for this story to be told.
In 2019 at the first Annual Conference on Faith-Based Abuse hosted by the non-profit CY CHRIST, Investigative Reporter Chris Ramirez gave a presentation on the Catholic abuse and cover-up in New Mexico. Chris Ramirez has been an investigative reporter in New Mexico for 13 years and he describes his job as making sure “bad actors in our state are held accountable.” His presentation was to an audience that ranged from religious laypeople and leaders, non-profit leaders, victim advocates, and members of law enforcement.
He used a variety of mediums to make his presentation. He had three large binders, filled with documents that describe the abuses of three different priests. He also presented showed clips of his news reports, giving the audience a more dynamic and interesting presentation. He gives an impassioned presentation that shows the years that it took for something to be done, his frustration at the powers that be trying to keep victims silent, his heartbreak of hearing their stories; and his excitement that what’s been accomplished is just the beginning.
However, before any of this started, we need to look at the history of the problem of clergy sexual abuse, particularly in the Catholic church. Not only as a whole but also specifically in New Mexico.
History
Many people will be surprised to learn that the problem of clergy sexual abuse goes the back to at least the second century, A.D. Former Priest and Psychotherapist, A.W. Richard Sipe, who spent most of his adult life studying priests who sexually abuse children, outlines in his book Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis, that the oldest known commentary on the gospels, The Didachè explicitly commands “Thou shalt not seduce young boys.” He also points out that the earliest recorded church council in Elvira in AD 309 has 81 canons (or laws), 38 of which deal with sex and Canon 71 specifically mentions “those who sexually abuse boys (p10). This shows that there were at least several instances of this by the year 309 and it continues to be a problem. The non-profit organization CY CHRIST compiles yearly statistics on faith-based abuse crimes and in 2020 there were 24 sexual crimes perpetrated by clergy or in a church atmosphere (cychrist.org). Several of these sexual crimes were committed by priests.
It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that reports of clergy sexual abuse were becoming public. The scandal broke in Louisiana when Father Gilbert Gauthe was accused of having abused multiple victims in his church. It was then uncovered that the Diocese (the administration in Louisiana) had known that Gauthe had abused minors in the past and continued to allow him to be a priest. As that story broke, several other Louisiana priests were accused of sexually molesting minors.
Although this story made national headlines, it quickly shrank from the public’s attention and the church continued in its indifference and also enabling behavior. It wasn’t until 2002 when the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team -an investigative reporting team- published their series Betrayal that an outraged public finally got the attention of the church. Even then it wasn’t until Catholics and churchgoers withheld money to the Boston Archdiocese (Betrayal p9). The Spotlight team followed up these reports with a detailed book by the same title in 2003. The investigative teams consisted of veteran investigative reporters such as Matt Carroll, Kevin Cullen, Thomas Farragher, Stephen Kurkjian, Michael Paulson, Sacha Pfeiffer, Michael Rezendes, and Walter V. Robinson.
However, the history of the scandal in Boston can be traced to New Mexico. Ramirez pointed out that “New Mexico has such a dark history with the subject, in a lot of ways it was the epicenter of the problem in the U.S.”
New Mexico’s Role
New Mexico was in a position to halt or help the problem of sexually abusive priests. That’s because many of them were sent here and the first warnings of such a scandal they posed was made as early as the 50s. In 1947 Father Gerald Fitzgerald started the Servants of the Paracletes treatment center. Originally intended to help priests with alcohol abuse they began getting priests who abused children. Fitzgerald began writing warning letters to the hierarchy of the dangers involved with these “problem priests” and as early as 1952 he wrote that “…leaving them on duty or wandering from diocese to diocese is contributing to scandal or at least to the approximate danger of scandal.” This was reported in the National Catholic Reporter from official court documents obtained by a California law firm that has handled hundreds of cases of clergy sexual abuse (April 3, 2009, p. 11, 12). The non-profit project Bishop-Accountability.org has found at least 120 priests in New Mexico alone have been accused of sexual abuse (https://origin.bishop-accountability.org/member/psearch.jsp).
The warnings that Father Fitzgerald made fell on deaf ears as prolific abusers who were treated at the center, such as James Porter went back to Boston to sadistically abuse over 200 minors, and David A. Holley was later handed down a 275-year prison sentence for his crimes in New Mexico. (Betrayal, p. 46).
One particular priest, Father Arthur Perrault was also treated at the Servants of the Paraclete. He was later discharged and given various positions in New Mexico, from a teacher at Saint Pious High School in Albuquerque to pastoring several churches or working as an Air Force chaplain. Ramirez makes clear that “wherever Perrault pastored he left behind a trail of victims…cloaked under the authority of a church which covered his tracks.”
However, just getting the records to find these details out was a battle in and of itself. In the first half of his presentation Ramirez says that it was in 2017 that KOB News 4 took on the daunting and seemingly “impossible,” task of suing the Archdiocese in Santa Fe for records of abusive pedophile priests in 2017. One of the first things he obtained was a timeline of Perrault’s abusive behavior, which he used as a prop in his presentation. It was so long that he had to get one of the other speakers at the conference to hold up the other end. The timeline was nearly six feet long and pointed to each known instance where abuse was reported, Perrault was moved somewhere else, and the abuse began again. His abuse covers five decades.
All of the information he obtained he used in a three-part series called “Shattered Faith.” In total, it was 24 minutes that told the story of the abuses and cover-up here in New Mexico. He used parts from two of the videos in his presentation.
Victims
In Part II of the video Ramirez shows, News-anchor Steve Soliz states in the introduction that “this chapter is meant to expose the seemingly widening circle of silence that most of our vulnerable victims say denied them justice.” This is important because it underscores the sphere of silence that victims often keep. The Rape Abuse Incest National Network (RAINN), perhaps the largest non-profit working to help victims of these crimes has statistics that show that only 230 of 1000 sexual assaults will be reported to the police (rainn.org). In many cases of childhood sexual abuse, cases go unreported and when it is perpetrated in the faith-based environment it can be even harder for the children to come forward. Bruce Selcraig, a sexual abuse researcher for the U.S. Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations says guilt is one reason the silence grows. “Guilt haunts their memories, yet if they come forward, communities may well view them as a reality too harsh to contemplate or as harsh critics of a cherished institution” (Lead Us Not into Temptation p. 106).
The reality is often too hard to bear even for the victims. Many do not understand that what has happened to them was abuse until they were well into their adulthood. One victim of a priest in Boston said it wasn’t until he started dating that what was going on became “increasingly, increasingly uncomfortable.” He said, “I was made to believe it was normal or natural, and so it seemed normal and natural” (Betrayal p. 68).
This plays an important role in Ramirez’s presentation, because no matter what the reason that a child may not report their abuse, when they turn 18 or when they do decide to report, a clock starts ticking. This is the statute of limitations, laws that limit how long justice can be served for a particular crime. In the video, Ramirez shows a stopwatch that starts ticking as he explains that the statute of limitations for child rape in New Mexico is only 15 years from when the victim turns 18 or when they report. Whichever comes first. The stopwatch stops clicking after that time and he says that “the abuser gets away with it.” He gives a sense of urgency in this video and in his presentation.
Ramirez states that this means that the “hope of many survivors hangs on a thread. Because many victims aren’t ready to report until well after they turn 18, nothing can be done in the criminal justice system to give them closure. In 1993 when two boys did make reports to law enforcement, nothing was done. So even though they reported the abuse, after 15 years no charges can be pressed. The way in which Ramirez heavily emphasizes and gives urgency to the time limit helps to will motivate law enforcement to start to work harder to close cases before the 15 year deadline, inform victims’ that there might be a time-limit on how long they can get justice, and encourage a change in the legislature, so that victims will have longer to weight their options, and are ready to report their abuse.
Arthur Perrault
From here in his presentation, Ramirez starts to look more closely at the story of Father Arthur Perrault. It’s already been mentioned that Perrault was hired by the Air Force as a chaplain. This gave him access to the Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque New Mexico, and the National Cemetery in Santa Fe where he began to abuse an altar boy, Kenneth Walters. Perrault probably would’ve gotten away with his abuse of Walters had it not been for one slight oversight. Perrault had abused Walters on Federal property. Therefore, the crime was federal and no longer state, and in the U.S. Criminal Code, there is no statute of limitations when it comes to the sexual abuse of a minor (18 U.S.C §2243).
When Perrault’s other victims found the courage to come forward, he panicked and fled the U.S in the early 1990s. Although Walters’ civil suit against the Archdiocese of Santa Fe was won, he told Civil Rights Attorneys Levi Monagle and Brad Hall that “Arthur Perrault is still out there and this is the villain in this story and I don’t want to let him get away scot-free.”
Then began the search for Perrault. It wasn’t until at least 2016 however, that they finally located Perrault, teaching high-school boys at the American Language Center in Tangier, Morocco. That’s when the FBI and the Department of Justice got involved in trying to bring him back. It wasn’t until 2019 that he was finally extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for his crimes from nearly 30 years ago.
Ramirez emphasizes the difficulties that come from trying to prosecute a case that’s 30 years old, has no physical, or forensic evidence, and the only witness is the victim…but that’s where U.S. Attorney Sean Sullivan was able to tell the stories of Perrault’s other victims, who had witnessed, who had experienced the same acts that Perrault committed. He called seven other victims of Perrault to testify and describe his abuse. Among those were Mark Nowak, Charles Starzynski, Elaine Montoya.
Ramirez interviewed these three in his series where they shared their story and the impact the abuse had on their lives. Both as adolescents and into their adulthood. These are only three of perhaps tens of thousands of victims.
Priests who had histories of sexually abusing minors came to New Mexico or worked elsewhere, left a wake of woe in the communities, in the families, and above all, in the lives of their victims. Starzynski said that “I think I had a relatively normal teenage life until…the things started happening.” Montoya also spoke more to the guilt and emotional devastation. She said that the abuse affected her so badly that “I became severely depressed and ended up in a psychiatric hospital because I wanted to kill myself.”
As previously stated, the guilt that survivors feel from all sexual crimes is real, but members of the clergy do the most damage to their victims because here “the cleric takes the place of God (Clericalism: Enabler of Clergy Sexual Abuse, p.192) Because of that, there is an incredible sense of betrayal and loss and often times a victims’ spiritual lives are forever damaged and oftentimes fatally. Victims say that “their soul has been murdered” (ibid).
Starzynski, Nowak, Montoya, and Walters survived their abuse, but many others have not. A 12-year-old boy who had been abused by a Franciscan brother in New Jersey swallowed a bottle of liniment. At the hospital, he told a nurse that life “was not worth living” (Lead Us Not into Temptation, p. 107). He committed suicide because the abuse, the pain, the guilt, the betrayal, made this life not worth it.
The fact that the priest is considered to take the place of God answers several questions about victimization. Thomas Doyle, a canon law lawyer and former assistant to the Pi Laghi at the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, D.C (ambassador and embassy, respectively), wrote an article in 2006 in Journal of Pastoral Psychology and pointed out how this position, makes it easier for priests to abuse children. Nowak said that when Perrault began abusing him that “you don’t say ‘no’ to a priest. So, I didn’t.”
A major case in Newfoundland, Canada, said that being close to a priest was as close as you could get to God without playing a harp. She said, “we are victims of our own heritage” (Clericalism: Enabler of Clergy Sexual Abusep.199) Many victims come from strong Catholic families, and Doyle says that they were “conditioned by their religious indoctrination to look on the clergy-abuser with a mixture of awe and fear.” The testimony from the other seven victims of Perrault helped to corroborate the abuse that Walters had suffered.
One of the hardest things for victims to do is testify against their abusers in open court. The guilt and shame of what has happened come back, they are often embarrassed and nervous, imagine having to describe to total strangers the worst sexual experience you’ve had in your life. For these victims, it was often their first experience and it would be repeated over and over by Perrault. The survivors would also have to answer difficult questions from the defense, questions that challenged their credibility, their memory, their motives, their experience. And then, perhaps most difficult of all is that they would have to do all of this while their abuser sits just a few feet away from them.
You would think that this would have discouraged Perrault’s victims from testifying but for Nowak and Starzynski, this was one of the moments they had been waiting for. A chance to tell their story and truth. Nowak said, “There did appear to be a big weight lifted from me.” “I get to take this story that is mine and tell everybody what it is. It just felt really good,” Starzynski said.
Twenty-eight years of waiting for justice. After hours on the witness stand, and after eight long days of trial, the verdict came back. On six counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact with a minor under the age of 12, the jury found Arthur Perrault, guilty (justice.gov). Justice was finally served.
Nowak just keeps saying that “it’s over. he’s done, he’s finally done. After all these years, and what seems like a situation that should’ve been dealt with two or three decades ago, finally he can’t do it anymore.” Montoya also said that it was “the first time since I was fourteen years old that I knew for a fact that Arthur Perrault would no longer abuse any more children.
In part three of the Shattered Faith series that Ramirez showed, the one that talks about the trial and conviction, News anchors Tessa Mentus and Soliz introduce the story by saying that it’s “for the New Mexicans who have waited decades for justice and to tell their story,” that “their bravery” led to Perrault’s conviction.
Conclusion
After waiting 30 years, Perrault’s victims finally have justice. The Vatican and the Catholic Church can no longer turn a blind eye to the abuse of their priests, nor can they hide any of it. The victims are ready to tell their stories, reporters like Ramirez are ready to tell it, and there is a public that is ready to hear it, and prosecutors and law enforcement ready to fight for justice. A common adage of the FBI is that they have “a long reach and an even longer memory. Justice will be served.” As for the victims, God has heard their cries, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge?” God’s answer to them soon will be, “It is done!” (The Remnant Study Bible, Rev 6:10, 21:6).
Ramirez said in his presentation that he felt the conviction was “what we’ve been working towards for the past several years.” His presentation represents again that no matter the time, no matter the distance, as long as victims are ready and willing to speak, as long as people in power are ready to hear and act on it, and as long as reporters like himself hound those people for accountability; time is up for the thousands, and thousands of priests who thought they would never be brought to justice.
Have information on Arthur Perrault? Send an email to usanm-priest@usdoj.gov.
Do you want to talk to someone? Call RAINN at 800-656-4673
Works Cited
United States, Congress, 18.
Berry, Jason. Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Doubleday, 1992.
pp. 106,107
“Case Tracking Center.” C.Y. C.H.R.I.S.T., 6 Apr. 2021, cychrist.org/case-tracking-center/.
“Database of Publicly Accused Priests, NM.” Login, origin.bishop-accountability.org/member/psearch.jsp.
Doyle, Thomas P. “Clericalism: Enabler of Clergy Sexual Abuse.” Pastoral Psychology, vol. 54, no. 3, 2006, pp. 189–213., doi:10.1007/s11089-006-6323-x.
pp. 192, 199
“FEDERAL JURY CONVICTS ARTHUR PERRAULT ON FEDERAL CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE CHARGES.” The United States Department of Justice, 10 Apr. 2019, www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/federal-jury-convicts-arthur-perrault-federal-child-sexual-abuse-charges.
Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe. Betrayal: the Crisis in the Catholic Church: the Findings of the Investigation That Inspired the Major Motion Picture Spotlight. Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2015.
pp. 10, 46-47,
Sipe, A. W. Richard. Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis. Brunner/Mazel, 1995.
pp. 10
“The Criminal Justice System: Statistics.” RAINN, www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system.
The Remnant Study Bible: with E.G. White Comments. Remnant Publications, 2009.
Rev 6:10, 21:6