With the Vatican City court due to deliver its verdict in the landmark financial crimes trial in just three weeks, defendant Cardinal Angleo Becciu has once again insisted on his innocence and said he “has faith” he will be acquitted of all charges.
Over the past week, the cardinal and his legal team mounted a full court press in Italian media, with Becciu giving a rare TV interview and his lawyers seeding friendly coverage in local and national newspapers.
Becciu stands accused of embezzlement and abuse of office, conspiracy, as well as perverting the course of justice. But while the cardinal and his team are predicting total exoneration, how confident should they really be about his chances?
“I continue to proclaim my innocence and I can say that I have never stolen,” Becciu said, suggesting that his personal financial circumstances were themselves a kind of proof of his honesty in office at the Secretariat of State, where he oversaw departmental finances until June of 2018.
“I have never improved my economic position. I don’t have villas, I don’t have houses, I don’t have apartments and my accounts are very, very modest.”
But Becciu’s claim to “modest” financial circumstances will likely strike many trial watchers, perhaps including the Vatican City judges, as curious, given some of the evidence they have heard over the last two-and-a-half years.
Among the charges he faces, the cardinal is accused of diverting Church funds to employ Cecilia Margona, a self-styled private intelligence agent, who has claimed to have been paid by Becciu to engage in clandestine work for the Vatican, as well as to spy for the cardinal on other curial officials.
According to evidence presented during the trial, Becciu instructed his deputy at the secretariat to pay Marogna via her Solvenian holding company without explaining where the money was going or why — and later upbraided him for not deleting departmental records of the transactions.
Financial records also show that the money sent to Marogna by Becciu was spent on designer label goods, luxury travel, and five-star resorts.
Becciu is also on trial for his role in a range of complicated investments, on which the Holy See lost hundreds of millions of euros — including the deal which involved the purchase of a London building.
“My intent was only to create advantages for the Holy See, to do only the good of the Holy See,” the cardinal told Rai, echoing his previous statements in court that he had been presented with “a proposal that was totally advantageous for the Holy See” but that he found recalling the details of the deal “difficult” for him and laid responsibility for the structuring of departmental investments on his staff.
But Vatican judges will have to weigh Becciu’s claims to have only ever acted for the good of the Holy See against testimony that he was actually the architect of a plan to funnel hundreds of millions of euros to a friend of his in the African nation of Angola.
Becciu’s alleged largesse with Church funds also supposedly extended to his own family, for whom he is accused of misappropriating hundreds of thousands of euros in Church funds.
A key transaction is 250,000 euros sent by Becciu to bank accounts controlled by his brother, Antonio Becciu, who runs the Spes Cooperative, a Catholic charity in Sardinia.
Both Cardinal Becciu’s brother Antonio and the local director of Caritas, Fr. Mario Curzu, are under investigation by Italian authorities in Sardinia as part of their enquiry into the matter. Both have refused to appear during the Vatican trial, despite repeated summons.
Sources close to the prosecution have previously told The Pillar that the priest and Becciu’s brother refused to appear in court because they were concerned they would face the choice either to implicate themselves in criminal activity or make false statements, which could have been used against them by Italian prosecutors.
The pope’s good servant?
Throughout his investigation and trial, Cardinal Becciu has repeatedly said that any suspect activity he may have engaged in was done with explicit papal approval.
Ever since his dismissal from curial service in 2020, Becciu has made a point of asserting his deep, personal loyalty to Pope Francis. But those assertions have also come under close scrutiny during the trial.
The cardinal has since insisted the matter is overblown — despite his recording of the pope appearing to constitute a separate criminal act all its own. In his TV interview last week, he sought to brush the incident aside saying that it was a non-incident until prosecutors got ahold of the tape.
“That phone call was already dead, no one knew about it,” Becciu told Rai. “I’ve never used it, but someone else wanted to publish it.”
Whether the pope and the judges feel the same way will become clearer in the coming weeks. But Becciu went further in his interview, trying to paint himself as a champion of reform and — though it may strike many court watchers as incredible — a victim for his efforts to bring financial transparency to the Vatican.
Asked if he agreed with “the effort the Pope is making to bring more cleanliness and transparency to the use of money in the Vatican,” Becciu responded “I can say that I am proud to have helped the Pope initiate these reforms.”
Speaking to Rai, Becciu went further, claiming that, as part of his reforming record, he “also took the liberty of pointing out to the Pope that certain people did not deserve to be in the Vatican.”
That boast would appear to be a bold reference to the case of the Vatican’s former auditor general, Libero Milone, whom Becciu had detailed by Vatican police and forced to resign from office under threat of criminal prosecution in 2017.
Becciu said at the time Milone had been “spying” on the private financial affairs of senior Church officials, including Becciu, and that the cardinal had convinced the pope to order his ouster.
He told Rai last week that he was “certainly” a victim of people opposed to financial reforms, and that “they almost accused themselves by making accusations against me.”
The logic and wisdom of those statements is likely to come under very close scrutiny by Vatican judges like Giuseppe Pignatone who, in addition to being the chief judge in Becciu’s criminal trial, is separately hearing a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal brought against Becciu’s former department by Milone.
Lawyers close to the Milone lawsuit have told The Pillar that all sides of the case increasingly see Becciu’s criminal conviction for abuse of office as presenting a “gentlemanly way of resolving” of the suit for all sides.
‘I have faith’
In that event that Becciu is convicted, the cardinal would face a potential prison sentence of up to seven years — something he told Rai he refuses to consider as a possible outcome.
Asked if he would appeal to the pope for clemency in the event he faced a lengthy jail term, he told Italian TV that “I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about the possibility of conviction.”
“I have faith,” Becciu said. “The same Holy Father, who meets the all same various people I have, has always told me to have faith, to have faith.”
While the cardinal will have to wait a least a few more weeks to discover his fate, many around the case will likely remember the long list of times he’s invoked his faith in Pope Francis to come to his aid during the trial.
In this life, at least, that faith has not yet saved him.
The Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption is seen in San Francisco on Monday, Oct. 30, 2023. The Cathedral is the principal church of the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
A San Mateo priest accused of molestation in a lawsuit is one of two accused clergy who remain in active ministry with the Archdiocese of San Francisco as the church faces renewed questions over how it responds to sexual abuse allegations.
The lawsuit, filed in Alameda County in November 2022, alleges Father Linh Tien Nguyen sexually abused a former altar boy and student of St. Pius Catholic Church and School in Redwood City between approximately 2005 and 2008.
The plaintiff in the case, identified as “M.S.,” alleges he was between 10 and 13 years old. He is now in his late 20s.
“This young person has got a lot of courage,” said Dan McNevin, Oakland leader of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. “If there’s any good news in this, it’s that this survivor had the courage at a very young age to come forward and has probably expedited the healing of a lot more kids.”
Official Catholic Church records show Nguyen worked as a pastor at St. Pius from 2005 through 2009. He is currently an associate pastor at St. Bartholomew Parish in San Mateo.
Nguyen and other staff members of St. Bartholomew did not respond to KQED’s requests for comment on the allegation.
A second priest, Father David Ghiorso, faces multiple allegations of sexual abuse of young boys at St. Vincent’s School for Boys in San Rafael and a Sonoma County summer camp in the 1980s and ’90s, according to court records and a source familiar with one of the cases.
The details of the accusations are laid out in documents from two lawsuits filed in Alameda County — one in 2020 and another in 2022. Today, Ghiorso is the pastor of St. Charles Parish in San Carlos and St. Matthias Church in Redwood City.
The allegations in the lawsuits have not been proven. The plaintiffs either declined or did not respond to interview requests.
“I can tell you that the Archdiocese followed its procedures in the instances you raised and that Fr. Ghiorso and Fr. Nguyen are priests in good standing and have faculties to minister in the Archdiocese,” Peter Marlow, the Archdiocese of San Francisco’s executive director of communications and media relations, told KQED in an email.
The Archdiocese also denies the allegations in legal filings.
News of the allegation against Nguyen comes as the Archdiocese is pressed for details in bankruptcy proceedings about how it handles sexual abuse allegations, and which priests it has deemed credibly accused.
On Nov. 8, the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors, which represents survivors, requested the court’s authorization to subpoena the Archdiocese for documents on the church’s finances and allegations of abuse dating back multiple decades. The Archdiocese objected, calling the request “excessively overbroad, vague and harassing.” A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 30.
A newsletter for St. Veronica’s Parish includes a welcome note and a photo of Father Linh Tien Nguyen.
The Archdiocese sought Chapter 11 protection in federal bankruptcy court in August as it faced more than 530 lawsuits filed by individuals alleging sexual abuse by clergy or others associated with the Archdiocese under a 2019 state law, Assembly Bill 218, or the California Child Victims Act. The law waived all time limits for abuse claims from 2020 through the end of last year, and it permanently extended age limits to sue for childhood molestation — from age 26 to 40 years old or within five years after the discovery of the abuse.
The bankruptcy proceedings effectively froze all the state court cases filed against the San Francisco Archdiocese, its institutions and clergy.
In recent back-to-back legal calls in the bankruptcy case, representatives of the Archdiocese answered questions under oath from the Office of the U.S. Trustee and the committee about the church’s financial situation and knowledge of abuse allegations. Officials said the church had found no accusations against clergy to be credible in the past decade, but has become aware of multiple allegations in that time.
In a Sept. 28 meeting of creditors, the Archdiocese’s Vicar General, Father Patrick Summerhays, disclosed that two active priests and two retired priests had been accused of abuse. Each has been exonerated by the church’s internal process, according to the Archdiocese.
“I have not yet received a credible allegation against a priest, although I have received allegations,” Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said two weeks later in a continuation of the hearing, referring to his 11 years as Archbishop.
When asked how many cases the Archdiocese has received in that time, Cordileone said there have been seven or eight accusations the church has had to investigate.
The Archdiocese’s process for responding to an allegation of sexual abuse of a minor involves reporting the allegation to civil authorities and removing the accused priest from active ministry while an investigation is conducted by a qualified investigator. A report on the findings of that investigation are handed over to the Archdiocese’s Independent Review Board, a panel of lay people who issues a recommendation to the Archbishop as to whether the allegation is ‘sustained’ or ‘not sustained,’ according to the Archdiocese’s website and church representatives.
“I’ve heard different theories as to what credibly accused means,” Cordileone said. “I try not to use that term and rather use [the] term ‘sustained’ or ‘not sustained.’”
What standard the Independent Review Board, or IRB, uses to determine if an allegation is sustained is unclear, James Stang, an attorney for the Unsecured Creditors’ Committee, later told KQED in a phone interview.
The Archdiocese of San Francisco is seen on Friday, Oct. 20, 2023.
“I can’t find anything that defines it in what the public can see on the website,” Stang said. “In other words, if I go to the website, and they discuss the review board process, I don’t see a definition of what constitutes a sustained claim.”
He continued: “I think the public should know what it means to have a sustained accusation. There has to be a definition somewhere. It can’t just be a gut check. There must be some standard that these review board people are using.”
While there isn’t a single, uniform definition of what constitutes a “credible accusation” against a priest that is shared across all Catholic dioceses, many have publicly shared their interpretations alongside published lists of credibly accused priests in their jurisdiction.
The Archdiocese of San Francisco is the only diocese in California that, to date, has not published such a list. Instead, the Archdiocese maintains a public list of priests and deacons in good standing who are approved for ministry in the Archdiocese.
In its Nov. 8 filing, the creditors’ committee asked for records related to abuse claims dating back to as early as 1941. Among them: personnel files of accused priests, communication between the Archdiocese and law enforcement agencies over the years, and documents explaining the church’s interpretation of “credibly accused.” It also requests documents from the paper trail of the church’s evaluation of sexual abuse allegations, including IRB meeting minutes, interview notes and recommendations.
When asked what standard of proof the IRB uses to determine if an allegation is “sustained” or not, Marlow said, “The process is for the Independent Review Board to review a claim and the investigator’s report and any other relevant information that can support a recommendation.”
When pressed for more details, he declined to clarify that aspect of the process further. In a subsequent email, Marlow elaborated on what happens when the IRB determines that an allegation is sustained. If the IRB finds that there is sufficient evidence to warrant a canonical trial and the trial results in a conviction, then the accused priest would be permanently removed from ministry. If the IRB finds that an accusation is not sustained, then the priest is reinstated to active ministry and damage to his reputation is remediated.
In a Sept. 28 meeting of creditors, the Archdiocese of San Francisco Vicar General, Father Patrick Summerhays, disclosed that two active priests and two retired priests have been accused of abuse.
The IRB was established in 2002, the same year that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops established the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, a set of procedures for addressing allegations of sexual abuse of minors by clergy often referred to as the Dallas Charter.
“Review boards were strangled in the crib before they could do something,” said Jim Jenkins, a retired East Bay psychologist who was the IRB’s first chairman at its inception.
Jenkins resigned in 2004 over concerns about the board’s integrity and ability to investigate independently. During his time on the panel, it was the Archbishop who decided what to do with an allegation, not the IRB, Jenkins told KQED.
“When they say the review board reviewed this and did not find anything sustained, that may be true,” Jenkins said. “But the fact that father so and so is recommended to be suspended — that is completely up to the Archbishop. They would never allow anyone else to make that decision. Certainly not lay people.”
Jenkins acknowledged that nearly 20 years have passed since he served on the board, which may have different processes today.
Attorneys for the Archdiocese stated that Cordileone has always followed the IRB’s guidance. Three IRB members contacted by KQED did not respond to interview requests.
Saint Charles Parish is seen in San Carlos, Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023.
Nguyen was placed on administrative leave in October 2022 and returned to ministry two months later, according to the Archdiocese. Ghiorso went on leave for around two months in late 2021.
Marlow declined to say what information the Archdiocese found in its investigations that resulted in Nguyen and Ghiorso both returning to ministry.
“While IRB investigations and recommendations are not shared with the media, I can tell you that the Archdiocese followed its procedures in the instances you raised and that Fr. Ghiorso and Fr. Nguyen are priests in good standing and have faculties to minister in the Archdiocese,” Marlow told KQED in an email.
Spencer Lucas, the attorney representing the complainant identified as M.S. in the lawsuit accusing Nguyen, expressed skepticism about the church’s processes.
“We do know that the Catholic Church, on a very broad scale, has done an inadequate investigation into many, many of these claims,” he said. “We should all be concerned that the church has not taken adequate steps to properly investigate claims and to institute appropriate training to raise awareness about this ongoing problem.”
‘We have our own list’
Survivors and advocates have been calling on the Archdiocese of San Francisco to release a list of priests who have been credibly accused under its watch for years.
In the Oct. 12 meeting of creditors, Cordileone disclosed that while the list hasn’t been released to the public, it does exist.
The Mass schedule is posted outside St. Pius Catholic Church and School in Redwood City, Calif., on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023.
“Does the Archdiocese have a list of clergy where the [Independent] Review Board has made a determination that the accusation is sustained?” Stang asked the Archbishop.
“We know which ones those are, yeah,” Cordinelone replied. “We have our own list.”
Asked why the Archdiocese has not published the list, Cordileone said that no one has given him a reason for doing so.
“The most important thing is that our young people are being protected and that those who abuse are kept out of ministry for doing that,” he added.
Jennifer Stein, an attorney with Jeff Anderson & Associates, which represents over 400 alleged survivors with claims in Northern California, the majority of whom are in the Bay Area, was listening.
“This is an ongoing and recurring theme that is self-serving to the Archdiocese,” Stein said. “It puts children and the public in great peril by keeping that information secret.”
In September 2022, SNAP published its own list of 312 priests who have been publicly accused of abuse and were associated at one point or another with the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Nguyen’s name is not included on the list as the M.S. lawsuit was filed two months after publication. Ghiorso’s name, however, is.
In October 2021, parishioners of both churches where Ghiorso currently works were notified via a letter that he had been named in filed claims and would be temporarily restricted from exercising public ministry while an investigation was conducted.
The announcement came nearly a year after a lawsuit was filed in Alameda Superior Court by two men alleging they had been sexually abused while they were living at St. Vincent’s School for Boys, a residential program for disadvantaged boys in San Rafael.
In court records from the lawsuit, plaintiff Gary Johnson alleges that he and other boys from St. Vincent’s were molested by priests at a summer camp in Sonoma County for several years in the early 1980s.
The lawsuit alleges several priests began showing up at St. Vincent’s weekly to take the boys off-campus to Camp Armstrong, where they were given alcohol and molested or forced to engage in sex acts with one another, according to court records.
Father David Ghiorso, who faces multiple allegations of sexual abuse of young boys at St. Vincent’s School for Boys in San Rafael and a Sonoma County summer camp in the 1980s and 1990s, was profiled in the San Francisco Examiner on Oct. 23, 1994.
“When not participating, perpetrator defendants would also watch the boys abuse one another and would masturbate as they watched,” the complaint reads.
After reporting the abuse to an athletic coach at the school, who notified the school’s front office, Johnson was removed from St. Vincent’s and placed in a foster home, according to the complaint.
A second plaintiff in the same lawsuit alleges a priest abused him for a year, shortly after he arrived at St. Vincent’s in 1989 at the age of 9 and became an altar boy. Marcus Raymond Hill alleges that on one occasion, when he and other boys were invited to the rectory for doughnuts after mass, he was asked to stay longer, given wine and forced to masturbate the priest.
On three other occasions, the complaint states the priest allegedly plied Hill with wine and anally penetrated and raped him.
Ghiorso, who is not named in the lawsuit, is identified as the alleged perpetrator in the case on a matrix filed in Alameda Superior Court. The matrix is a chart that displays data from hundreds of Northern California clergy sex abuse cases filed under AB 218, including case numbers, attorney names, alleged perpetrator names, dates of alleged abuse and other information.
A person familiar with the case confirmed to KQED that Ghiorso is an alleged perpetrator in the lawsuit. NBC Bay Area previously reported the allegations.
Ghiorso was ordained in 1981 and worked as a pastor at Our Lady of Loretto Church in Novato through 1985, according to the Official Catholic Directory. From 1986-1990, he was the associate director of St. Vincent’s. Ghiorso went on to fill leadership roles with the Catholic Youth Organization and CYO Archbishop McGucken Youth Retreat and Conference Center, the location of Camp Armstrong, records show.
Ghiorso returned to the ministry in December 2021 following his temporary leave, according to Marlow. Four months later, court records show, he was accused in a new lawsuit of ongoing abuse of another altar boy at St. Vincent’s.
From around 1988 through 1991, an unnamed plaintiff alleges, he was “continuously anally raped and sexually assaulted” by Ghiorso when he was 10-13 years old. The plaintiff alleges Ghiorso began sexually abusing him in an area of the church that altar boys used to change. The abuse escalated to mutual oral sex and penetration in the church and at Ghiorso’s office, according to court records.
Several times, the plaintiff attempted to run away from St. Vincent’s and was heavily medicated by staff at the facility in an attempt to control his behavioral outbursts, the complaint reads.
The plaintiff first reported the alleged abuse to a private investigator hired by the Archdiocese, who contacted him in late 2021, according to the complaint. The investigator had “been previously told by one of the plaintiff’s classmates that the plaintiff may have been one of Father Ghiorso’s many victims,” the document reads.
“It was not until the plaintiff was contacted by the investigator that his memories of what Father Ghiorso did to him as a child resurfaced,” according to the document.
Ghiorso and his attorney did not respond to KQED’s multiple requests for comment.
When asked if Ghiorso was removed from ministry a second time pending an investigation into the new claim, Marlow declined to specify and instead restated that the Archdiocese’s procedures were followed in each case.
“There are good reasons why Fr. Ghiorso is a priest in good standing with faculties to serve in the Archdiocese of San Francisco,” he said.
In Oakland, California, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Christ the Light is difficult to miss. Towering over Lake Merritt in the heart of the city, its modernist glass dome reflects the East Bay sun in all directions.
The building, which was completed in 2008 and financed by the Roman Catholic diocese of Oakland, cost $175m. But that price tag confounds Joseph Piscitelli.
In the 1970s, Piscitelli attended a Catholic high school in nearby Richmond, where, from the age of 14, he experienced repeated sexual abuse at the hands of his vice-principal, an ordained priest. For decades, Piscitelli experienced nightmares and panic attacks. Friends who had also been abused turned to drugs and alcohol, and several took their own lives.
In 2003, Piscitelli sued the Salesian College Preparatory high school and the Salesian order, and won. While the cases were decided in his favor in 2006, they had not held leaders at the top accountable. So, in 2020, he filed a new suit, this time against the Oakland diocese.
Then, to Piscitelli’s dismay, the diocese declared bankruptcy in May. As a result, his case was put on an indefinite hold.
The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, California.
“Oakland could get together enough money to build a $200m cathedral not too long ago, but they can’t get the money together to pay the child victims whom they raped for decades,” Piscitelli said. “They’re morally and ethically bankrupt, but they’re not financially bankrupt.”
One by one, various arms of the Catholic church across California have declared bankruptcy, citing an inability to pay damages from large numbers of sexual abuse lawsuits. The dioceses of Santa Rosa and Oakland filed in the spring. The archdiocese of San Francisco followed suit in August, and the diocese of San Diego has shared its plan to do the same in November. The lawsuits come at a time when Catholicism in California is growing – fueled in large part by immigration from Latin America and Asia – while other parts of the US, including former Catholic hubs in the north-east, are seeing their numbers dwindle.
The flood of California suits came after 2019 legislation opened a three-year “look-back window” that would allow survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file suits based on old claims that would normally have fallen outside the statute of limitations. When the window closed last December, more than 2,000 individuals around the state had filed cases against the Catholic church; 330 accusers have sued the Oakland diocese alone.
“No one really expected this huge number [of abuse cases] to come in at this last month,” said Maureen Day, a sociologist and associate professor of religion and society at the Franciscan School of Theology. “It suddenly became a much larger financial hardship for many dioceses.”
But declaring chapter 11 does not mean that the church is broke, said Marie Reilly, professor of law at Penn State University. Rather, it is a legal strategy undertaken by corporations that say they don’t have the funds to pay a high number of individual settlements. Known as “reorganization”, these bankruptcy protections let the church avoid undertaking dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of individual costly trials by grouping them into one settlement.
But the church claims bankruptcy is also fairer to victims, primarily because it means each victim is treated equally and all survivors receive even payouts.
“You see some of the settlements that are out there. You can almost use up all the funds on one or two settlements, and the rest of the survivors that have legitimate concerns get nothing,” said Peter Marlow, executive director of communications and media relations for the archdiocese of San Francisco. In 2019, the Los Angeles archdiocese paid $8m to a single abuse survivor. To date, settlements have cost California’s Catholic church more than $1b.
“The diocese believes this is the best way to ensure a fair and equitable outcome for all survivors and provide just compensation to the innocent people who were harmed while allowing the diocese to stabilize its finances and continue its sacred mission entrusted to it by Christ and the church,” said Helen Osman, director of communications for the diocese of Oakland.
To abuse survivors, the proceedings feel like a cop-out. “It’s just another way to silence us,” says Dan McNevin, who leads the Oakland chapter of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (Snap) support group.
Unlike trials, bankruptcy proceedings do not involve a discovery process, meaning key pieces of information about what church leaders knew may never be revealed.
McNevin knows how meaningful those revelations can be. As a child, he was an altar boy at his local parish in Fremont, south of Oakland, where he says he was groomed and abused by his priest. In 2003, following California’s first look-back window, he brought a suit against the diocese of Oakland, claiming it had knowingly shuffled his abuser from place to place to mask his crimes.
The diocese initially denied those claims, but during the trial, documents unearthed during discovery revealed that Father James Clark had been convicted of sexual abuse years before he arrived in Fremont.
“When we discovered that he had been arrested, my case was made,” said McNevin. “It probably helped settle 60 cases.” But those cases were settled individually, not collectively, as they would be in bankruptcy proceedings – a critical difference to McNevin.
“They’re going to try to slice and dice the survivors into categories,” he said. “How do you contemplate making those kinds of stark arbitrary decisions when every human being is different?”
Melanie Sakoda, survivor support coordinator at Snap, says the removal of the discovery process results in victim retraumatization. “What they’re really looking for is information,” she said. “After waiting all these years before finally getting themselves together enough to come forward and file a lawsuit, it’s disappointing. And it makes people angry.”
For Piscitelli, the suggestion that the church is unable to afford individual lawsuits is especially infuriating. He says those claims come across as disingenuous in light of the vast assets held by California’s Catholic organizations, which include properties in some of the country’s most expensive real estate markets.
“It’s duplicitous at best,” said Piscitelli. “It’s advantageous for the diocese.”
McNevin, who has spent years researching church holdings and tallying diocesan assets, agrees. Using public ownership and title records, McNevin claims to have found that the Oakland bishop as a corporation owns more than 2,000 pieces of land. Some, like churches and schools, are central to the church’s mission, and will therefore be excluded from settlement discussions. But others appear to be empty plots of land, rental properties or shopping centers, he says.
“I was stunned,” said McNevin, who has shared the appraisals – which Snap says total more than $3bn – with the Oakland bishop, Michael C Barber, and attorneys for the plaintiffs. “They have the assets to pay people whatever is needed,” McNevin claimed.
The diocese of Oakland did not respond to requests for clarification about how real estate will play into the proceedings, and would not confirm or deny that the Oakland bishop owns this much real estate, aside from saying that it owned approximately 100 parishes at its peak. Documents from the case state the diocese’s real property value is “undetermined” and list Furrer Properties, Inc – a stock corporation that owns and rents properties – as an asset.
The archdiocese of San Francisco flatly denies any accusations of secrecy or obfuscation. “Anyone can have access to the information. It’s available on a website that’s free of charge,” said spokesperson Marlow.
Another element the church emphasizes is that declining membership and rising costs, particularly during the pandemic, have squeezed budgets and limited the church’s ability to perform its duties. As a result, parishes have been forced to consolidate and close.
Day, the sociologist, says potential church closures are an equity issue, since immigrants comprise a large portion of parishioners. “These are people who are in need of jobs, in need of community,” she said. “So we are going to be failing these new migrants as well.”
Seeking bankruptcy protections safeguards worshippers, the church says, because it ensures that only the bishop is sued. “The parishes, the schools and the other ministries associated with the archdiocese aren’t included,” said Marlow.
Yet experts say the proceedings do affect the local Catholic community emotionally and spiritually. “There is a lot of pain and hurt,” said Day. Reilly added that in the past, sexual abuse allegations have caused some individuals to leave the church altogether.
Inside the Cathedral of Christ the Light during Easter mass, in Oakland, California.
Back in Oakland, Piscitelli finds it impossible to believe that the church’s motivations are anything but nefarious.
“As a victim and a survivor, this is an entity that has historically and habitually enabled child rapists for decades. They covered for them, they transferred them, they shuffled them and they enabled them. And now they’re stating that they want to provide compassionate and equitable solutions for survivors,” he said. “I don’t believe it for a second.”
Piscitelli said he has heard from a number of fellow survivors who feel the same way. Many of them elected not to file lawsuits for that very reason.
Those who did, however, plan to support one another in fighting against the legitimacy of the bankruptcy ruling in order to have their own individual trials. That’s the only way that, Piscitelli says, they can begin to close past wounds.
“It’s like looking at scenes on Netflix, but it’s real, and you had to live it.”
— The Archdiocese of Baltimore launched an investigation into Rev. Paschal Morlino after he admitted the payment to The Baltimore Banner
Father Paschal A. Morlino, O.S.B., is a Benedictine monk and priest of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He has been pastor of St. Benedict Church, Baltimore, for more than 30 years.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore has dismissed the Rev. Paschal Morlino, the celebrated “urban monk” of Southwest Baltimore who led St. Benedict Church for decades, following the recent disclosure that he paid $200,000 to quietly settle allegations of fraud and sexual assault.Morlino’s abrupt removal as pastor of St. Benedict’s was announced Saturday to parishioners, and it comes amid an investigation by The Baltimore Banner that brought details of the 2018 settlement payment to the attention of archdiocese officials.
“On Thursday when an inquiry was made by The Baltimore Banner, the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Benedictines were first made aware of a settlement that had been entered into by Benedictine Fr. Paschal Morlino some years ago,” the archdiocese said in a statement. “The Archdiocese immediately engaged in an internal investigation and within 24 hours, a decision was made to remove Fr. Morlino as pastor of Saint Benedict Church.
“He is no longer permitted to celebrate Mass or engage in public ministry in the Archdiocese. Fr. Morlino has returned to his religious community, Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pa. The Archdiocese and Benedictines intend to conduct further investigation.”
Morlino, 85, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The archdiocese’s decision to remove the popular Benedictine monk known as “Father Paschal” brings a stunning end to his 39 years as pastor of St. Benedict. Two days earlier, on Thursday, he granted a wide-ranging, 90-minute interview to The Banner at the church, declaring he had nothing to hide. Morlino confirmed that five years ago he paid $200,000 to the man who accused him of rape but denied that he had assaulted or defrauded the man.
“I just wanted to keep him quiet, to be rid of him, because he was just stirring up trouble,” Morlino said. “My conscience is clear; it’s all stuff that he made up.”
The man who accused Morlino died in April 2020. The Banner does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted without their consent.
Morlino has not been charged with a crime.
Morlino was ordained in 1966, and as a young monk outside Pittsburgh founded the Adelphoi house for boys. The nonprofit took in abused, neglected and delinquent youths. Adelphoi has since expanded to include 21 homes and serves 2,900 children and families a year, according to its website.
Around the historic St. Benedict Parish near Carroll Park, Morlino looms even larger. A self-described “Southern boy,” with his Virginia twang, he arrived in Baltimore during the 1980s like a whirlwind.
Morlino counseled sex workers, homeless people and people with addictions in some of the city’s poorest streets. He energized the congregation with his gritty, roll-up-your-sleeves evangelism. Under his leadership, the parish tripled in size, according to the church website. Congregants renamed the church’s block “Paschal’s Way.” They named the parish building the Paschal Center.
Former parishioner Kathy Durm-St. Amant said she used to adore the Benedictine monk like her own dad. But one day a friend told her a secret. The friend had vacationed with Morlino many years before on a cruise.
”He said he went on that cruise, he was in bed. He woke up with Paschal on top of him,” she said.
She encouraged her friend to call a lawyer. After he died in 2020, she found letters exchanged by the attorneys who negotiated his claim. She provided the letters to The Banner.
In one dated Jan. 24, 2018, her friend’s attorney, Joanne Suder, demanded $375,000 to prevent a lawsuit and accused Morlino of forging the man’s signature on bank records. The man had worked for Morlino, fundraising for the church, cooking, cleaning and carrying out errands.
“You stole all of his cash from checks telling him his expenses exceeded the balances of his checks,” Suder wrote.
Suder also accused Morlino of raping her adult client on the cruise in September 2000 and of multiple rapes in the years that followed.
Speaking about the man, Suder wrote, “His physician has opined that your sexual, physical, emotional and fraudulent behavior has caused him such injuries that he may never recover.” She declined to answer questions from The Banner about the matter.
Morlino told The Banner he went on a cruise with the man along with three other friends but he had no sexual contact with the man, either on the cruise or in the years after.
When asked about the alleged fraud, Morlino said the two had an agreement that the man’s paychecks would be deposited into a church account that paid for his health care.
“I took care of his medical insurance; that was the deal,” Morlino said. “He didn’t have any money; he played on my sympathy.”
The man was popular around Southwest Baltimore, Morlino said, and he saw him as an asset to the parish, someone who could help draw together the church and community.
His business dealings with the man went further than most others. Morlino said he paid the tax debt on the man’s home. But their yearslong acquaintance was tumultuous and ended when Morlino dismissed the man from his fundraising and other duties. Morlino said he was stunned to hear the man was accusing him of assault and fraud.
In response to the letter from Suder, the pastor made a counteroffer through his private attorney.
“Although Father Paschal is indeed not a rich person, in conjunction with his family and friends, he has managed to raise $25,000 to try and settle this matter,” wrote Salvatore Anello III, the pastor’s attorney. “There would have to be a release and total Confidentiality Agreement. As you can see whatever we do here, we are in an untenable position since the mere accusation, whether it be true or not, and it is not true, can end his ministry at St. Benedicts.”
Anello could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday. The sides settled in February 2018 for $200,000, according to documents reviewed by The Banner and confirmed by the pastor.
“It wasn’t true,” Morlino told The Banner of the allegations against him, “but how can you prove that in court?”
The man’s friend, Durm-St. Amant, was not bound by the nondisclosure terms.
She notified church leaders about sexual assault allegations involving Morlino in August 2018 using the archdiocese’s online portal, and said she later met with two church officials — Monsignor James Hannon, director of the division of clergy personnel, and Jerri Burkhardt, director of the office of child and youth protection. But she feels ignored today.
“What did he say? They’re going to meet with [Morlino] and counsel him?” Durm-St. Amant said, speaking about Hannon. “Not, ‘We’re going to shut him down.’ Not, ‘We’re going to take him out of service.’ That he needs counseling.”
Durm-St. Amant’s complaint alleged that a second man had been assaulted by Morlino on a different cruise. This man had died by 2018. Asked Saturday about its response to the complaint and allegations of two victims, the archdiocese addressed only the deceased man, saying Morlino denied assaulting this individual and that because the man was dead church officials could not corroborate the allegation.
The 456-page report identified 158 priests accused of the “sexual abuse” and “physical torture” of more than 600 victims over the past 80 years. The findings led lawmakers to reform Maryland’s statute of limitations related to claims over old acts abuse.
The new law was expected to bring a flood of lawsuits against the archdiocese. On the eve of the Child Victims Act, the Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for bankruptcy.
He knew “luck” wasn’t the right word the moment he said it.
But Nicholas Finio was trying to describe the way everything lined up perfectly for the reckoning he’d spent decades working toward.
He filed a lawsuit in time, he worked with an experienced legal team and a good therapist. He was ready to confront the defrocked priest whose persistent sexual abuse had turned his years as a blond-haired altar boy delighted to be chosen for the solemn duties at Mass into a nightmare. The terror of the abuse lived inside him for 15 years, it followed him through high school and college, into his relationships and his marriage. It even made him think about suicide.
“It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life; it was terrifying,” said Finio, now 34 and an assistant research professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland. “The first time I ever told a lawyer about it I was dripping with sweat and my hands were shaking.”
And then?
Silence.
The Pennsylvania Archdiocese where Finio had been an altar boy reached for a shrewd and now-familiar playbook the Catholic Church has been deploying to muzzle survivors: declaring bankruptcy.
That meant the case that Finio had filed in 2018, when he was within the statute of limitations, that had been building for two years of discovery and paperwork, was folded into a bankruptcy hearing.
“The one piece of power I still had — the ability to speak to the public, in the courtroom — was taken away from me,” Finio wrote to me this week. “I did not have that ability as an abused child, and they took it away from me again as an adult survivor.
“The church, with its immense power, cash assets to pay lawyers, and actuarial science,” Finio wrote, “chose to relegate my story and those of dozens of other survivors to [E]xcel spreadsheets, paragraphs in emails, and [W]ord documents.”
It was as if “they had the cheat code,” he said.
>And that’s exactly what the Archdiocese of Baltimore did, filing for bankruptcy Sept. 29 — two days before Maryland’s Child Victims Act became state law. The law was intended to open the door for hundreds of survivors to sue the church for its part in thousands of horrific sexual acts committed against children, and for church leaders’ complicity in enabling priests and covering up the abuse.
He is speaking out now because other people are about to endure the “enraging” process that he went through.
“The bankruptcy judge didn’t talk to us,” he said. “There’s no getting interviewed by anybody — you’re just telling your story to the insurance companies and everybody sits around the table for a couple of years.”
Finio was part of the small committee of survivors who work with bankruptcy lawyers in these cases. They are seen by the court as “creditors.” More than two dozen U.S. dioceses have deployed the same tactic, according to the Catholic News Agency. They call it a “restructuring” and say — from their gilded and historic buildings — that the move is crucial to their survival.
“I had to deal with a lot of anger in the last three years,” he said. “Not really having any recourse, any ability to act on everything that has held me back for so long.”
Survivors, the lawyers who deal with these cases said, aren’t in it for the money. They want to be heard. They want the rest of the world to understand the adults’ complicity, the calculated coverups that kept them tortured for years.
“Survivors don’t want to get processed,” said Benjamin Andreozzi, who was Finio’s lawyer, has represented victims in New York and New Jersey and who is now representing about 20 survivors of abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
When Finio saw all of this playing out in Baltimore last week, he decided to speak publicly for the first time, forgoing the John Doe anonymity of his lawsuit. He wants the church, the priest and other survivors to hear his voice.
The priest who Finio says abused him, John G. Allen, 79, is living in an apartment in Harrisburg, according to public records. He did not respond to my email seeking information. His only public comment on record about the allegations against him was a guilty plea in 2020 to two counts each of indecent assault against a child under 13, indecent assault of a child under 16 and corruption of minors — all crimes involving altar boys, according to media reports.
The Dauphin County Court judge gave him five years of probation and life on the sex offender registry, where he submits his photos, address and a description of his tattoos (a Chinese Capricorn, a moon, a star and a four-leaf clover, all on his left thigh.) He submitted his most recent photo to the registry in August.
Ordained in 1970, Allen has a long history of sexual assaults and incidents, according to the grand jury report by the Pennsylvania attorney general.
Each time something happened, the church knew.
The grand jury report documents how the church knew Allen was arrested for soliciting an undercover police officer. They heard from boys who said he paid them for sex acts. Strip poker. Nights in a hotel. Backroom invitations before services. And a bishop got the memo about Allen’s alleged confession — at a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting — that he was obsessed with young boys, the report states.
And through all that, Allen was moved around nine parishes across central Pennsylvania
It was in 1999 that Finio was a 10-year-old altar boy at St. Margaret Mary Alacoque parish in Penbrook, dreading every time Allen was the priest celebrating Mass.
Finio said the priest groped and molested him dozens of times over the three years he served at the altar. He told no one at the time.
When Finio sued in 2018, the church offered a small settlement. He wanted a trial.
Then, the bankruptcy shut it down.
He wants the Baltimore survivors to know they are not alone, and that although they’re in for a long and frustrating process, they should persevere.
“Don’t stop fighting,” he tells them. For other survivors. For today’s children. For themselves.
