The New Rules for Keeping Secrets
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Priests and lawyers changed course last week, making it a little easier to speak out ____________ by ADAM COHEN
The Rev. Joseph Towle, a priest in the Bronx, N.Y., usually hears confessions, but recently he offered up a jaw-dropping one of his own. Thirteen years ago, a man named Jesus Fornes told Father Towle he had committed a murder, one for which two innocent men had been convicted. Towle disclosed last month that Fornes, now dead, was the killer, and urged that the men--who had served 13 years in prison--be freed.
Towle's bombshell provoked outrage from two directions. To some, it was shocking that a Catholic priest would violate his calling by betraying a penitent. To others, the shock was that a man of God kept silent while two innocent men languished behind bars for a crime they didn't commit.
Time was when the confidential professions were reliably confidential. A lawyer kept your crimes and financial mischief to himself; a priest took your sins to the grave.
But two sets of professionals who have built their power on centuries of keeping secrets--lawyers and priests--are revisiting that tradition, partly as a way to repair their reputations in a world grown less tolerant of the powerful taking advantage of the powerless. More specifically, they are also fending off the modern reality of lawsuits. (bold mine)
... now each group, while defending the core of its privilege, has taken steps to let their practitioners talk a little more.
The A.B.A. House of Delegates ... voted 243 to 184 in favor of a new rule that would allow lawyers to disclose client secrets to prevent "reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm." ... the new policy lets lawyers speak out even when the potential for harm is not immediate and when the act is not criminal.
In Boston the archdiocese .... announced last week that it was supporting a bill in the state legislature that would add priests and other clergy to a list of professionals, including teachers and social workers, who are legally required to report suspected child sex-abuse cases to the authorities.
The Boston church's shift--it opposed the bill a week earlier--came amid a messy sexual-abuse scandal. Bernard Cardinal Law recently admitted ... that after he was informed that John Geoghan, a priest, had allegedly molested seven boys, he transferred Geoghan to several other Boston parishes. Geoghan, who retired in 1993 and was defrocked five years later, is accused of molesting at least 70 children. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
This kind of legal exposure and the press that comes with it have made it hard for the church to deal with sexual abuse by priests as an internal matter, as it once did. If the bill passes, Massachusetts would become the 12th state to require priests to report child sexual abuse.
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from the August 20, 2001 issue of Time magazine