Robert Blair Kaiser

Whistle: Tom Doyle's Steadfast Witness for Victims of Clerical Sexual Abuse Robert Blair Kaiser

Publisher Marketing: In WHISTLE, author Robert Blair Kaiser makes use of dual literary genres to pay tribute to Doyle's work during this dramatic and disruptive era of the American Catholic Church. Fitting together like a sandwich, the genres of biography and journalistic reporting complement each other while retaining their individual integrities. The end result is a very vivid and engrossing narrative. The trail began when a couple, happily married for many years but banned from the church's sacramental life due to a prior divorce, came seeking relief from their painful status in the Church. Young Father Doyle helped them receive an annulment (and at no cost; a rarity!), then witnessed their marriage vows. Not surprisingly, as news of this rippled through the parish and beyond, other couples began seeking his help for annulments. In the early summer of 1984, Archbishop Pio Laghi assigned Doyle to look into a report that nine boys had been sexually abused by Gilbert Gauthe, a priest in the Layfayette, Louisiana diocese. The diocese had handled the matter in the customary way; i.e., by settling with money to the parents and receiving promises of silence in return. However, parents of one boy had reneged on the agreement, hired a lawyer, and filed a lawsuit against the diocese. With Gauthe's indictment (and some careless handling of the documents), the case became public knowledge and more boys came forward with claims of abuse from Gauthe-one as early as 1976. With this assignment, Doyle found himself slowly falling down the rabbit hole into a subterranean world he hadn't known existed (nor did the laity). There he was introduced to the "clerical culture" of the hierarchy-an exclusive society of men living in princely privilege secured for themselves by themselves as high-ranking powers in the Church. Later, as the entire sex and cover-up scandals unrolled in public, it was clear for all to see that for years, the members of this culture had been protecting themselves with secrecy, deception, and all sorts of devious maneuvering. Not money alone, but silence, power, and exclusivity were the coins of the realm. As Kaiser reports, claiming to act "for the good of the Church" was the default position that bishops and popes used to justify their unsavory behaviors. Kaiser's reporting supplies what was and was not taking place in the broader landscape for Doyle's biography. He describes some of the hard-to-believe plots and actual underhanded protocols provided for the hierarchy now under attack. The Vatican was complicit in some of the devious schemes bishops were using to shelter church assets from survivors and their attorneys. He quotes directly (chapter and verse) from the testimony in some of the depositions, including that of Cardinal Bernard Law, whose hypocrisy, deception and betrayal of Doyle was truly exceptional. He tried to awaken the hierarchy to the number and scope of sexual scandals that were tumbling into public awareness via the media, plus an untold number of others waiting in the wings. In 1985, with two other concerned men, a Catholic attorney and a priest psychiatrist, Doyle created a 92-page report giving the bishops information and helps for handling the coming storm. They handed it to a committee of the USCCB meeting at that time, and then mailed a copy to every U. S. bishop. Sadly, the report went unheeded. One bishop proposed that the USCCB create a lay board to oversee and deal with sexual violations among the clergy, but the idea of taking suggestions from the laity and sharing with them a bit of power was not to the liking of the majority.