Spoils of the Kingdom: Clergy Misconduct and Religious Community

4. Authenticity Lost: Faith and Victimization

86 4 Authenticity Lost: Faith and Victimization Authenticity of a religion is not an objective matter to be measured; it is a perception of legitimacy by a critical mass of believers in a faith community’s traditions and leadership authority. Whether the community is hierarchically or congregationally operated (e.g., Shupe 1995, 36–38), local or national, the effects of clergy scandal can range from prison sentences of clerical deviants to organizational devastation. For example, within the episcopal (monarchical) reality of the modern American Catholic Church, an obscure cleric, the Reverend Alvin Campbell, wreaked havoc in small congregations in Morrisonville and Rochester, Illinois. Campbell had been an Army chaplain and, as it was eventually learned, was having sex with a fifteen-year-old male church organist. After the young man’s parents reported Campbell to his military superiors, he was allowed to resign and was given an honorable discharge . In civilian life he moved to Rochester, and while pastoring St. Mary’s Church of the Assumption, he had sex with boys for over a year and a half. There, too, he was pressured to resign from that position when a teenage girl reported to her parents that he had sexually fondled her. At the same time that Louisiana’s Father Gilbert Gauthe was developing his own list of victims during the early to mid-1980s, Campbell was quietly being moved to a new Illinois parish by his bishop. Campbell at one point sought out counseling from a church official who “advised him to continue therapy and to visit his mother” (Stephens 1986b). Camp- Faith and Victimization 87 bell was assigned to St. Maurice Church in Morrisonville, where, civil authorities came to learn, he molested at least fourteen boys. The Illinois Division of Criminal Investigation at first hesitated to prosecute Campbell, particularly when the church insisted it could handle the matter internally. There was a mixture of suspicion and confidence about how much church elites knew of Campbell’s past behavior. Said John Farrell, mayor of Morrisonville and a lector at St. Maurice, “I know there’s a shortage of priests . . . but I have my doubts how the diocese could send a priest with that problem to a small rural church where there were no other Catholic churches for 15 miles. It seems like an obvious question—how could it happen when they knew about it beforehand? You just ask yourself—if they knew he was a pedophile” (Stephens 1986b; see also Stephens 1986a in “The Campbell Case” series). Campbell pleaded guilty to molesting seven Morrisonville youths and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison, rendering an entire community of faith in one small region suspect of the larger denominational entity. Wrote a journalist, “Campbell’s crimes devastated the families of the boys he molested. But fear of the unknown also gnawed at hundreds of Morrisonville families for months” (Stephens 1986a). The Reverend Barry Bailey, pastor of a Fort Worth, Texas, 10,500member First United Methodist Church (a mega-congregation that during the 1980s had sixteen associate pastors on staff), retired seemingly with decorum and good wishes in 1994, but two years later, this church, a presbyterian-style (republican or lay-representative type) congregation, was rife with scandal. Eight women accused Bailey of sexual exploitation, from unwanted advances, lewd phone calls (often about masturbation), and sexual harassment to seduction of two of the women during counseling sessions and his predilection for masturbating himself while sexually “teaching” them. Damages sought in lawsuits ranged from $678,000 to $4.7 million for such things as psychological and medical bills resulting from stress, trauma, anguish, and loss of reputation. A female former director of youth ministries, who quit her job at First United Methodist in June 1995, sought $2.91 million in compensation. She testified in court, “He said that I should throw you on the ground and force you to—[have sex with] me. . . . I was shocked. I was scared. I didn’t say anything. I was just thinking, ‘How am I going to get out of this office? How was I going to get out of my job?’” Bailey denied the seduction and masturbation talk/act charges, but they nevertheless tore his congregation apart, leading him to retire as the church’s senior minister in 1994 and later to relinquish his minis- 88 spoils of the kingdom terial credentials in the United Methodist Church. After a five-week trial, jurors...