Victims’ kin desire policy to punish Catholic officials

WASHINGTON – Sally Ellison does not have an appointment with the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. She is not even a Catholic. But she is flying 900 miles from her home in Wisconsin to Washington today for a meeting of U.S. bishops, and she thinks they should hear what she has got to say.

“Because of their negligence, my son is dead. I think that’s a pretty good reason for them to listen to me, don’t you?” she said.

After an unusual hearing last month, a judge in Hudson, Wis., ruled that a Catholic priest, the Rev. Ryan Erickson, “probably” murdered James Ellison, 22, and Daniel O’Connell, 39, on Feb. 5, 2002.

The priest, who had a penchant for real handguns and for pretending to shoot people with his thumb and index finger, avoided prosecution by hanging himself from a rectory fire escape last year.

At the conclusion of a “John Doe hearing” – a form of trial without a defendant that is allowed in just five states – St. Croix County Circuit Judge Eric J. Lundell said he was convinced that Erickson, 31, shot the two men after O’Connell accused him of molesting children.

“On a scale of 1 to 10 as far as strength of evidence, I would consider this a 10,” the judge said.

Members of the devoutly Catholic O’Connell family and the staunchly Lutheran Ellison family are coming to Washington in hopes of addressing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which will meet here for the next three days. The families’ 10 representatives say they want “accountability from the bishops” and a meeting with the pope.

They also have drafted steps they think the church should take. They want a mechanism for punishing seminary rectors and bishops “who recklessly ordain troubled seminarians.” They want disclosure of the names and whereabouts of “every admitted, proven or credibly accused Catholic cleric.” They want each bishop to publicly acknowledge his mistakes, meet with victims and support legislation in all 50 states to lift the criminal and civil statutes of limitations in child sex abuse cases.

They call it the O’Connell-Ellison Five-Point Plan.

“Our bishop hasn’t called us once. Not once,” said Janet O’Connell, 74, mother of one victim. “I want to keep going up the ladder until I get some kind of an answer. It’s got to stop.”

After three years of settling lawsuits, instituting police background checks and removing hundreds of known or suspected abusers from ministry, the bishops appear eager to put the issue behind them. Their former president, Bishop Wilton Gregory, declared last year that the “terrible history” of sex abuse by priests “is history.” The subject is barely on the agenda for this week’s meeting.

More than anything else, it is the passionate, homespun efforts of sex abuse victims that keep the bishops from turning the page on the scandal. Week after week, in diocese after diocese, victims and their families distribute leaflets, deliver letters to bishops and lobby legislators.

The O’Connells and the Ellisons have sought advice on how to pressure the church from one of the best-known plaintiff’s lawyers in the specialized arena of sex abuse lawsuits, Jeffrey Anderson of St. Paul, Minn. But they say they will not sue the church.

“We want to be able to make recommendations to the pope. That sounds way out,” said Thomas O’Connell Sr., 76, the dead man’s father. “But when you look at it the other way, we’re not asking for millions.”

Dan O’Connell, who had a wife and two young children, was killed in the office of his family business, a funeral parlor. Ellison, an intern who was a semester from graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in mortuary science, might have heard the shot and come running. He was felled by a bullet in the office doorway.

At first, the police investigated rumors about drug addicts seeking embalming fluids. They looked for gambling debts or spurned lovers.

It was more than a year before investigators questioned the priest. According to testimony at the John Doe hearing, Erickson knew details, including the position of the bodies, that police had not made public. He told police that if he had committed such a crime, “I don’t think I could live with myself.”

Before his suicide, Erickson wrote two notes in which he maintained his innocence but expressed fear that police were going to pin the deaths on him. Some parishioners at St. Patrick’s Church in Hudson, a town of about 10,000 people across the St. Croix River from Minneapolis, still believe the priest.

Thomas O’Connell Jr., 53, the victim’s older brother, said he is satisfied the case is solved.

In a statement to the press last month, the Diocese of Superior, Wis., said it was unaware of any allegations that Erickson was molesting children until Dec. 17, 2004, two days before his suicide.

But 10 days ago, Bishop Raphael Fliss apologized to parishioners and acknowledged he had known for more than a decade that Erickson was accused of molesting a boy in 1992, while in seminary. Because police investigated that incident in 1994 and decided not to file charges, the bishop said, he ordained Erickson in 2000 and did not remove him from ministry when the U.S. bishops’ conference adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward sex abuse in June 2002.