Documents show bishops transferred known abuser: Church officialssay policies have since changed
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A National Conference of Catholic Bishops leader and several other top
clerics knowingly allowed a child-molesting priest to work for at least 20
years in Massachusetts, New Mexico, West Texas and Colorado, their
correspondence shows.

Repeated transfers of the now-imprisoned Rev. David Holley provide a case
study in how bishops have cooperated to protect pedophiles in the
priesthood, say experts who have tracked hundreds of clergy- abuse cases
around the country.

Catholic Church officials dispute that assertion, saying they lacked
knowledge about pedophiles' incurability until the early 1990s and now are
moving to flush out "wolves in sheep's clothing."

Indications that bishops understood the danger much earlier appear in their
own writings, which were in personnel files that some of Father Holley's
former parishioners obtained in litigation a few years ago. The Dallas
Morning News recently reviewed the documents, whose contents were sealed
under out-of-court settlements and have never been made public.

"This man has been . . . [accused of] molesting teenage boys on at least
two occasions - most recently in a hospital from which he has been barred -
and with carrying around and showing to these boys pornographic magazines
and books," wrote Worcester, Mass., Bishop Bernard J. Flanagan in a 1968
therapy referral.

Those allegations and similar ones forced Father Holley out of his home
diocese of Worcester and led to a series of transfers in the Southwest, the
correspondence shows.

In 1982, Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza wrote that he knew of Father Holley's
"past difficulties" and stated: "With our shortage of priests, I am willing
to risk incardinating him" - which means formally making him a priest of
the Diocese of San Angelo, Texas.

At the time, Bishop Fiorenza headed that diocese. Today, he governs the
Diocese of Galveston-Houston and, as vice president of the national bishops
group, is expected to become president next year.

Bishop Fiorenza, 66, declined interview requests, saying through spokesman
Ron Regan that he didn't want to revisit old traumas. "The church needs to
move beyond this," Mr. Regan said Thursday .

Father Holley isn't the only child molester whom Bishop Fiorenza has
allowed to continue working. After going to Houston in 1985, the bishop
reassigned a priest caught in the act of abusing a girl and offered her no
help, according to published reports that his spokesman doesn't dispute.
The woman who discovered the abuse said the diocese pressured her not to
tell police.

Mr. Regan said the Houston diocese , like the Catholic Diocese of Dallas
and many others, now has a policy of investigating all abuse allegations
and putting anyone accused on leave.

Father Holley, 70, didn't respond to interview requests. He was sentenced
to prison in 1993 for molesting young boys in Alamogordo, N.M., two decades
earlier. He is serving a maximum sentence of 275 years at the Western New
Mexico Correctional Facility in Grants, N.M.

During Father Holley's 30-year career as a priest, bishops sent him for
inpatient psychiatric treatment at least twice, then institutionalized him
again when abuse allegations resurfaced in the early 1990s after he'd
retired.

One of the hospitalizations was initiated by Bishop Fiorenza's now-deceased
predecessor in San Angelo, Bishop Stephen A. Leven, who wrote in 1977 that
Father Holley was "a calculated risk."

Other revelations in the bishops' correspondence:

* Bishop Flanagan, now retired, wrote in 1970 that he would help Father
Holley find "a benevolent bishop who could use his services" after evidence
of molestation emerged in three Massachusetts parishes. The first record of
abuse in his personnel file was made in 1968, though Father Holley has
testified that it was reported to Bishop Flanagan during his first parish
assignment, from 1962 to 1964.

Bishop Flanagan was unavailable for comment because of poor health, said
Worcester Diocese spokesman Ray Delisle . Other top church officials in
Worcester also were unavailable, he said.

* Worcester Auxiliary Bishop Timothy J. Harrington, who later became head
bishop and recently died, wrote a few months earlier in 1970: "Bishop
Flanagan and I have had such serious doubts about Father continuing in the
priesthood that, at one time, it was suggested that he seek a dispensation
and return to the lay state. . . .

"People have been so greatly disturbed by his behavior that we would wonder
whether he can avoid his reputation going before him in any area of this
compact diocese. We also question whether we can chance the possibility of
his having another relapse."

* Wilmington, Del., Bishop Thomas J. Mardaga refused to take on Father
Holley but expressed openness to other priests "who have experienced
difficulties in their own communities. This has been our policy . . ."
Bishop Mardaga died more than a decade ago.

* Father Holley ended up at an Albuquerque retreat house run by the
Servants of the Paraclete, a Catholic order that aids priests plagued by
everything from sexual misconduct to addictions. All those under Paraclete
care "go out to neighboring parishes on weekends," Father Holley wrote to
superiors in Worcester in 1971.

In recent years, the Paracletes and higher church officials have settled
several dozen lawsuits over abuse committed by these priests. The policy
allowing sex offenders to minister in parishes was changed.

* While under Paraclete care, Father Holley served as an assistant pastor
at an Alamogordo church until the mid-1970s. His personnel file contains no
record of allegations being made against him then, but his immediate
supervisor, the Rev. Wilfrid Diamond, later testified that several victims'
families told him of abuse at the time. Father Diamond - who said he
himself was once put under Paraclete care for having sex with a woman - is
now dead.

* In El Paso, where Father Holley went next, Bishop Sidney M. Metzger
removed him from his first parish job because of more molestation
allegations. He put him at another church in the city that was described by
the first pastor, the Rev. A. Dixon Hartford, as needing help. "Bishop, I
know what I'm proposing is very risky . . .," wrote Monsignor Hartford, now
pastor at another church. He could not be reached for comment Friday;
Bishop Metzger has since died.

* After being forced out of El Paso, Father Holley went to the Diocese of
San Angelo in 1977. Court records say he worked at churches in McCamey and
Garden City. Repeated recurrences of "his past problems" led to Father
Holley's expulsion by Bishop Fiorenza in 1984, church correspondence shows.

* Father Holley ended up working later in the 1980s for short periods at an
Amarillo church and as a chaplain at hospitals in Albuquerque and Denver,
where church records indicate he last worked in 1988.

The records do not specify why Father Holley left those posts, although
Amarillo Bishop Leroy T. Matthiesen once told The Boston Globe that Father
Holley had been accused of making sexual advances toward another priest's
nephew in 1985. The bishop said he ordered Father Holley into counseling.

Bishop Matthiesen could not be reached for comment Friday. An Amarillo
diocese spokesman said he could find no record that Father Holley had
worked there.

The Archdiocese of Santa Fe, of which Albuquerque is a part, likewise said
it could find no records on Father Holley and wouldn't comment.

Denver archdiocesan officials said they granted Father Holley the right to
work at a Catholic hospital after the Worcester diocese assured them that
he was a priest in good standing. Mr. Delisle, the Worcester spokesman,
said he didn't have access to the priest's personnel file and couldn't
comment.

In the early 1990s, Father Holley and some who supervised him were sued in
New Mexico and Massachusetts. More than a dozen Alamogordo victims later
received undisclosed amounts from the Diocese of Worcester, as well as the
Diocese of El Paso, of which Alamogordo once was a part; the Servants of
the Paraclete; and a clinic to which the order sent Father Holley.

Separately, four Massachusetts men received settlements from the Diocese of
Worcester, according to published accounts. One man has said he got
$12,500; the other amounts weren't disclosed.

The Alamogordo suit led to criminal charges of sexual assault and sodomy,
to which Father Holley pleaded guilty. Before being sentenced, he told the
judge that he empathized with the young men who had testified against him.

"When they shared their pain, their embarrassment, their anguish, their
suffering, I was able to identify with them," The Associated Press quoted
the priest as saying.

One of the victims, Robert Curtis, said Thursday he never felt that Father
Holley had taken responsibility for his actions. But the greater crime, he
said, was committed by the bishops who "shuffled him around to unsuspecting
little towns."

"Those people deserve to be in jail, too, as far as I'm concerned, " said
Mr. Curtis, who was an 11-year-old paperboy when Father Holley first
approached him in the early 1970s. "They were consenting to what he did.
They put every one of those kids in harm's way, including me."

To this day, he said, none of those clergymen has apologized personally to
him.

The Rev. Thomas Doyle, a church-law expert who formerly worked in the
Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C., said Father Holley worked in an
unusually large number of dioceses. But the broad outlines of his story,
Father Doyle said, are not unusual.

"In numerous dioceses in this country, priests reported for sexual
misconduct with children were transferred not only once but often several
times," he wrote in a 1996 report for lawyer Sylvia Demarest. She is one of
the plaintiffs' attorneys who recently won a $119.6 million judgment
against the Diocese of Dallas and suspended priest Rudolph "Rudy" Kos.

In a confidential 1985 report to all U.S. bishops, Father Doyle warned of
the emerging pedophilia scandal and offered advice on combating it. After
the document's key recommendations went ignored, he began working as an
expert witness for victims suing the church - a role he played in the
Dallas trial.

In a recent interview, Father Doyle said he did not believe bishops
transferred molester priests out of ignorance of pedophilia's seriousness.

Such an argument "is absolute lunacy," said Father Doyle, now a chaplain at
Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. "Everyone knows it's a felony" to
sexually abuse a child. Yet, church officials, he said, long failed to
report cases to police.

No record could be found that Father Holley's supervisors ever reported him
to secular authorities. Texas and New Mexico required such notification.

In 1992, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops first spoke with one
voice about abusive priests; some bishops also met with a group of victims.
That same year, Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk, then president
of the bishops group, issued this statement:

"In the matter of priests and sexual abuse, undoubtedly mistakes have been
made in the past. Until recently, few in society and the church understood
the problem well. People tended to treat sexual abuse as they did
alcoholism - as a moral fault for which repentance and a change of scene
would result in a change of behavior. . . .

"Where lack of understanding and mistakes have added to the pain and hurt
of victims and their families, they deserve an apology and we do
apologize."

Archbishop Pilarczyk called for "far more aggressive steps . . . to protect
the innocent, treat the perpetrator and safeguard our children."

He said new policies were already in place, "notwithstanding the fact that
such sexual misconduct has involved relatively few priests measured against
53,000 priests in our country."

Father Doyle said nearly 1,000 pedophile priests have been identified over
the last 15 years, most through criminal or civil charges. Knowledge of the
problem was already widespread when he worked in the embassy a decade ago
and sent the Vatican information about cases as they came to light, he
said.

"In numerous dioceses across the United States from the 1970s through the
early '90s," his report to Ms. Demarest states, "complaints of child abuse
were handled in such a unified fashion as to indicate a meeting of the
minds as to how best to prevent public knowledge of the abuse, avoid
criminal prosecution and suppress potential claims. . . .

"How was such a commonly practiced plan of action arrived at? The bishops'
activities in and through the National Conference of Catholic
Bishops/United States Catholic Conference would provide an informal forum."

That line of thinking initially led Ms. Demarest to name the bishops group
as a defendant in the Kos case. The group resisted in pretrial motions, and
she backed off - fearing, she said, that she couldn't prove it had a duty
to her clients, at least as that term has been interpreted by the Texas
Supreme Court.

Still, she noted Friday, "the Dallas jury found that there was a
conspiracy" to cover up abuse by Mr. Kos. "The question arises: Is the
conspiracy limited to the Dallas diocese and the parties from outside the
diocese who cooperated with them?"

Ms. Demarest said she still struggles to fathom why the church she was
raised in has harbored child molesters.

"They needed the bodies" because of the priest shortage, she said. "They
were very confident they would be able to prevent the public from finding
out."

Former priest A.W. Richard Sipe, who worked at one of the hospitals where
Father Holley was institutionalized and has counseled hundreds of pedophile
priests, advanced another explanation in a report for Ms. Demarest: that
bishops simply didn't consider molestation a major sin, even though they
felt it needed to be concealed "to protect the reputation and finances of
the Catholic Church."

"After I was ordained in 1959, I learned that some priests had sex with
adults and even minors, and to some degree this was taken for granted by
church authorities," he wrote.

"The secret world of sexual activity, including sexual activity with
minors, was known by the Catholic hierarchy, and though considered
unfortunate and morally wrong, was accepted as an inevitable and easily
forgivable failure of some priests."

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the bishops' conference, rejected
that assessment, although stressing that she didn't know enough about the
Holley case to address its specifics.

"This criminal activity is absolutely appalling and always has been," she
said. Asked why clerics long failed to report the crimes, she suggested
that both they and the priests' victims didn't want to call public
attention to "something that was rightly considered sordid."

The bishops' conference now calls for all dioceses to comply with reporting
laws and develop abuse-prevention strategies. Since 1992, it has also
continued to elaborate on guidelines for dealing with victims, the accused
and the community.

Both of the molestation cases that Bishop Fiorenza is known to have dealt
with in Houston surfaced in 1986. And both involved priests caught in the
act of molesting children, the Houston Chronicle reported in 1992.

The bishop wouldn't talk to the Houston newspaper, which said its calls to
him were returned by Monsignor Daniel Scheel, then the diocese' s
chancellor.

The monsignor wouldn't discuss details of the cases then and maintained
that "things were a lot different" when the crimes occurred. "We didn' t
know about the tendency of these people to repeat their acts."

One case occurred in Navasota, where social worker Ramona Ybarra reported
finding the Rev. Fernando Noe Guzman on the floor, pants down, with a
13-year-old girl. Ms. Ybarra told the Chronicle that she later met with
Monsignor Scheel, who urged her not to cooperate with police and who
transferred Father Guzman to a Galena Park parish.

In a deposition, Monsignor Scheel said he accepted Father Guzman' s
characterization of the girl as a "precocious child who came on to him." He
said he didn't ask her name or age, so the diocese didn' t contact her to
offer counseling.

Bishop Fiorenza, in his deposition, said he had left the matter in
Monsignor Scheel's hands.

The story was unpublicized for a few years, until Father Guzman impregnated
a Galena Park church secretary. After she sued, the priest acknowledged the
1986 abuse and was criminally prosecuted. He served 90 days in jail but was
not defrocked, the Chronicle reported.

In the other case, a Houston police officer discovered his own priest
performing a sex act on an 11-year-old boy in a van. The Chronicle quoted
another officer as saying that the Rev. Donald L. Stavinoha laughed about
his arrest and predicted that nothing would happen to him because "I'm a
priest."

The boy's family sued the diocese and won payments for counseling. Father
Stavinoha, stripped of most priestly powers, later pleaded guilty to sexual
assault and was imprisoned for a little more than a year.

The two priests' whereabouts are unknown, said Mr. Regan, the diocese
spokesman.

His diocese's chancellor, the Rev. Frank Rossi, issued a statement late
Friday saying that "bishops do well to directly remind their priests of the
responsibility they have to conduct their lives with the greatest of human
dignity and virtue. . . . "

"When acts of sexual misconduct do occur, the diocese strives to respond
with compassion and healing love."

Bishop Fiorenza - the first from a Southern diocese elected to a top post
in the bishops conference - is a native Texan who has stressed social
justice issues.

He headed the church's national anti-poverty program, the Campaign for
Human Development, in the early 1990s. He has called for breaking the cycle
of poverty and helping the poor build "a better life for themselves and
their children."

In an interview with The Morning News last year, Bishop Fiorenza talked
about the rapid growth in many of his parishes and the corresponding
shortage of pastors. He said he hoped that his flock would be inspired to
bring forth new priests.

"We would like to emphasize strengthening family life, bringing moral
teachings into the public arena . . . ," the bishop said. "We believe it's
a biblical value to welcome the stranger and care for the poor. And of
course a high priority is the reverence for life, particularly the unborn
child."

In a 1993 affidavit in the New Mexico lawsuit, Father Holley testified that
"my psychosexual disorder first began to manifest itself in approximately
1962." That was the year Bishop Flanagan accepted him in the Diocese of
Worcester on a trial basis from the Benedictine order, in which he'd gotten
his start as a priest in 1958.

Well before he was officially made a diocesan priest in 1967, he testified,
"Bishop Flanagan had received reports that I had sexually molested boys" in
three parishes. "On at least two occasions Bishop Flanagan called me in to
discuss the allegations, cautioned me against causing a scandal in the
church, but he expressed no comments about my victims."

Almost 30 years later, four middle-aged men came forward, trying to get the
Worcester Diocese to acknowledge the abuse they suffered as boys. They said
the church told them in 1993 to sue if they wanted compensation for
therapy, according to The Globe; diocese officials declined to comment on
that allegation.

Months earlier, at their general assembly, the nation's bishops had passed
a resolution saying that they'd "reflected - once again and more deeply -
upon the pain, anguish and sense of alienation felt by victims. . . . "

"We pledge ourselves to one another to return to our dioceses and there to
examine carefully and prayerfully our response to sexual abuse; to assure
ourselves that our response is appropriate and effective; and to be certain
that our people are aware of and confident in that response."

Staff writer Michael D. Goldhaber contributed to this report.
PHOTO(S): 1. The Rev. David Holley . . . the priest received 275
years in prison for molesting boys in New Mexico. 2. The Rev. David

Holley. 3. Worcester Bishop Bernard Flanagan, now deceased. 4. The Rev.

Dixon Hartford, El Paso. 5. El Paso Bishop Sidney Metzger, now deceased.

6. Galveston-Houston Bishop Joseph Florenza, formerly San Angelo

bishop. 7. Amarillo Bishop Leroy Matthiesen. CHART(S): (DMN) Path of A

Pedophile Priest. ; PHOTO LOCATION NOTE: Photos #1 and #4 were not sent

to the library for archiving.

© 1997 The Dallas Morning News All Rights Reserved

Brooks Egerton / Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News; Copyright 1997,
The, Documents show bishops transferred known abuser: Church officialssay
policies have since changed. , The Dallas Morning News, 08-31-1997, pp 1A.
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Copyright © 1999 Infonautics Corporation