Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [163]
Born in 1947, he was raised outside St. Paul in a comfortably middle-class home with older and younger sisters. The family attended a Lutheran and later a Congregationalist church. “It made me feel constricted,” he recalled. His father, a furniture buyer, was deeply humanitarian, but quietly so; he recalls his mother as emotionally distant. “I don’t remember my childhood. I remember being cared for, but there was a lack of bonding I somehow internalized. Maybe some missing element in childhood explains my compulsive behavior.”
After high school he entered Simpson College in Iowa. He was nineteen and deeply in love when his girlfriend, Patty, who came from a sprawling Catholic family, got pregnant. They married and had a son. Anderson left school, worked, then transferred to the University of Minnesota just in time for the revolution. His hair grew long, he smoked weed, he marched against the Vietnam War, hungering for a larger part in the 1960s social rebellion. After graduation and several low-wage jobs, he began night classes at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. By then they had an infant daughter, too. He flunked a course, scrambled for readmission, and found his stride in a criminal law class taught by Rosalie Wahl, a future justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. He thrilled to the idea of fighting the establishment by defending people on the margins. In a faculty-supervised poverty law clinic, he took the case of a black man accused of exposing himself in a church basement. Anderson argued that his homeless client was only looking for a place to pee. The judge agreed. “And I got something that day I’d never felt before,” he told me in his elegant office, flanked by pictures of Clarence Darrow and Dr. King. “A feeling of power, that I could make a difference in how society treats people.”
Starting out as a criminal defense attorney, he established a practice with a former law professor that included personal injury work. In 1983 a blue-collar Catholic couple asked his help. Their twenty-five-year-old son, in prison for molesting a youngster, had revealed to them that he was abused as a boy by Father Tom Adamson. They had met with Auxiliary Bishop Robert Carlson, the chancellor of the Twin Cities archdiocese. Carlson offered mild compassion, and then sent a check for $1,500. “Cash it,” said Anderson. “And let me visit your son.”
Gazing at the young inmate through the glass partition, he was touched by his sad naïveté, a quality he detected in many criminal clients. Anderson called the cops; they were powerless, the statute of limitations on Adamson’s crimes had lapsed. He knew of no lawyer who had sued the Catholic Church.
Minnesota law allows a plaintiff to serve a complaint on a defendant before filing court papers. Discovery proceeds as an inducement to settle a case without notoriety or court costs. He sent his complaint to the archdiocese. Church counsel called immediately: what did he want? He wanted the priest removed from his parish. He soon got assurance that Adamson was yanked. The church wanted to settle. Anderson wanted to take the deposition testimony of Archbishop John Roach. His opposing counsel said no. Anderson threatened to file suit and call the media. He got the deposition, along with church files containing letters that documented how Adamson had crisscrossed dioceses and parishes trailed by sex abuse complaints. He took the deposition of a second bishop, Loras Watters of Winona. Convinced that both bishops had lied to him under oath about their knowledge of Adamson’s history, he probed deeper.8 The archdiocesan lawyer offered a settlement “in the usual way,” a signal to him that Adamson was not unique. The offer was $1 million to be paid in a structured annuity, a steady