Vatican's top American has mixed record on abuse

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - In 1997, the Rev. John Conley walked into a dimly lit church rectory to find a disheveled boy standing there and someone else crawling out a back door. The boy told him he had been wrestling with the parish's head priest.

Conley told church leaders and police. After complaining loudly when the archdiocese decided not to remove the Rev. James Aylward, Conley ended up being disciplined himself.

Conley said the San Francisco archbishop wanted to send him to a hospital "where they send priests who are disturbed."

"He said, 'Father Conley, you do know what wrestling is, don't you?'" Conley recalled. "And I said, 'As a matter of fact, I do know what wrestling is. It's usually in a gymnasium with all the lights on. It is not a 60-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy in a hallway."

The archbishop is now Cardinal William Levada, the highest-ranking American at the Vatican and head of the office that defrocks pedophile priests.

While Levada, 73, has played a key role in several church sex-abuse reforms, in several cases as archbishop in California and Oregon he kept some accused molesters in the church and failed to share some allegations with police or parishioners.

According to interviews and hundreds of pages of personnel files, deposition transcripts and court records over a 20-year period reviewed by The Associated Press, Levada allowed molesters to remain in the priesthood, didn't respond to pleas to notify parishioners of an abusive priest and worked with an alleged abuser to establish a lay review board.

Aylward later admitted to a history of inappropriate conduct with boys and was removed from the ministry. The archdiocese maintains Conley, who was a federal prosecutor before becoming a priest, was disciplined because of anger management problems, not because he reported suspected abuse.

Levada's supporters say it's unfair to judge him outside the context of the era, when not only the church but the justice system was more lenient toward abusers and more likely to believe that they could be rehabilitated.

Pope Benedict XVI has recently vowed to take action on the issue, after a round of scandals worldwide left the Vatican initially blaming the media and abortion rights and pro-gay marriage groups. Critics of Levada say his past could imperil reform as the Vatican navigates what could be a transformative moment in its history.

"You don't rise to that level by upsetting the apple cart," said James Jenkins, who resigned as chairman of the San Francisco lay review board after becoming disillusioned with Levada's handling of several abuse cases. "To think that he is going to turn his back on the very conservatives that supported him to get to that position is laughable."

Bishop John Wester, former vicar for clergy in San Francisco, counters that Levada is a strong reformer.

Levada was appointed to lead the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Benedict, who - as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - held the post until becoming pope in 2005. Many of the scandals date to the tenure of Benedict's more popular predecessor, John Paul II, who is now widely seen as having dragged his feet on eliminating sex abuse from the church.

As an archbishop, Levada established one of the first boards in the nation where congregation members reviewed clergy abuse claims and helped develop the church's "zero tolerance" policy in the U.S. In his current role, he has suggested that bishops worldwide adopt the U.S. standards and report abuse to police when required by civil law. He also played an important role in the Vatican's decision earlier this month to take over the scandal-plagued Legionaries of Christ, whose founder sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least one child.

"He knows on the ground what that experience is," Wester said. "It's very complicated, because you're dealing with the victims and the perpetrators and as an administrator he had to respond to all of those people."

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Levada would have no comment when asked to respond to a set of questions about his actions in Portland and San Francisco.

Levada himself has acknowledged mistakes, without referring specifically to priest sex abuse or particular cases. In an interview with "PBS NewsHour" last month, he said he was "learning by doing" as a bishop and "I certainly could have done some things better than I did."

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When he became archbishop in Portland in 1986, Levada inherited an explosive scandal.

The Rev. Thomas Laughlin had served six months in prison for sex crimes and parishioners were outraged that he was still a priest. Levada met with the families and wrote directly to Ratzinger, petitioning successfully for Laughlin's removal from the priesthood.

Levada told PBS it "was a very good learning experience for me. ... I was helped to take a closer look at every case that came before me."

Two years later, the archdiocese called police when it received a report that another priest had molested a 17-year-old boy. Levada sent the cleric to inpatient therapy, prepared a press release and dismissed him from ministry in 1990 after he admitted abusing others.

"I think he had a really good sense that the Laughlin scandal had been handled really, really badly,'" said Kelly Clark, a Portland attorney who deposed Levada. "I think he decided he was going to try to keep his shirt clean."

In a 2006 deposition, however, Levada said he received complaints about at least six other abusive priests but only reported one to police because the others were from the past. No announcements were made in parishes where molester priests had served.

"So many of these cases involved abuse that happened decades before," Levada said of making parish announcements. "It seems to me that what you're suggesting would affect a priest's ability to minister and affect his reputation among the people."