SNAPnetwork.org
December 21, 2010
To: James Santelle, United States Attorney, Eastern
District of Wisconsin
From: Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director, Survivors Network of those Abused
by Priests
Re: Destruction of evidence by Green Bay diocese of
child sex crimes by priests, concealment and transfer of known sex offender
clergy
Mr. Santelle,
I am writing on behalf of childhood victims of rape, sexual assault and
abuse by clergy sex offenders in Wisconsin and our families. SNAP, the Survivors
Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAPnetwork.org) is the oldest and largest
self help organization of survivors of clergy sex crimes in the world. SNAP was
founded in 1989 and currently has over 10,000 members in the United States
alone.
In February of 2005, a lawsuit was filed in Milwaukee County alleging fraud
on behalf of the archbishop of Milwaukee and several senior managers of the
archdiocese for concealing and transferring known sex offenders without
notification to work with children and families in parishes and schools. That
such a pattern and practice exists has been well established in thousands of now
documented cases of child sex abuse by Catholic clergy around the United
States. A national study by John Jay College of Criminal justice completed in
2004 and appended on a yearly basis, concluded that over 5,000 clergy have
sexually assaulted children in the United States over the past decades; the vast
majority were known to have committed these crimes by their superiors. Since
2005, cases on behalf of victims in the diocese of La Crosse and Green Bay have
also been filed in civil courts alleging similar fraud.
In 2007, the Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously upheld the cause of action
in the 2005 claim, concluding that sufficient evidence existed of the
intentional concealment and misrepresentation by Wisconsin church officials of
known child sex offenders. The filing was significant since Wisconsin law, as
of 1995, bars any negligence claims against religious organizations for sex
offender clergy based on a 1st amendment ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court
in the mid 1990's.
Last month, the Wisconsin Appeals Court, in a consolidated appeal involving
13 lawsuits charging the Archdiocese of Milwaukee with negligent
misrepresentations about priests accused of assaulting children, upheld lower
court ruling that insurers were not responsible for damages because what the
church is accused of doing is no "accident". Failing to use ordinary care to
ferret out priests with a sexual abuse history and representing them as safe to
be around children are voluntary acts, according to the court. It does not
matter whether the church was able to foresee the sexual abuse - it is the
misrepresentation that the children would be safe that is the cause of
injury.
Our concern today focuses on the diocese of Green Bay. Current and past
Green Bay bishops, church officials and managers have been called as defendants
in a high profile fraud case concerning a serial child sex offender, Fr. John
Patrick Feeney. Feeney, according to hundreds of pages of previously secret
church records, was directly reported to officials of the Green Bay diocese for
repeatedly sexually assaulting children in his 40 year career as a priest.
After transferring Feeney into well over a dozen assignments in northeastern
Wisconsin, the bishop of Green Bay moved Feeney to a parish in Las Vegas,
Nevada, where he went on to assault more children. Feeney was then eventually
moved to California. In 2002, Outagamie County authorities arrested Feeney and
brought him back to Wisconsin for prosecution for crimes committed in parish
assignments in the 1970's against children, based on the tolling of the criminal
statute for child sex assault under Wisconsin law. Feeney was convicted and is now in prison.
Fraud claims against the diocese of Green Bay have were filed on behalf of
Wisconsin and Nevada victims of Feeney in 2007. In a decision that mirrors the
Wisconsin high court, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled this summer against the
Green Bay diocese.
Last month, a deposition in the Green Bay diocese fraud case was of Fr.
John Doerfler. As Chancellor and Vicar General, Doefler is the second or third
highest ranking official of the Green Bay diocese. In his managerial duties
assigned to him by his bishop and under the internal rules of the Catholic Canon
Law, Doefler is responsible for the maintenance of all clergy priest records and
files of the diocese.
According to the John Jay report referenced earlier, the Green Bay diocese,
based on figures supplied to the researchers by the diocese, as of 2004 had
documented allegations of child sex assault on at least 51 clergy working in the
diocese over the past several decades. 16 of these direct reports involved
clerics who live and work in the Green Bay diocese and are members of the
Norbertine religious order, whose international headquarters is in De
Pere.
Catholic canon law requires that every diocese and religious order maintain
in a specifically designated and secured "vault" a "secret archive" containing
all reports, evidence, internal church investigations, mental health evaluations
and assessments, and all materials, records and documentation, including
decisions and orders by the local ordinary and his managers, of every cleric
alleged or determined to have committed sexual acts against children and
minors.
Sometime in 2007, according to Fr. Doefler's sworn testimony, while under
direct orders from the bishop of Green Bay, he and staff members of the diocese
under his supervision began to deliberately and systematically destroy what
appears to be nearly all records and documentation concerning sex offender
clergy. This material would include criminal evidence of child sex crimes by
clerics as well as evidence of fraud by the bishops of Green Bay and the senior
management of the diocese. The document destruction was first ordered by Bishop
David Zubik. Zubik has since been promoted by the Vatican to run the diocese of
Pittsburgh.
As a justification for his actions and the orders of his bishop, Doerfler,
surprisingly, cites federal HIPPA laws, regulating health providers and
insurers. In other words, the diocese of Green Bay is claiming that the
destruction of evidence pertinent to both criminal authorities and the court
examining their pattern and practice of fraud while employing Fr. Feeney was
necessary due to the requirements of federal law.
In our representation of clergy abuse survivors, we are requesting that
your office investigate this matter to ensure that no federal laws have been
violated by what appears to be an intentional set of actions to circumvent
justice for the victims of the Green Bay diocese's astounding number of felony
sex offenders; perpetrators that were not only allowed to continue working with
children in Wisconsin but some known transferred across state lines where they
continued their assaults on new victims.
As in other cases across the country, the records stored within these
dioceses frequently indicates a long history of continuous notifications to
church authorities of these criminal activities, their knowledge of the nature
and extent of the crimes committed and their understanding of the obvious risk
they posed to innocent children and youth should they be allowed to continue
working as priests. Similar to others dioceses, Green bay failed to notify
parents, children or the wider community that they were retaining the services
of known felony sex offenders, placing them in positions of authority with
direct contact to children, and filing away this critical information in a
locked vault. And now, after decades of concealment that has perpetuated some of
the most abhorrent felony crimes in our communities, the Green Bay diocese
suddenly destroys criminal evidence they have meticulously kept for decades upon
decades just when our legal system is holding
them accountable for aiding and abetting these criminals. Since our state
tolling laws enable law enforcement to seek justice in cases where the offender
has left the state, we are fearful that criminal evidence was also destroyed;
intentionally disrupting future federal, state and local law enforcement
investigations and the spirit and intent of our state laws.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first known instance of a
Catholic diocese or institution destroying nearly all records of sex offenders;
a trend that we fear will only magnify among its numerous institutions across
the United States should the Green Bay dioceses actions be left un
addressed.
Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter,
Peter Isely
SNAP Midwest Director
John Pilmiar
SNAP Wisconsin Co-director