The Civil Trial of Michael Sprauer I

In one of the few priest sexual abuse cases that has gone to trial, a Multnomah County (OR) jury on May 16 awarded two men $1.4 million in damages against Michael Sprauer, the Department of Human Resources of the State of Oregon and the Oregon Youth Authority for Sprauer's molesting of them at the Maclaren Youth Correctional Facility in the early 1970s. This essay and the next will review the laws and that enabled the men, now 49 and 44, to bring the civil case (the jury found against Sprauer in the case of the two 49 year-olds but not the younger man). The final essay will review some of the deposition testimony for the trial that shows some of the ambiguities inherent in a trial like this.

But I will begin with a personal comment--because I met and talked to Michael Sprauer on numerous occasions between 1998-99 while he was director of religious services for the Oregon State Department of Corrections. I also will add some thoughts about sexual abuse in the 1970s.

Meeting Michael Sprauer

I had the occasion to meet "Father Mike," as he was known, because my then-wife was a chaplain at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem in the late 1990s. Sprauer oversaw the work of all the chaplains and religious programming in all state correctional institutions. He was highly respected by everyone I met, for he brought a seriousness and studiousness to issues of religious life within the prison walls and also a hard-headed knowledge of how a complex state bureacracy works. He took questioners' queries very seriously, and he seemed to be abreast of every issue related to inmate religious privileges and claims--an area which is very complex for any lawyer who has chosen to dip his/her foot in it. Indeed, when I was talking to a respected judge in Salem, who now is an appellate judge in this state, this person mentioned to me that Sprauer was known far and wide in the legal community as the "expert" on all inmate legal religious issues. That is, by the time he was in his mid 50's (which I estimated him to be in that period), he was at the "top" of his game. He was securely fixed in a state bureaucracy, highly regarded by all, careful and, apparently, caring at the same time.

I knew he had been a chaplain at Maclaren in the early 1970s, but that was just a part of the deep past of his "resume." When he and I would talk (usually at staff parties or special occasions), I would often probe him about religious liberty issues that were faced in the late 1990s (a "Wiccan" Chaplain?; length of inmate hair for "religious" purposes; access to literature that wouldn't be screened, etc.). I would never have suspected at the time that the just-beginning net of allegations of clergy sexual abuse would eventually catch him in its complex reticulations. Yet one thing I have also learned as I have lived is that people do all kinds of things in their youth that they later regret, and that our society has also "evolved" on many issues in such a way that what was hid or condoned in one era would be held criminal in another.

Let's take a trip back to the 1960s and 1970s in American Catholicism.

Clergy Sexual Abuse in the 1960s and 1970s

A Catholic friend, who was nurtured in the 1960s in Catholic schools in the womb of American Catholicism (Boston area), once told me that there were two "known facts" among clergy and informed lay people alike concerning sexual activity of priests in those days. First, the priesthood was full of homosexuals. Second, that sexual "contact" with boys, though not officially condoned, was widespread and known to the Church authorities. Why wasn't it exposed before the 1990s? Principally because the make-up of the Catholic Church in the earlier days, as well as the nature of American society. In the 1950s and 1960s the Catholic Church was still composed primarily of immigrants or children of immigrants who were still "outsiders" to the American experience. Even Catholics of accomplishment and elite education were aware of how they were treading on Protestant ground wherever they went (except at Notre Dame, Catholic U. and a few other prominent Catholic schools); i.e., they still were "outsiders" in the country. Sociologists have also pointed to a sort of "immigrant consciousness" that characterizes such communities. One manifestation of this consciousness was authority accorded to priests. Since priests were the representatives of Christ on earth, their conduct was pretty much above question, even if not completely above reproach. The best thing for young men to do was to 'be aware' when they were around priests suspected of being molesters. Sometimes if things got really bad a priest would be transferred to another assignment.

But the times were just not ripe, either in the Church or society, to bring the interests of young people against the weight of authority of the Church at that time. I think that one of the reasons, sociologically speaking, that clergy sex abuse allegations have had so much traction in America in the late 1990s and beyond is that Catholic lay people are now so integrated into the heart of America (i.e., they have lost the "immigrant consciousness" of earlier) that they just won't put up with that stuff anymore. The lay people have more degrees and have achieved more recognition publicly than the priest; why then defer to them on this issue? Of course, our society has changed dramatically, too, in crediting children's testimony and testimony of those who were abused as children, but the Catholic Church has also changed significantly. And because both of these things have changed in the last 40 years, any "explanation" of church authorities regarding past sexual abuse issues has to ring with such an air of improbability and insincerity that the full credibility of the church is shown to be shattered.

Different Explanations

For example, if the church today tried to be honest about life in the 1950 and 1960s (i.e., "we were aware of all the abuse and didn't do much about it, unless it got really bad, and then transferred the guy"), it would open itself to immense legal liability. On the other hand, if it denied that it knew about things (the general approach), it would look like it was trying to cover up obvious evidence of abuse. If it claimed that the local priests were "on their own" (and thus try to limit liability for the Church at large), the claim would be received as laughable, for if there is one organization that puts new meaning into the concept of male hierarchy in the world it is the Catholic Church. So, the Church has been absolutely trapped by the lawsuits. It has forced itself into lying, into not owning what it knows to be the truth--while at the same time trying to contend that it is the bearer of truth. Religions great and small need this kind of comeuppance every once in a while, lest they lose their grounding in common dust of human life.

Conclusion

It really wasn't in Michael Sprauer's interest that this case go to trial. The Catholic Church has settled nearly all its cases short of trial. Why? Precisely because it doesn't want the graphic details that came out in the Sprauer trial to emerge. Why did it go to trial? I don't know, except that the State and the Church don't have the same interests here. Usually the State hopes that it will escape liability because it can "wait it out" for a long time, and its legal talent is "free"--i.e., the lawyers in general are all on the public payroll anyway. And, it also knows that the priest will take the brunt of the "fall," as Sprauer has been taking in the media. And so the case went to the jury--and the jury concluded that Sprauer had abused Robert Paul and Randy Sloan in the early 1970s while he was a Maclaren chaplain.

The next essay sorts out the statutes at issue in this case--why this was a civil rather than criminal case.

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