Kelly legally safe despite not reporting abuse

By Andrew Wolfson

August 4, 2002 - Prosecutors say Roman Catholic Archbishop Thomas C. Kelly had no legal obligation to report the Rev. Louis E. Miller to authorities in 1990 -- even after the mental evaluations the bishop requested showed that the priest admitted he had fondled boys his entire adult life.

But the top lawyer for Kentucky Cabinet for Families and Children said that had he been asked at the time, he would have told the archdiocese to notify the state about Miller as set out in Kentucky's mandatory child-abuse reporting law.

The evaluations done for the church showed that Miller, who last month was indicted on 56 counts of child sexual abuse, ''posed a risk to children and that risk hadn't diminished,'' said William K. Moore, the cabinet's general counsel.

And other child advocates, ethicists and some Catholic theologians, when asked by The Courier-Journal, said they too thought that the archdiocese should have notified civil authorities, as well as parishioners at churches where Miller had served.

''They should have alerted people and invited victims to come forward for help,'' said Professor Chester Gillis, chairman of the theology department at Georgetown University and author of ''Roman Catholicism in America.''

The archdiocese didn't report Miller to civil authorities or tell parishioners.

Brian Reynolds, chancellor and chief administrative officer of the archdiocese, said the church didn't report Miller to authorities but thought the priest's therapist had.

Louisville psychologist Dennis Wagner -- who treated Miller, according to court records -- said he couldn't comment. The professionals who evaluated Miller for the archdiocese -- Dr. Richard Brush, a Cincinnati psychiatrist, and Robert Tureen, a clinical neuro-psychologist who also practices in Cincinnati, did not return phone calls.

Mike Jennings, a spokesman for the state Cabinet for Families and Children, said the agency has no record of any complaint against someone who workers knew to be a Catholic priest.

Brush said Miller admitted molesting his first victim in 1960 and periodically acting out sexual impulses with 10to 15-year-old boys as often as every other month.

Tureen said Miller indicated that while he is ''unable to anticipate a situation in which he is likely to experience sexual urges,'' he finds them ''uncontrollable.''

The evaluations were sent to Kelly, who had requested them after Mark Delmenhorst alleged in 1989 that he was molested by Miller in 1977, when Delmenhorst was 15.

Kelly, who declined requests for an interview, restricted Miller from working with children and in 1992 assigned him to Sacred Heart Village, a nursing and retirement home. Between 1990 and '92, Miller studied at St. Louis University and served as chief financial administrator at Holy Name Church.

At the home, Miller was supervised and had less exposure to children, Reynolds said.

He said the wisdom of that decision is shown by the fact that no one has accused Miller of committing sexual abuse since 1990.

Miller, 71, has pleaded innocent to the criminal charges in Jefferson County, as well as 14 counts in neighboring Oldham County. Forced to retire in March, he was removed from ministry after the archdiocese received reports of alleged incidents of abuse from the 1960s and 1970s.

Miller also is named in 65 lawsuits filed against the archdiocese by people who have alleged abuse by him. The archdiocese has denied claims that it knew about Miller's alleged sexual misconduct and concealed it.

What the law requires

Kentucky's mandatory child-abuse reporting law says ''any person who knows or has reasonable cause to believe that a child is . . . abused shall immediately cause a . . . report to be made to a local law enforcement agency or the Kentucky State Police, the cabinet, the commonwealth's attorney or the county attorney.''

Excluded from the statute are priests and lawyers who are in an attorney-client or clergy-penitent relationship.

Lawyers in the state attorney general's office and the office of the Jefferson County commonwealth's attorney say the state law only requires reporting to government agencies when a particular victim is identified, when the victim is under 18, and the abuse is current.

Violation of the reporting law is a misdemeanor punishable by up to 90 days in jail, but misdemeanors must be prosecuted within a year.

The law, however, is rarely invoked. Records compiled by the Administrative Office of the Courts for the past five reporting years show that there were 74 cases and 26 convictions statewide from 1997 through 2001.

Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Stengel's office, which is prosecuting Miller on 42 counts of child abuse, said the archdiocese didn't violate the law.

The priest's mental evaluations didn't identify specific victims and were triggered by allegations of an adult who told the archdiocese that Miller had abused him 13 years earlier, spokesman Jeff Derouen said.

Moore, the general counsel for the Cabinet for Families and Children, declined to say if he thought the archdiocese violated the law by not reporting Miller in 1990.

But Moore said that in other cases in which abuse is reported by a victim who is now an adult, the cabinet investigates to see if there are other children at risk in the same family or facility.

''You would think (the archdiocese) would have wanted to make a report,'' he said.

Lawrence Cunningham, a theology professor at Notre Dame University, said the Catholic Church had no national policy on this issue in the early 1990s, but he said ''simple decency'' would have demanded that the archdiocese talk to families in Miller's former parishes.

The Rev. John Langan, a professor of Christian ethics at Georgetown University's Institute of Ethics, said the archdiocese should have notified families that previously had filed complaints naming Miller.

David Clohessy, national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said: ''Think about the parents who have agonized for years not knowing why Johnny abuses alcohol or Sally can't maintain a relationship or Billy committed suicide.

''If a chemical company realizes that it has dumped something toxic on a playground,'' Clohessy said, ''its first duty is to reach out and inform people who may have been hurt.''

Jackie Town, director of case advocacy for Kentucky Youth Advocates, said the ''bottom line is that the archdiocese knew they had an admitted pedophile.''

Reynolds acknowledged that Miller would have been removed from ministry in 1990 if the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, adopted in June by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, had been in place then. The charter says ''there is no place in the priesthood or religious life for those who would harm the young.''

He said the archdiocese, in light of the charter, is revising its policies on notifying parishioners where a priest is accused of abuse and about what it should do if an adult reports he was abused as a child.

He also said that in 1993, when the archdiocese adopted new policies on sexual abuse, it printed and distributed 10,000 copies and made ''a very public request'' for victims to come forward.

''It was our hope then and now to assist any victim of abuse in their process of healing,'' he said.

The archdiocese has said that some adults who approach the church to report they were abused as children don't want their allegations publicly reported and have no interest in prosecuting. Reynolds said the archdiocese gives all adults information about how to file a criminal complaint themselves.

David Richart, who heads the Louisville-based National Institute on Children, Youth and Families, said the archdiocese should report every allegation made by adults, even if the victim has no interest in prosecuting. That way, when the ''fourth or fifth or seventh report comes in about the same priest, prosecutors can detect a pattern,'' he said.

The perpetrator ''shouldn't get a pass just because the abuse occurred in the past,'' Richart said.

Archdiocese took steps

Reynolds said the archdiocese took steps to ensure that Miller wouldn't pose a risk when he went to Sacred Heart Village in 1992. Miller was ordered to remain in counseling, and his supervisors were told why he had been assigned there so they could keep an eye on him, Reynolds said.

Law professor Patrick Schiltz, who defended Catholic dioceses in hundreds of cases in the early and mid1990s, said the Archdiocese of Louisville's response to the Miller evaluations was ''par for the course.''

In the past, he said, it was rare for priests to be removed entirely from ministry, and they were defrocked only if there was evidence of rape or other extreme offenses.

Schiltz, who is associate dean of the St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, said ''the typical archdiocese response'' to allegations like those against Miller was to have ''a couple rounds of therapy and if that didn't work, assignment to a hospital ministry or somewhere else they wouldn't be around children.''

After reading the evaluations of Miller, Schiltz said he would have recommended that the archdiocese put him in ''a paperwork position'' or give him the ''chaplaincy of a nunnery.''

Schiltz said that it would have been less moral and less ethical to remove Miller from ministry entirely -- ''to turn him loose on society'' with no monitoring by the archdiocese.

''I think moving him to restricted ministry,'' Schiltz said, is better than ''letting him manage the local Dairy Queen by day and coach a Little League team at night.'''

But attorney William McMurry, who represents most of the plaintiffs who have sued the archdiocese, said that once Kelly received the evaluations of Miller, he should have been removed from ministry or defrocked, and never allowed to work as a chaplain at Sacred Heart Village, where children visit relatives and school groups perform.

''Just because no complaints were made against him there doesn't mean he quit his 'compulsive pedophilia,' '' McMurry said.

If a private employer received similar evaluations, it would investigate and terminate the employee if the allegations were confirmed, according to attorneys who specialize in employment law, including Edwin S. Hopson of Louisville.

Some lawyers said they would never advise a company to move such an employee where he had any access to children or the elderly because if he abused again, a jury likely would find it totally foreseeable and grossly negligent.