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“It’s a spurious accusation,” Whelan told TV reporter Dan Noyes, who got a moment inside the rectory. The Salesians announced that Whelan had no contact with children, though he was still saying Mass. In the long buildup to the trial—which yielded a $600,000 verdict to him—Joey Piscitelli kept saying, “The priest who molested me is a block away from Bishop Levada, and he has left that priest in ministry with kids.”43

Born in 1936 in Long Beach, William Levada had gone through the Camarillo seminary with Roger Mahony. As a young theologian he worked for Cardinal Ratzinger at the CDF in the early eighties. Back home in 1985, boosted by Mahony, he became an auxiliary bishop. A man of compact build with receding gray hair, Archbishop Levada lived in the rectory of St. Mary’s Cathedral around the corner from the Salesian provincial headquarters, which housed a religious brother who had served time for child abuse and three priests, dripping guilt from civil cases, who were beyond the statutory reach for criminal charges. Religious orders serve at the discretion of a bishop.

Anderson had first encountered the Salesians in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2002, when he sued one of the religious brothers, who was promptly transferred to a Salesian house in New Jersey. Later that year, he sued the order in Chicago for a Mexican priest who faced accusations from four Latino youths; the priest was packed off to New Jersey, then Mexico. When Joey Piscitelli contacted him, Jeff Anderson engaged a Bay Area attorney, Rick Simmons, as cocounsel. After taking the depositions of Whelan and his superiors, Anderson saw the California Salesians, with sixteen perpetrators, as a hive of corruption. Levada’s passivity from that reality, while he lived around the corner from Salesian headquarters in the City by the Bay, weirdly made sense. Anderson had taken Levada’s deposition over his decisions as archbishop in Portland several years before. Levada had sent predators in therapy back to ministry. The archdiocesan attorney, Robert McMenamin, had advised Levada to tell church officials about their obligation to report predators to the police. Levada declined. McMenamin resigned; he later began representing abuse victims. The Oregon Supreme Court dismissed Levada’s petition to disqualify McMenamin from such cases as a conflict of interest. McMenamin wrote to his successor: “I have loyalty both to my religion and the confidences of former clients, but not to church officials who deny justice to victims.”

Stirring his powdered vitamins and liquid fruit, Jeff Anderson pondered the mind-set that linked Levada, Mahony, and innumerable bishops he had deposed across two decades. Levada struck him as remote, affable, and clueless about what had been going on in his own diocese. But he fell right in line with the hierarchs, hiding the secrets of a celibate system that tolerated all kinds of behavior, the worst of which defiled innocent youth. Unlike AA members, they had no higher power to help them change their hypocritical ways. Popes received them with fraternal esteem. Their first responsibility was to a perverse chivalry that cloaked the sickest secrets. The splendor of Mass, the legacy of saints, the Eucharist as table of life had scant meaning for Anderson; he knew the rituals were vital to Catholics, but he had never known the spiritual dimension of the faith in such a way as to mourn its loss. But he saw how that loss tore at his clients. He was sensitive to the struggle of Tom Doyle and Pat Wall, who were regrounding themselves spiritually. He drew strength from their search, their learnedness, their tenacity in resisting the evil, in taking his battle however far he might.

Levada had gone to San Francisco in 1995. Since the 2002 scandal had broken, he had shoveled some of the muck. Among the clerics he had pulled from ministry for sexually abusing youth were a chaplain of the San Francisco 49ers football team, a former head of Catholic Charities, a rector of the