Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [164]
“Sick, scared, upset, and unable to sleep,” he says now of the offer as if it had been made yesterday, “I saw it as a huge amount of money.” His client had gotten out of prison when Anderson went to see him. He recalls crying as he explained the settlement offer, which carried a nondisclosure clause: hush money. Anderson asked him not to agree to that condition. “Jeff,” said the man, “turn it down—but turn it down quickly, before I change my mind.”
He returned to his office, drafted a complaint, went to the courthouse.
Filing the case made major news in St. Paul. The fall 1984 criminal indictment of Father Gilbert Gauthe in Lafayette, Louisiana, made bigger news. Gauthe accepted a twenty-year plea bargain in 1985; the diocese settled a dozen cases with the families of boys he had abused. Gauthe and Adamson were opposite faces of the same coin. Adamson was never prosecuted. The early Gauthe cases (many more would follow) settled, on average, for about $400,000 per victim. Anderson settled his case for $1.2 million as a structured annuity. Other Adamson victims called him. He settled those cases in the late 1980s for an average of $550,000, some $10 million in all, of which insurance companies paid about a third of the costs. Eventually he persuaded the Minnesota legislature to extend the statute of limitations for child abuse. Along the way, his marriage died because of his drinking and infidelity. Later, he met and married Julie Aronson, who was fourteen years younger than he. In 1992 Jeff Anderson had a year-old son, a lovely wife, a beautiful house, and a surging practice when his eighteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage revealed that she had been abused at age eight by her therapist, an ex-priest. The man had since gone to prison. Throttled with guilt, Jeff Anderson resolved to be a better father. But he was rolling down a jagged hill, drinking so voraciously that on his fiftieth birthday he crashed: blacked out after a dinner with friends. When he awoke his second marriage was on the rocks.
Anderson entered outpatient treatment and began attending AA meetings. As the rescuer peered into the wreckage of his drinking, he felt fear at the specter of something he could not control. The spirituality that kept all those Catholics glued to their church had a million forms, he realized; he wanted a spiritual base to overcome the lovelessness that drove his compulsive drinking. How does an agnostic find a higher power? His wife and AA allies helped, but it was a Catholic priest who really got him grounded.
BROTHERS IN BATTLE
Father Tom Doyle, the canon lawyer at the Vatican embassy, had lost his job, and a sure bet to become a bishop, because of the 1985 report he coauthored that warned the hierarchy of the abuse crisis. Doyle was a Dominican, and Dominicans are known for preaching; when reporters called, Doyle spoke his mind about the bishops’ inaction, his candor quotient rising like a critical mass. The cleric who had worn French cuffs at embassy functions and gone to White House lunches joined the air force as a Catholic chaplain. In 1988 he had unpacked his books in a cottage on an Indiana air base when a lawyer named Jeff Anderson telephoned. Doyle let him talk. A few days later he sent Anderson the ninety-three-page report he had written with lawyer F. Ray Mouton and psychiatrist Father Michael Peterson, which had gone to every bishop in America. The document was a smoking gun at that juncture for Anderson’s lawsuits.
A disillusioned soldier of orthodoxy, Tom Doyle was on his own crash landing from alcohol. After hitting bottom, Doyle never blamed the Vatican or bishops; he accepted his powerlessness over drinking and refocused his spiritual life on the daily path of recovery. He accepted himself as a wounded healer. With a pilot’s license and membership in the National Rifle Association, Doyle was as conservative as Anderson was liberal. Tom Doyle became the brother Jeff Anderson never had, bonded in the struggle to live clean and take the battle forward. Doyle had become a