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SANTA CLARA — The woman went to confession at Our Lady of Peace seeking forgiveness.
She suffered from a sex addiction, she told the young priest.
The Rev. Gerardus Hauwert Jr., fresh out of the seminary, offered to help. For months, he provided her private prayer sessions and sent her to rid her demons through one of the Catholic Church’s oldest and most mysterious rituals: exorcism.
But what happened over the next year at this parish known for its towering statue of the Virgin Mary facing Highway 101 would end up exposing the San Jose Diocese yet again to allegations of sexual abuse — and raise alarm about how an inner circle of priests responded to claims against one of its own.
Unlike the horrific revelations of priests molesting young children, the alleged indiscretions in this case touched on the boundaries of temptation and faith — a different kind of violation of trust.
The accuser was a devout and deeply troubled Santa Clara woman who was already a rape survivor. And what she claims the priest did to her in late 2011 and 2012 — engaging in a series of sexual encounters, some involving holy water on her bare breasts and a crucifix on her naked inner thigh — formed the basis of a 2013 lawsuit against the diocese, alleging that the priest took advantage of her vulnerability to sexually assault her.
What the priest says she did to him — sending hundreds of sex videos, nude photos and underwear and calling him relentlessly — would lay the foundation of the church’s defense, that she was the sexual harasser who “regularly seduced men for sex through witchcraft.”
‘The priests made it worse’
The shocking back-and-forth is detailed in a confidential 61-page report prepared by a church-hired investigator and internal emails and letters obtained by the Bay Area News Group, providing a fuller picture of the woman’s claims in her lawsuit. While the additional information doesn’t clear up which side was telling the truth — the priest or the parishioner — the investigative report concluded that Hauwert, Our Lady of Peace’s former Pastor Jose Giunta and the Rev. Gary Thomas, the diocese-sanctioned exorcist, kept meeting with her in the year after her initial confession, even though they claimed her behavior was growing more overtly sexual. Only when the woman threatened to share her story with the bishop did they take “a different course of action.”
“It was at this point evidence was destroyed and (the woman) was told to refrain from having contact with Father Hauwert,” the internal report said.
Giunta told the investigator they advised Hauwert to delete the woman’s videos and photos, because “it’s no good for a priest to have.”
The Rev. Thomas acknowledged he should have gone to the bishop immediately with the photos, which Hauwert later deleted but didn’t because “the demon in (the woman), the Jezebel spirit, divides and conquers.”
The diocese ultimately settled her case in 2015, but details were not disclosed.
The woman — who this news organization is not naming because she is a victim of an alleged sexual assault — did not want to be interviewed but authorized her San Jose lawyer to share her personal correspondence with church officials and speak on her behalf.
“You’ve got to remember, she’s the victim here. She went to them for help and instead the priests made it worse,” her attorney Rob Mezzetti said. “It’s like an alcoholic going to his sponsor and the sponsor saying, ‘Let’s talk and grab a drink.’ ”
Any priest who uses a woman’s confession to exploit her weakness and sexually abuse her, he said, “is a perpetrator, should be defrocked and belongs in jail.”
Instead, Hauwert was transferred — to a parish in Greenland.
Church: ‘No response’
The case comes to light as Catholic churches across the country struggle to reconcile how church leaders handled decades of sexual abuse among priests.
“There is a need for transparency in the way the Church responds to allegations of the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable adults,” San Jose Bishop Patrick McGrath wrote to parishioners in September in the wake of a scathing grand jury report in Pennsylvania.
But on Thursday, when the diocese joined a growing movement and released the names of 15 priests who had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct with minors, it failed to include the names of priests accused of similar conduct with vulnerable adults, like the Santa Clara woman.
And diocese officials have refused to answer a series of detailed questions about the allegations and internal church communications in her case.
“We’ll have no response,” diocese spokeswoman Liz Sullivan said earlier this month, and none of the church officials identified in this story would respond to interview requests.
Hauwert, now the pastor at St. Michael the Archangel in Ontario, Canada, wouldn’t discuss the case, either. When reached earlier this month, the 46-year-old priest said he would call back shortly but never did and didn’t return repeated messages. In an interview with the church’s hired investigator in 2012, he denied any inappropriate sexual behavior.
But troubling questions remain: Why did the church try to treat a woman’s sexual addiction in the first place? And why was exorcism — rather than more conventional psychological counseling — the solution?
Why an exorcism?
The website for the San Jose diocese lays out a strict process for the use of exorcism. “Solemn exorcisms, according to the Canon law of the church, can be exercised only by an ordained priest, with the express permission of the local bishop, and only after a careful medical examination to exclude the possibility of mental illness.”
But it is not clear from the investigator’s report that those criteria were met. Instead, the report says, not long after the woman’s confession in August 2011, Hauwert himself referred her to Dr. Richard Hill, a church-sanctioned psychologist. Hill, according to Mezzetti, told the woman “your problem is spiritual” and recommended an exorcism. When asked questions about his work on this case, Hill replied by email: “I can’t help you, sorry.”
So she began seeing the Rev. Thomas, pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Saratoga and one of dozens of exorcists sanctioned by the church across the country. Part of his job in evaluating potential subjects for the ancient ritual, he explained in an interview in 2011, is to distinguish between the “psychological and diabolical.” His life story — about his journey from a doubter of demons to a believer — inspired the 2011 Hollywood movie “The Rite” starring Anthony Hopkins.
In an interview published in June in MEL magazine, Thomas said, “Eighty percent of the people who come to us are sexual abuse victims. … I’m not saying that those who are sexual assault victims are going to be demonically affected, but what I am saying is that it creates an opening that Satan can use.”
Thomas told the Santa Clara woman to delete the racy photos of herself, the diocese investigative report said, because “the demons were feeding on them.”
The church’s investigation didn’t address whether she was possessed. It did conclude, however, that the woman “without question is a vulnerable adult.” By the church’s definition, a vulnerable adult is “impaired due to a mental illness” or other issue, which apparently would not make her a candidate for exorcism, under the church’s own protocol. The report said Hauwert, Giunta and Thomas identified that the woman was a vulnerable adult “early on in their meetings” with her and “continued to see her.”
Experts in sex abuse and priest scandals found that troubling. They say the case reveals an alarming, old-world approach to modern problems.
“The priests in this case acted not only unprofessionally but in a manner that betrays total ignorance of mental health issues,” said Thomas Doyle, a Catholic priest in the Dominican Order and canon expert. The clergy, he said, “is not equipped to deal with serious psychosexual disorders, as the recent past has proven.”
Exorcism, he said, “is not appropriate for anything but the subject of horror movies.”
The only time an exorcism might be appropriate, says Oakland-based sex addiction therapist Jenner Bishop, is if the person is deeply spiritual, believes it could work and is able to externalize the problem by blaming the devil instead of themselves.
Still, Bishop said, “an exorcism is an unusual treatment plan. I should reiterate that. An exorcism is an unusual treatment plan.”
The confidential report
In September 2012, just over a year after the woman first went to confession with Hauwert, “she finally had a breakdown and came forward,” Mezzetti said. She first complained to Giunta, revealing “everything,” the woman told the investigator.
Hauwert also came forward to his boss Giunta that month, prompting the pastor to take over her personal consultations. Giunta told the investigator she tried to touch him, too, but he stopped her. He said the woman also offered to send nude photos, but he turned her down.
In November 2012, the woman complained to the diocese Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults, established in the early 2000s in response to the priest abuse scandals then.
The woman’s allegations were never forwarded to the police. But church officials took other action: They began sending the woman to a therapist, Mezzetti said. And they referred her complaint to the Insight Group, an investigative agency comprised of former San Jose police. Over a three-week period, Rick Botar, a former San Jose Police sergeant, interviewed the woman and Hauwert, Giunta, Thomas, a parish security officer and receptionist.
According to the woman’s account, during their private prayer sessions on church property, Hauwert poured holy water over her breasts, rubbed her bare chest, and placed a crucifix over her chest, vagina and inner thigh. The pair would kiss, she said, and she said that she would grab him both over and under his pants, once masturbating him as he prayed outside the rectory. She told her attorney the pair had sexual encounters “about 20 times” between 2011 and 2012. At one point, she carved his name in her thigh.
According to the lawsuit, the priest was “falsely representing to her that sexual acts with (him) were a necessary part of her therapy.” The priest, she contends, also encouraged her to send the sex tapes and nude photos of herself nightly, as well as her underwear and dresses.
Hauwert acknowledged to the investigator that he received the videos and knew they included nude subject matter involving his parishioner, but only watched small snippets and told her they were “morally wrong.”
When she sent him underwear and other clothing, he considered them “things of an evil nature,” Hauwert told the investigator. So, he burned them, on the advice of Father Thomas.
Hauwert said he tried to prevent the woman from touching him, told her not to send sex tapes and blocked her chronic text messaging. Pastor Giunta told the investigator, however, that at one point he had seen Hauwert and the woman holding hands and that he discouraged it.
“It is one thing to do prayers on someone, another to touch,” Giunta told Hauwert, according to the report. “That creates a relationship and that is not good, they’ll be attached to you.”
‘Appropriate and compassionate support’
Thomas told the investigator it was “public knowledge” that the woman “regularly seduced men for sex through witchcraft,” though it is not clear in the report whether he offered a basis for his claim. So he believed she was making up her allegations to get back at Hauwert for denying her advances.
The Our Lady of Peace receptionist told the investigator that the woman appeared obsessed with the priest and called him “hundreds of times.” Hauwert tried to block her calls, she said, but the woman kept changing her number so he wouldn’t recognize the calls were from her, according to the internal report.
At one point, the receptionist said the woman told her, “I want to see him (Hauwert) fall, all of the priests fall, especially him.”
Once the woman complained to the diocese, things started to change. The private prayer sessions and exorcisms stopped and Pastor Giunta also sent her a letter on church stationery, trying to limit her attendance at church services “to maintain a healthy parish.”
“Although we have attempted to provide appropriate and compassionate support and boundaries, your repeated and persistent pattern of behavior with both Fr. Gerardus Hauwert and myself qualify as harassment,” Giunta wrote in the December 2012 letter. “Both Fr. Gerardus and I will continue to pray for you and the edification of the Body of Christ.”
Mezzetti said the letter was the ultimate slap in the face.
“She came to him for sex addiction help for crying out loud and they sent her a letter that her conduct was inappropriate,” Mezzetti said.
In an email to the Rev. Thomas obtained by this news agency, the woman’s father pleaded with him to continue the exorcism treatment. Also a devout Catholic, her father expressed concerns about Hauwert’s “explicit prayers” with his daughter, but suggested that the priest is “human” and can be “tempted by the devil.”
Emails show the church discussed internally how to handle the family’s request not to end her visits with the exorcist — alluding to psychological problems, not demonic ones.
“If we cut if (sic) off for that reason, it could surely look like retaliation,” Monsignor Francis Cilia, who oversees the diocese clergy, wrote to the pastor of a neighboring parish where the woman started attending Mass. “Can’t the therapist figure out that she has many loose screws, that she is not firing on all thrusters?”
A new parish in Greenland
Hauwert’s parents, who still live in San Jose, said in an interview this month with this news organization that they believed their son did nothing wrong. They said he had wanted to be a priest since childhood and had a strong connection to the Virgin Mary, which inspired him to treat women with special respect.
“My son’s goal was to help people,” his father, Gerardus Hauwert Sr. said, adding that he knew only a little of the accusations except that she constantly called him. “I think he tried to get her help and that’s all he would do.”
Parishioners threw the younger Hauwert a farewell party before he was transferred to Greenland in the spring of 2013. The diocese would not explain why he was sent away. His parents don’t know either. They would only say he was asked whether he wanted to go to a hot or cold location. “He said cold,” his father said.
He ended up in Ontario leading a parish in the Diocese of Peterborough, where officials said they didn’t know about the allegation in San Jose. The Diocese of Copenhagen, which oversees Roman Catholic churches in Greenland, did not respond to questions.
Shortly before Hauwert left San Jose, a church official wrote his accuser to explain that the investigation into her allegations had been closed and that “Father Gerardus Hauwert has accepted a new assignment outside the diocese, where he will continue his ministry.”
The church official told her the diocese would continue offering her therapeutic services through June 2013, but if she wanted to continue using an exorcist she would have to contact the neighboring dioceses.
“I have until June to heal?” she asked in an email, incredulously. “A year of damage I feel like I (am) trying to go back into the world from isolation. Ask the bishop if he wants me to be like the other victims and leave the Catholic faith.”
