Catholic Church blackmails mom–and that’s legal?
I’d been pondering a recent New Yorker piece questioning whether blackmail is actually an illegal act, and how you define blackmail, when this morning a bombshell story appeared on the front page of The New York Times, detailing a woman’s long affair with a Catholic priest, and the efforts made by the Church to cover it up:
O’FALLON, Mo. — With three small children and her marriage in trouble, Pat Bond attended a spirituality retreat for Roman Catholic women in Illinois 26 years ago in hopes of finding support and comfort.
What Ms. Bond found was a priest — a dynamic, handsome Franciscan friar in a brown robe — who was serving as the spiritual director for the retreat and agreed to begin counseling her on her marriage. One day, she said, as she was leaving the priest’s parlor, he pulled her aside for a passionate kiss.
Ms. Bond separated from her husband, and for the next five years she and the priest, the Rev. Henry Willenborg, carried on an intimate relationship, according to interviews and court documents. In public, they were both leaders in their Catholic community in Quincy, Ill. In private they functioned like a married couple, sharing a bed, meals, movie nights and vacations with the children.
Eventually they had a son, setting off a series of legal battles as Ms. Bond repeatedly petitioned the church for child support. The Franciscans acquiesced, with the stipulation that she sign a confidentiality agreement. It is now an agreement she is willing to break as both she and her child, Nathan Halbach, 22, are battling cancer.
A Mother, a Sick Son and His Father, the Priest – NYTimes.com.
If ever there is such a thing as legal blackmail, then this would certainly seem to be it: In order to gain support for the child she conceived with a priest, Ms. Bond has to sign away all rights to revealing the identity of the father. She is given hush money to ensure her silence.
Now, you could say this is a far cry from the Letterman case–where a TV producer, discovering his girlfriend was sleeping with the talk show host, threatened to tell all–or at least some–unless he was paid off. But is it really that different? What makes it okay for corporations to withhold severance money from fired employees unless they sign stringent “separation agreements,” basically giving away their rights to free speech, and possibly, their life stories? What allows a religious organization, in this case the Franciscans, to deny living expenses to a child for whom one of their own has clear responsibility, unless the mother agrees to shut up?
We think of blackmail as something from a 1940s film noir, where a seedy character in filthy raincoat and brimmed hat hisses to his victim, an envelope filled with incriminating evidence in hand. But it seems to me, blackmail can go the other way–through pefectly legal channels, where individuals demanding their basic rights–child support, severance pay, alimony–can be, legally, blackmailed into silence.
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I am no fan of the Catholic Church, and I think their approach to the issue of celibacy and its failures is heinous. But to say that this is blackmail is just ridiculous.
I object to consent agreements in which the plaintiff, usually in a position of extreme weakness, is required to sign a non-disclosure as part of a settlement agreement. Unfortunately, it is done all the time.
But if this were blackmail, some dimwitted lawyer would have raised this issue on appeal, and won. And for some people, half a loaf is better than none – they have the option not to sign the settlement agreement and to proceed to trial, or to take whatever they can get in settlement.
The time for the mother in this case to realize that this was “blackmail” was when she initially made her claim for child support. She should have allowed her claim to proceed through the court and allowed the court to rule on her claim. Actually, reading how much she received from the Franciscans in child support and lump sum settlement, it sounds like she did better with the settlement, non-disclosure and all. (This is especially true since the father, a Father, had taken a vow of poverty and thus had no money. I know, the Franciscans have money, but this is what they would have argued at trial, successfully.)
Whenever a settlement agreement is finalized in order to terminate a lawsuit, things are given up. If the son of this couple had not unfortunately ended up getting cancer at an early age, mom wouldn’t have been asking for more money and this wouldn’t be news.
And if you think that settlement agreements can’t come back and bite the party with “all the power”, guess again.
Several years ago a couple sued the bishop of Cleveland for violating the settlement agreement that the parents entered into after they sued the Catholic church for child molestation. The settlement was ten or more years earlier; it required that the offending priest never be placed in a situation where he would work with kids. Of course, the Cleveland diocese promptly placed the priest in a parish, where he re-offended.
When that news came out (some years later), the parents sued the diocese of Cleveland. The diocese’s attorneys argued “But you signed a settlement agreement saying that you would stay silent”. Of course, the parents responded “But you broke the agreement”; and they won in court.
From the NYT article, the Franciscans paid up what they said they would, and more. Was mom in a tight situation when she signed the agreement? Probably. But look at her history and see if she didn’t paint herself in a corner, over and over and over.
Blackmail, please.
Trueblack, your points are all valid; thanks for taking the time to articulate them so well. And, obviously, this is not blackmail according to legal practice. But I still question the emotional/moral issues here, and I do think the elaborate contract involved becomes a kind of counter-blackmail, where silence is insured in exchange for money (in this case, money that, I believe, was her due).
Maybe I should retitle this post: Mom Blackmails Catholic Church, Catholic Church Blackmails Her Back–and It’s All Legal!
In response to another comment. See in context »Hello Susan,
No this is not actually blackmail which is extortion of money or something else of value from a person by the threat of exposing a criminal act or discreditable information. The church did not demand any money or anything of value from the woman in question. It was the woman who demanded money from the church for child support. No doubt the reason the Franciscan Order agreed was, at least in part, to prevent the release of discreditable information about one of its members. All that the Order asked was that she not reveal that they were paying her. I am sorry but that is not blackmail.
Blackmail or not, whatever anyone wants to call it, that despicable priest is at least as responsible for that child as the mother is. For those who hold themselves up as models of right, there should have been no question at all about what needed to be done, and a “silence” agreement was not it. Shame on the Franciscans …