2 Paths, No Easy Solution on Abusive Priests

New York Times/March 3, 2002
By Laurie Goodstein and Jodi Wilgoren

St. Louis -- It has been 20 years since John Scorfina's family complained to church officials about the Rev. Leroy Valentine's sexualized horseplay with him and his two brothers, which they say ended with the priest molesting 11-year-old John.

It has been four years since the Scorfina brothers took $20,000 each from the Archdiocese of St. Louis on the condition they never speak of the settlement, believing that lawyers for the church had promised to remove the priest from parish work.

But when the three men recently learned that Father Valentine, who has denied any wrongdoing, was an assistant pastor at a church attached to a Catholic elementary school, the order not to speak could not contain their outrage.

"I just don't want any kids to go through what I went through," John Scorfina said this week.

Across the Mississippi River in Belleville, Ill., the priests who have been accused of sexual abuse no longer work in churches. One performs karaoke on Wednesday nights at the Lincoln Jug restaurant in Belleville and another pumps gas at his mother's service station in the small town of Columbia.

In the mid-1990's, the Diocese of Belleville publicly ousted 13 priests accused of inappropriate sexual contact with children, leaving them in an odd limbo - on the church payroll yet without portfolio, called "Father" but barred from administering sacraments or wearing the collar. "In the church," said one, the Rev. Raymond Kownacki, "you're guilty until proven innocent."

Here in the center of the country, these two dioceses - one, in a major city in which a third of the population is Catholic, the other a sprawling 11,000-square-mile expanse of small farm towns - have taken divergent paths in handling accusations of sexual abuse by clergymen.

While Belleville made headlines by removing priests, St. Louis quietly moved them around. Each diocese has a board to review the cases. In Belleville, a victim's say-so was often enough for the board to strip priests of their church ministries; in St. Louis, many victims said they were unaware of the board's existence.

As church officials nationwide rethink their approaches to the issue amid recent scandals, each bank of the river offers lessons about the intractability of the problem.

Belleville's broad public sweep of priests from the altar may have eased victims' pain, but it also left some parishioners uneasy that innocent men were being maligned, while others worried about potential pedophiles being released from the rectory, unwatched. The policy in St. Louis, until this week, of keeping nearly all accusations secret as the archdiocese moved the priests into new parishes, retirement, or low-profile posts, angered victims and may have led to further offenses.

The issue of sexual abuse by priests has taken on new urgency in recent months after disclosures that the Boston Archdiocese had known for years about the sexual misconduct of a priest who was accused of molesting some 130 children. That case led to repeated apologies from the leader of the archdiocese, Cardinal Bernard Law, who reversed his policy of keeping the matter within the church and gave state authorities the names of some 80 priests accused of abusing children over 40 years.

Since then, church leaders in New England and Philadelphia have informed parishes of similar accusations against priests, handed priests' personnel files to prosecutors and relieved some of the accused of their duties. In Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahoney issued a public apology to victims and released a new policy vowing that a priest who had abused a child would never return to active ministry.

Here in St. Louis, an archdiocese of 223 parishes, church officials announced the removal of two pastors today, saying they had "raised the bar" about who is unfit to serve in a parish post. The standard, since 1996, had been that any priest deemed to pose a future risk would be removed. Since the Boston incidents, they say that any priest with a substantiated accusation against him will be ousted. The two priests received treatment after the accusations, which are 15 and 14 years old, officials said.

"As painful as it is, we're going to keep the trust of our people," said Bishop Timothy M. Dolan, the vicar for priests. "We have to be able to say, we have to be able to believe, that there is no priest in a parish against whom there is a credible claim of clerical sexual abuse."

Accusations about pedophilia have plagued the Roman Catholic Church in the United States since the first major case arose nearly 20 years ago in a Louisiana parish. Experts warn that, like alcoholism, pedophilia is a disease that can be controlled but not cured, and that problem priests should not be reassigned to parishes where they are at risk of abusing again.

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, who lives in St. Louis, says the experiences of Belleville, while flawed, are a starting point as bishops review policies. St. Louis, he says, is a model of what to avoid.

"In Belleville, like virtually every diocese in America, the survivor who comes forward has a long tough road," he said. "But in St. Louis, that road is steep, uphill, and seemingly endless."

St. Louis Parishioners Uneasy but Dependent

Father Valentine was the favorite of many children at St. Pius X, a parish and school in Glasgow Village, a community of identical aluminum-sided bungalows in the northern part of St. Louis. The priest took them out for ice cream and cheeseburgers. He lavished affection on children like the Scorfinas, who came from single-parent or troubled families. "He was like the dad that wasn't there," said John Scorfina, who now runs a construction company.

Father Valentine, in an interview on Thursday at the rectory of St. Thomas the Apostle, where he is now an associate pastor, said he was barred by the legal settlement from discussing the case. When told that this was his opportunity to respond to whether there was any truth to the accusations, he looked down and shook his head. The senior pastor, the Rev. Henry Garavaglia, who sat in on the interview, said, "Emphatically, I would say no."

Then Father Valentine looked up and said suddenly, "At the same time, parents should always be concerned who's working with their children."

Others who lived in Father Valentine's parish said they felt uneasy about him, particularly when he wrestled with groups of boys and slid them over his body in a game he called "crack your back."

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