Weapons of Mass Destruction

At the behest of paid, unnamed ‘trauma-informed consultants,’ my diocese provided a six-figure settlement for a claim far too old to be filed in any court of law.

May 22, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

And they keep on coming. A year before the 2002 wave of clergy sex abuse claims rippled out of Boston across the country, Sean Murphy, age 37, and his mother, Sylvia, demanded $850,000 from the Archdiocese of Boston. Sean claimed that three decades earlier, he and his brother were repeatedly molested by their parish priest. In support of the claim, Mrs. Murphy produced old school records placing her sons in a community where the priest was once assigned. No other corroboration was needed. Shortly thereafter, Byron Worth, age 41, recounted molestation by the same priest and demanded his own six-figure settlement. The men were following an established practice of “mediated settlements,” a precedent set in the early 1990s when a multitude of molestation claims from the 1960s and 1970s emerged against Father James Porter and a few other priests. In 1993, the Diocese of Fall River settled some 80 such claims in a single negotiated deal. Other Church institutions followed that lead on the advice of insurers and attorneys.

Before the Murphys’ $850,000 demand was paid, however, Sean, his mother, and Byron Worth were indicted by a Massachusetts grand jury for conspiracy, attempted larceny, and soliciting others to commit larceny. It turned out that Sean and Byron were once inmates together at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Shirley where they concocted their fraudulent plan to score a windfall from their beleaguered Church.

On November 16, 2001, Sean Murphy and Byron Worth pleaded guilty to fraud charges and were sentenced to less than two years in prison for the scam. The younger Murphy brother was never charged, and Mrs. Murphy died before facing court proceedings. Local newspapers relegated the Murphy scam to the far back pages while headlines screamed about the emerging multitude of decades-old claims of abuse by priests. When two other inmates at MCI-Shirley accused another priest in 2001, a Boston lawyer wrote that it is no coincidence these men shared the same prison. “They also shared the same contingency lawyer,” he wrote. “I have some contacts in the prison system, having been an attorney for some time, and it has been made known to me that this is a current and popular scam.”

It is not difficult to understand the roots of such fraud. Prison inmates, like others, read newspapers. Just months before the onslaught of claims against priests, the Archdiocese of Boston landed on the litigation radar screen with the notorious arrest of Mr. Christopher Reardon, a young, married, Catholic layman, model citizen, and youth counselor at a local YMCA who was also employed part-time at a small, remote parish outpost north of Boston. As Mr. Reardon’s extensive serial child molestation case came to light—with substantial and graphic DNA, videotape, and photographic evidence of assaults that occurred over previous months—the YMCA quickly entered into settlements consistent with the State’s charitable immunity laws.

In a search for deeper pockets, however, a local contingency lawyer pondered for the news media about whether the rural part-time parish worker’s activities were personally known—and covered up—by the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. It was a ludicrous suggestion, but it was a springboard to announce in the Boston Globe (July 14, 2001) that “the hearsay and speculation” among lawyers and clients, is that “the Catholic Church settled their cases [of suspected abuse by priests] for an average of $500,000 each since the 1990s.”

It was a dangled lure that would soon have many takers, some of whom have been to the Church’s ATM more than once. In January of 2003, at the height of the clergy scandal, a 68-year-old Massachusetts priest had the poor judgment to be drawn into a series of suggestive Internet exchanges with a total stranger, a 32-year-old man named Dominic Martin. Using a threat of media exposure of the printed exchanges, Mr. Martin demanded that the priest leave an envelope containing $3,000 in a local restaurant lobby.

The frightened priest, who never had a prior accusation, compounded his poor judgment by paying the demand. Soon after, another cash demand was made, but the priest finally called the police who set up a sting of their own. On January 24, 2003, Dominic Martin and his wife, Brianna, were arrested at the drop point, and charged with extortion.

The police report revealed that Mr. Martin had changed his name. His birth name was identified as Tod Biltcliffe, a man who, a decade earlier, obtained a settlement when he accused a New Hampshire priest of molesting him in the 1980s. At the time the priest protested that Mr. Biltcliffe was committing fraud and larceny. The Church settled anyway. Biltcliffe’s claim was that when he was 15 years old, the priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA. Curiously, the investigation file contained a transcript of a 1988 “Geraldo Rivera” show entitled “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” One of the cases profiled was that of a young man who claimed that a priest fondled his genitals while the two were in a hot tub at a local YMCA.

The 1988 “Geraldo” transcript was a sensationalized account of clergy sex abuse cases from the 1970s and 1980s. The transcript is notable because it contains many of the same claims of exposing secret Church documents, archives, and episcopal cover-ups in 1988 that lawyers and reporters claim to have exposed for the first time in 2003.

Writer Jason Berry, and contingency lawyers Jeffrey Anderson and Roland Lewis all appeared live on “Geraldo” on November 14, 1988 to announce the existence of secret Church archives, cover-ups by bishops, and out-of-court settlements of Catholic clergy sex abuse claims across the country. Jason Berry, who excoriates the Church and priesthood at every turn, actually defended, in 1988, the existence of so-called “secret” Church archives: “Canon law says that you have to have a secret archive in every diocese…. That’s funny because I’ve been attacking the Church for three years on this… I want to express my own irony of [now] being in a position of defending the Church.”

Enter Shamont Lyle Sapp

When Shamont Lyle Sapp first detected the smell of money, he found it too enticing to pass up. Convicted for a series of bank robberies, Mr. Sapp, then age 51, was serving a lengthy sentence in the dark peripheries of the U.S. Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania when the scent first drifted by his cell in 2008. That was when Sapp filed a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon. Detailing his tragic past, Sapp’s lawsuit claimed that he was a stranded teenage runaway from his Pennsylvania home en route to stay with relatives in Oregon. Then Archdiocese of Portland priest, Father Thomas Laughlin took advantage of his plight to repeatedly sexually abuse him.

Sapp claimed in his highly detailed lawsuit that the priest offered the young runaway a job cutting grass, then sexually abused him at a Portland Catholic church. Then Father Laughlin sodomized him during a five-day motel stay paid for by the priest who then funded the youth’s return trip to Pennsylvania. It was the latest horror story in the Catholic abuse narrative, and one that dismayed Catholics coast to coast.

Mr. Sapp’s story rang true, so it flew. Further inquiry was deemed unnecessary. The detailed claims were reported to civil legal authorities for whom the story also rang true, but Father Tom Laughlin had already been accused and convicted by others with similar tales. Mr. Sapp’s disturbing story added to the weight of a growing millstone around the priest’s neck.

In all public documents in the case, Mr. Sapp found refuge among an ever-expanding list of “John Does” accusing priests from the Archdiocese of Portland to cash in on its bankruptcy proceedings. Sapp’s story was accepted at face value resulting in a cash settlement of $70,000. Inmate Sapp accepted the offer while lawyers, the Archdiocese, and victim advocates all pontificated about how no amount of money could compensate him for the trauma he endured. As for Father Laughlin, the “credible” (aka “settled”) accusations drove another nail into the coffin containing the remains of his priesthood as the Archdiocese sought his dismissal.

There was only one problem with Shamont Lyle Sapp’s story: “It was entirely fabricated,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Peifer who in 2014 prosecuted Sapp for mail fraud and other federal charges for this and three similar frauds carried out against Catholic priests and dioceses in four jurisdictions. While serving another sentence in a medium security state prison in Minersville, PA, Mr. Sapp filed a second lawsuit claiming that a priest of the Diocese of Tucson, Arizona sexually abused him.

Later still, Sapp was serving a sentence in a South Carolina prison from where he sought compensation for claimed sexual abuse by another priest. And before all the above, Sapp filed a 2006 lawsuit claiming that a Spokane, Washington priest had sexually abused him in a similar account.

In all these other claims, Sapp picked from diocesan records the names of senior priests who had never before been accused, destroying not only their good names, but their vocations. Each was removed from ministry under the terms of the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter. They became “Priests in Limbo,” as the National Catholic Register’s Joan Frawley Desmond described priests living, sometimes for years, under a cloud of shame and suspicion for events that could not be disproven after the passage of time. In each of his claims, Shamont Lyle Sapp simply did a little research on publicly available bankruptcy proceedings entered into by each of the four beleaguered dioceses he sued. He then attached his name and claims to each case — one by one over several years — aided and abetted by an assurance of anonymity as “John Doe” at every level in the settlement process.

He was also “John Doe” in the news media, and in the fired-up rhetoric of the activists of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests who are ready to dismiss any hard questions as “revictimizing the victims.” It was ultimately his own greed that unfolded Mr. Sapp’s hand. In 2011, Sapp gained some notoriety when he filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages against comedians Jamie Fox and Tyler Perry, falsely claiming that they stole from him an idea for a film project called “Skank Robbers.” Finally, someone took a hard look at Shamont Lyle Sapp, and it was his undoing.

“Like the Anti-Communist Witch Hunt of the 1950s”

In a 2004 article in the Boston Phoenix, “Fleecing the Shepherds,” legal expert and author Harvey Silverglate cautioned against capitulating to significant numbers of questionable claims brought after the Church entered into huge blanket settlements. In some cases, such claims were deemed “credible” — the standard established for permanent removal of accused priests — with no other basis than their having been settled.

As accusations swept over the U.S. Church, few in the media dared write anything contrary to the tidal wave gaining indiscriminate momentum against the Church. A notable exception was the left-leaning Catholic magazine Commonweal, which editorialized: “Admittedly, perspective is hard to come by in the midst of a media barrage that is reminiscent of the day care sex abuse stories, now largely disproved, of the early nineties… All analogies limp, but it is hard not to be reminded of the din of accusation and conspiracy-mongering that characterized the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s.”

With media coverage of the unprecedented $4 billion invested in mediated settlements, the trolling for claims and litigation continues unabated. In 2007, a Boston area high school history teacher and coach of twenty years, a husband and father with no prior record or accusation, was caught up in an Internet sting by New Hampshire Detective James F. McLaughlin posing on-line as a teenage boy cruising Internet chat rooms for sexual encounters. The practice has netted the detective some 600 arrests, including — by his own estimation — one Catholic priest, six police officers, and 18 public school teachers.

The Keene, New Hampshire police detective was also known to have fielded cases for local contingency lawyers. The ex-teacher, now prison inmate, related that as the handcuffs were set upon him, before he was even led out of the YMCA to which he had been lured and arrested, Detective James F. McLaughlin reportedly asked some enticing questions: “Are you a Catholic?” “Yes,” said the suspect. “Were you ever an altar boy?” Another “Yes.” “Were you ever molested by a priest?”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: The mainstream media, and sometimes even the Catholic media as well, too often shrinks from reporting on the story of fraudulent claims of victimhood. So please share this post on social media and elsewhere. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report

Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia

The trial of Cardinal George Pell for “historic” sexual abuse claims is underway in Australia, but the state of Australian justice also has the world’s attention.

“Why have a trial at all? Just take the man into the Outback and shoot him.”

“Trial by Media.” The ominous term has already been a part of the public record in regard to Australia’s Cardinal George Pell. I used the term myself in a post two years ago entitled, “Peter Saunders and Cardinal Pell: A Trial by Media.”

The concern for the poisoning of justice through leaks to a toxic and predatory news media is nothing new, but “Trial by Media” hangs like the burial shroud of justice itself over the trial of Cardinal Pell on 40-year-old claims of sexual abuse.

Lest anyone doubt the power of the media to both generate such claims and shape justice and due process in a case like this, consider a recent issue of The Week, a popular weekly news magazine.  The Week  presents itself as “The Best of the U.S. and International Media.” It selects excerpts from online media and newspapers throughout the world and presents them as the best written accounts of the week’s top stories.

In its July 21, 2017 issue, The Week chose as the best of the media from Australia a column by Barney Zwartz in The Age entitled, “The Nation’s Top Catholic in the Dock.” It should raise the alarm for anyone concerned for the media’s role in all this, and the slant it presents. Here is an excerpt:

“After decades of rumors, Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, is finally facing trial for child sexual abuse. At this point, Australians are numb to the horror, having endured years of parliamentary reports that produced damning evidence against so many priests…”

We can only hope that Australians are not so “numb” that they don’t see through this language. It is an open invitation to a lynch mob. The phrase, “after decades of rumors” should alarm everyone from the start. For any objective observer of this story, the only “damning evidence” is the accusations themselves and the fact that there has been a sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Australia.

This is the state of the evidence thus far presented against Cardinal Pell as this “Trial by Media” gets underway. To incite a community to forego due process in favor of emotion is the very foundation of all witch hunts. An “availability bias” has been built that places Catholic priests in a suspect class. I described its momentum in “How SNAP Brought McCarthyism to American Catholics.”

Conditioned by a predatory media, Australians are now invited to ignore the abyss that is empty of evidence, and weigh the claims against Cardinal Pell with nothing of substance except “decades of rumors” that left Australians “numb to the horror.” The same media-fueled moral panic swept America and spread like a virus.

Now some of those who used it for profit are themselves before the bar of justice — (See “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme”). But Mr. Zwartz and The Week  present other “evidence” as well, and it is a central but unspoken feature in the indictment of Cardinal Pell:

“A combative participant in Australia’s culture wars,” the ultraconservative Pell had long been a divisive figure in Australia because of his `relentless, overbearing’ style. He was ruthless in punishing priests who deviated from doctrine by advocating changes to Mass or supporting ordination of women.”

Actual evidence of any offense from forty years ago does not exist in the Pell case, but for too many about the business of news and fake news, it need not exist. His Eminence is guilty of “other things”: fidelity to Catholic teaching, a conservative mindset, and an insistence that priests support orthodoxy. This is enough for the Trial by Media to rush to judgment.

Whether it is enough for the people of Australia remains to be seen. I think not. Even after my own experience of justice, I remain open to the hope that the better nature of thoughtful people will prevail. I know many Australians, and they are neither unjust nor “numb” as some in the news media suggest.

Where Are Your Accusers? (John 8:10)

Who are the current accusers in the trial of Cardinal Pell? It strikes me as bizarre that so many in the news media have focused this story only on the wider scandal and Cardinal Pell’s conservative mindset without much inquiry into the rest of the equation. Most in the media have said nothing about Pell’s accusers except to freely identify them as “victims,” and to insinuate that unnamed others contemplate coming forward.

There’s just enough smoke to create the impression of a raging fire Down Under. On June 30, The Media Report, an ever vigilant source of the rest of the sobering story, posted “Now This: The Media’s Cardinal Pell Disinformation Campaign.”

David F. Pierre, Jr. at The Media Report  focused on a sobering fact that most other reports have omitted or downplayed. These accusations are from forty years ago. Much of the news media will not identify the accusers because of politically correct policies to withhold the identities of sexual abuse victims, but these accusers are not children; they are men in their fifties.

They have criminal records of their own. Although that in itself does not discredit their claims, it should be sufficient enough for a closer look.  The Media Report  pointed out (with supportive links) that one of the accusers, Lyndon Monument, is an “admitted drug addict” who served a term in prison for criminal assault stemming from a drug debt. He also previously accused a childhood teacher of sexual abuse.

The other accuser, Damian Dignan, “has a criminal history for assault and drunk driving.” He has a history of alcohol abuse, and also previously accused a childhood teacher of assault. Both men are raising their claims against Cardinal Pell for the first time, forty years later, and only when the climate would lend itself to less scrutiny over financial settlements.

Experience tells me that both the justice system and the news media should be especially cautious in forming judgments in such a case. In 2005, during the height of the priesthood scandal in America, I wrote an article for Catalyst entitled “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud.”

The article details multiple cases of men with criminal records who concocted schemes to obtain financial settlements through fraudulent claims about Catholic priests. They took advantage of the very climate now smoldering behind the Pell case.

Then there was the story of Shamont Lyle Sapp that I exposed in “Catholic Priests and the Perversions of Predators.” Before he was investigated and exposed by a vigilant U.S. Attorney, Mr. Sapp, from his prison cell, accused several priests in multiple states using details and “evidence” gathered from Internet accounts of other accusations against priests. It was only a fluke that Sapp was investigated and caught in the scam.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

The Media Report  also reminded us that back in 2002, Cardinal Pell was previously accused by a “career criminal” who had been convicted of tax evasion, narcotics charges, illegal gambling operations, and organized crime with “an impressive 39 court convictions under his belt.” He accused Cardinal Pell of abusing him in 1962, but Pell was exonerated and cleared of the charge.

“Cardinal George Pell and Other Martyrs for a Nefarious Cause” raised the specter that claims like these 40-year-old charges are used by some as “weapons of mass destruction” in order to bolster other agendas. At the popular site, Whispers in the Loggia (“For the Cardinal Prefect, ‘My Day in Court’” June 29), Rocco Palmo raised the same “historical” abuse case from the 1960s in which Pell had been cleared, but he attributed its momentum, and its treatment in Rome, to other agendas:

“Two decades of revelations of abuse and cover-up have been treated as a political football among the Church’s ideological camps.”

There is no evidence or reason for treating the current forty-year-old “historical abuse” case as any different. The mere fact that charges were brought in such a case could have a lot more to do with Pell being a target for political factions that are happy to see him in the dock of justice knowing that, regardless of the outcome, Pell is permanently maligned and out of the way.

But among all the toxic press, there are many sounding the alarm that “Trial by Media” in Australia is itself facing trial. In National Review  (“The Persecution of Cardinal George Pell,” June 29, 2017) author George Weigel described the campaign against Pell in Australia as…

“…a thoroughly poisonous public climate exacerbated by poorly sourced but widely disseminated allegations, no respect for elementary fairness, and a curious relationship between elements of the Australian media and the Victoria police…”

George Weigel cited comments from several Australians who have refused to become caught up in the climate of moral panic and nefarious agendas. These voices are worth hearing out. Attorney Robin Speed, President of the Australian Rule of Law Institute warned against prosecutors acting against Pell “in response to the baying of a section of the mob.”

Angela Shanahan in The Australian  summarized the trajectory of the case:

“Conspiracy and rumor reign, logic and fact have gone out the window in the case of Cardinal Pell…. In all this sound and fury, the Cardinal has acted impeccably. He has said nothing except to state his innocence.”

Columnist Peter Craven, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (June 9) concluded,

“One can only hope to God that in the present climate people will be capable of realizing this is a case being mounted for a witch trial”

Voices of dissent against the blind orthodoxy of victimhood are a minority in Australia just as they are a minority in America. Some of these voices have been courageous in their defense, not only of Cardinal Pell, but of justice as an ideal that is now itself under indictment. Australian political commentator Amanda Vanstone, a former Ambassador to Italy and “no fan of organized religion,” wrote,

“George Pell’s trial by media has to stop. What we are seeing is no better than a lynch mob from the dark ages… The public arena is being used to trash a reputation and probably prevent a fair trial.”

Andrew Halphen, co-chairman of criminal law at the Law Institute of Victoria addressed the leaks to the media about Pell as a startling affront to the legal system. He expressed grave concern over whether Pell could now have a fair trial. He added that he could not think of any other case in which a charge against a public figure “finds its way to the front page of a major news publication before a person is actually charged.”

After I posted “Cardinal George Pell and Other Martyrs for a Nefarious Cause,” a first-time reader in Ballarat, Australia sent a comment that I want to post here because it speaks volumes about the climate in which Cardinal Pell faces trial. It begins with a quote from the above post:

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“‘This nonsense continues because of the clamor of a few and the silence of many.’ Ahh, the irony of your comment. I am a Ballarat resident. My childhood bore witness to the culture of pedophilia that thrived here. And as an adult, the impact of the sexual abuse that happened to so many in my community continues.

“I am appalled by your lack of compassion for victims. Your want to dismiss the validity of these crimes because of the delay in victims coming forward and/or charges laid, and your implied belief that our Australian justice system is flawed.

“Our community knows its truths. The Catholic Church cannot conceal this truth as it once did. Your comments are just “clamor.” Hurtful clamor. Pell and the rest of “your fellow sufferers” [quoted from Cardinal Avery Dulles on TSW’s “About” page] cannot demand the silence of so many impacted because it doesn’t fit your narrative.”

— a resident of Ballarat, Australia

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The defense rests its case. My heart goes out to Australians who have suffered the unspeakable, but the above comment makes the case for me. If what other priests did to other victims is now sufficient “evidence” to indict and convict Cardinal Pell then why have a trial at all? If it is too late to salvage justice from vengeance, then just take the man into the Outback and shoot him.