Robin Laananen
Sister Fran Ferder and the Rev. John Heagle.
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In 1988, a woman showed up at the South Seattle office of a counseling center called Therapy and Renewal Associates, known as TARA, saying she had been abused by a Catholic priest while in high school. According to her later account, she was referred to TARA by the Seattle Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church. TARA was run by two extraordinary people—a nun and a priest who had formed a highly unusual professional and personal partnership. Sister Fran Ferder and the Rev. John Heagle practiced as internationally known therapists while advancing what for the church were subversive ideas about sexuality and church hierarchy. They were at the center of the Seattle Archdiocese's response to a nascent sexual-abuse crisis that was beginning to grip the Catholic Church nationwide.
The nature of the counseling the woman received at Therapy and Renewal Associates in 1988 is the subject of a recently filed lawsuit that questions in whose interest they were acting: that of the woman, who was ostensibly their client, or the church. It could be another example of the church's early tendency to minimize the consequences of sexual abuse by priests. And the charges suggest the need for scrutiny of one of the least-understood aspects of the Catholic abuse crisis—the role of the therapists used by the church to help both victims and perpetrators. But the story of therapists Ferder and Heagle is not a simple one. It is as complex as the conduct of the archdiocese itself during this pivotal period.
Ferder and Heagle helped draw up the Seattle Archdiocese's initial protocols for dealing with abuse allegations, protocols that were at the time far more progressive than those of virtually every other archdiocese in the country. The protocols included removing a priest immediately when allegations surfaced. The nun and the priest were also part of a response team the archdiocese deployed for "listening sessions" in shaken communities that had learned of abuse in their midst.
Even more crucially, the Seattle Archdiocese relied on their clinical services. It used TARA to evaluate abusive priests, including some of the state's most notorious predators. At the same time, the church sent victims of such abuse to Ferder and Heagle, often paying for the counseling they delivered.
The woman who came to TARA in 1988 says she didn't understand the relationship between TARA and the archdiocese. Now that she does, she has filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court. Filed in September, then withdrawn and refiled last month because of a procedural issue, the suit names the woman only by the initials K.M. It says that she saw both Ferder and a counselor who worked for TARA named Judy Knight. According to the suit, K.M. expressed an interest in suing the church, but both Ferder and Knight tried to talk her out of it, suggesting instead "pastoral counseling" and "healing through the church." The suit also alleges that Ferder told K.M. that the statute of limitations for pursuing a legal remedy had likely lapsed, when in fact it had not. Most potentially damning, the suit claims that Ferder and Knight insisted that K.M. meet with a third woman, who appeared to be part of the counseling team. In reality, that third woman was Jessie Dye, a lawyer who worked for the archdiocese and whose duties included helping to mediate settlements with abuse victims. All the while, according to the suit, K.M. racked up thousands of dollars in therapeutic fees that the archdiocese failed to cover. The defendants are Ferder, Heagle, Knight, Dye, the archdiocese, and the former priest accused of the abuse, Robert Renggli. The suit's charges include negligence, breach of trust, and legal and counseling malpractice.
Because the suit fell into procedural limbo for several months—the plaintiff's attorney, Eric Lindell, says he was unable to find the correct address of one defendant—Ferder and Heagle don't know about the litigation when we talk. Listening to the charges, Ferder expresses shock. "This makes me angry now," she says as details of the case come back to her. "I went so far out on a limb for her," she says of K.M. Far from trying to suppress K.M.'s claims, Ferder says, she agitated within the church on her behalf. Since the priest accused of abusing K.M. fell under the authority of St. Martin's Abbey in Lacey, Thurston County, Ferder says, she wrote a letter to the abbot and later met with him in an attempt to convince him to compensate K.M.—which Abbot Neal Roth confirms.
But the real irony of the lawsuit might be that Ferder and Heagle have frequently taken on the role of church critics, stirring controversy and expressing sentiments you don't normally hear from nuns and priests. Listen, for example, to how Ferder talks about clerical hierarchy, members of which she thinks are chosen more for orthodoxy than competence: "Many individual priests have been forced to take responsibility for their behaviors," she says in our interview, "but not a single bishop has gone to jail. Not a single bishop, other than Cardinal Law"—Bernard Law, who resigned in the wake of revelations about multiple Boston scandals—"has lost his position, and that only happened because the local priests rose up and demanded it. But the bishops themselves, as a group, have not made themselves and one another accountable for this tragedy. They still talk about it as though, and act as though, it's a problem of a few bad apples, not as a deeply sick, systemic problem."
