Center Must Pay $5.7 Million Over Abuse by Priest It Treated

In the northern Minnesota town of Bemidji, where Mark Smith grew up, it was an article of faith: You obeyed your parish priest.

Smith did. And when he was 9, he says, the Father James Porter molested him.

Now, 24 years after the encounter that devastated his faith and shadowed his life, Smith and other victims of the former priest are receiving compensation from an unusual and controversial source--a center that counseled Porter before the incidents.

The Servants of the Paraclete Treatment Center in Jemez Springs, N.M., agreed to pay nearly $5.7 million to 21 Minnesotans who said Porter sexually abused them while a Roman Catholic priest at the Bemidji parish in 1969 and 1970, after he had spent time at the center.

The settlement raises a question that worries some who treat sex offenders: Should treatment centers be held responsible when treatment does not work?

“It’s a considerable threat to treatment programs,” said Gerry Kaplan, director of Alpha Human Services in Minneapolis, which treated Porter decades later. “Treatment programs cannot be responsible for the actions of criminals. They’re responsible for their own behavior. We’re not.”

But victims believe the system put a pedophile back in a parish and bears part of the blame.

“It is one way to hold them accountable,” said Smith, who lives in the Twin Cities area. “I feel they have to make restitution for what they did, for the suffering we’ve been put through.”

Under the settlement approved in November, the New Mexico center admitted no wrongdoing. Most of the money, $5.3 million, would come from three insurance companies if they agree to pay.

“They were negligent in the way they treated him, they were negligent in the way they released him and they were negligent in suggesting that he was anything less than totally unfit for the priesthood,” said Jeffrey Anderson, attorney for the 21 victims involved in the settlement. “They implied that he had been cured.”

An important distinction is that from 1947 to 1977 the New Mexico facility was not a treatment center but a place for monastic religious retreats, said Father Liam Hoare, president of the Servants of the Paraclete congregation.

“We never purported to be a treatment center,” Hoare said. Instead, priests and brothers spent time in private prayer, at Mass or in one-on-one sessions with a spiritual adviser.

Porter later participated in a 13-week program at Alpha Human Services for people who deny or greatly minimize their offenses, as part of a 1992 conviction for molesting a baby-sitter in Minnesota.

He is serving an 18-year prison term in Massachusetts after pleading guilty to 41 counts of sexual abuse while a priest there in the 1960s.

Alpha Human Services has been sued only once in 20 years and that case was dismissed, Kaplan said. But he believes suits such as the one against Paraclete will make it harder to get insurance and could chill efforts to treat sex offenders.

“In our society, we always want to blame somebody when something goes wrong. And it’s wrong to blame someone other than the perpetrator,” Kaplan said. “Typically there is someone other than the perpetrator with deeper pockets.”

“There’s no doubt it will spur similar lawsuits,” said Cassandra Thomas, president of the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault. “I don’t know of one treatment plan other than death where they can promise that recidivism will not occur.”

Thomas said she is concerned about lawsuits--or the fear of them--driving treatment centers out of business.

“The reality is, these people are getting out (of jail),” she said. “If we don’t come up with a treatment, we haven’t done anything but put them into an environment where they get more angry and visualize more offenses.”

The suits also could drive the Archdiocese of Santa Fe to bankruptcy. In November, the archdiocese asked parishes for cash to help fight dozens of sex-abuse lawsuits that could cost up to $50 million. Many priests or former priests named in the lawsuits attended the Servants of the Paraclete center.

People in the field say that treatment cannot “cure” criminal behavior, but that if offenders want to change, counseling may help control or redirect their urges. That philosophy has changed considerably since Porter was counseled by the New Mexico center.

“I’m not saying that in any way it was justifiable,” Kaplan said. “But we constantly evaluate their misdeeds by contemporary standards rather than by the standards of how these situations were handled 20 years ago.”

Hoare said the New Mexico center hired trained therapists and counselors after realizing the problem was not easily solved.

“The term ‘Pray and it will go away’ just doesn’t fit anymore,” he said.

But Smith, one of the victims, said the center still should have known Porter would abuse again.

“I don’t buy the excuse that ‘We didn’t know,’ ” he said. “It just doesn’t wash. . . . You don’t put an alcoholic back behind the bar. You don’t put a pedophile back in a parish.”