Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [171]
The archdiocesan annual budget of $116 million was nearly half that of the Vatican. Less than a month after the glowing coverage of the cathedral opening, Mahony cut the budgets of seven church programs “to close a $4.3 million deficit … [with] layoffs of roughly 60 employees,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Five of Mahony’s top assistants resigned in frustration.
Mahony and other archdiocesan officials have said that the cuts in the budget were needed to close a deficit caused by losses in the stock market. Others have pointed to the church’s need to set aside money against the future costs of sexual-abuse settlements.34
While Jeff Anderson was on a journey toward spirituality, John Manly’s faith was crumbling. His law firm was in a high-rise office near John Wayne Airport in Orange County. A Republican who had built a practice on real estate law, Manly had gone through Catholic schools and attended retreats as a University of Southern California undergraduate. After serving as a naval intelligence officer, he went to law school. He and his wife had four children. “There is an evil in all this,” Manly brooded in a December twilight of 2004, with a panoramic view of gleaming malls and manicured streets. “We have clients in Alaska who went through stuff that is mind-boggling to someone like me.”
In 1996 Manly and Irvine attorney Katherine Freberg had taken the case of Ryan DiMaria, age twenty-one, who was battling alcoholism in the aftershocks of being molested by Father Michael Harris, a popular high school principal from whom he had sought counseling as a teenager, after a friend’s suicide. DiMaria told a priest how Harris had abused him: Father G. Patrick Ziemann, the scion of a prominent area family, and a seminary friend of Mahony’s. Mahony, in the meantime, arranged for Ziemann to become bishop of Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco. Ziemann squandered the diocesan treasury, left a $16 million debt, and resigned in 1998 when a priest sued him, alleging he coerced him to provide sex. To prevent Mahony from testifying in the DiMaria case, the Orange diocese settled for a whopping $5.2 million, and agreed to eleven demands made by DiMaria and his attorney, notably, a zero-tolerance policy on abusers. In time, Ryan DiMaria became an attorney representing victims. Harris, the perpetrator, left the priesthood but was never prosecuted.
John Manly’s firm had one hundred abuse clients. His chief researcher, Patrick Wall, was a brilliant canonist who had quit the Benedictine priesthood in Collegeville, Minnesota, after five parish assignments, each one replacing a pastor who had stolen money or abused children. Wall had recently moved to California when he saw Manly quoted in the press. He called in hopes of sharing a few things he knew. Manly hired him on the spot. Now married, with a child, Wall was a sleuth when it came to church documents—and had become an Episcopalian by 2003. Another expert witness, Richard Sipe of La Jolla, was a psychotherapist and former Benedictine priest who had written books on celibacy. In their overlapping research, Sipe, Wall, and Tom Doyle, with ten advanced degrees among them, formed a brain trust for Jeff Anderson and John Manly. The trio collaborated on Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes, a history of how church laws responded to systemic clergy sexual abuse and the hierarchy’s latter-day reliance on psychiatric treatment facilities.35
“In some dioceses,” said Manly, “if you’re not part of the sexual culture, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get choice assignments. No one can talk about it because the consequences for that person are catastrophic.”
The darkness John Manly felt cut a sharp contrast with Pat Wall’s wit. Both men had the heft of football players from their younger years. Wall was rewriting his idea of faith with intrigue over each new document. “Roger Mahony is crucial to the Vatican,” he told me in 2010, by which time he had become a Buddhist. “He was one of the cardinals called to the Consistory for the Study of the Special Economic Problems