After Spotlight was released in 2015, the name Richard Sipe exploded from a name well-known in the clergy sexual abuse reform world to one that was integral in the plot of a blockbuster film.
Sipe was one of the most influential figures in breaking down the floodgates of holding the Catholic Church accountable for the abuse and cover-up of children. Sipe died on August 8, 2018, of multiple organ failure in La Jolla, California, at the age of 85.
Yet even at 85, he was still taking on new cases to help survivors of child sexual abuse.
One of his brothers, John Sipe, said Richard “fought an uphill battle is whole life.”
Sipe’s largest, but by no means singular, contribution to the world of clergy sexual abuse was his mammoth report, published in 1990, detailing the secret world of sexual misconduct within the Catholic Church.
His most bombshell findings were that, out of all priests, 6% sexually abused children and minors. He also confirmed that priests were referred for pedophilia once a week, on average. His research linked the Catholic Church’s celibacy requirements to its issues relating around sexual cover-ups and abuse.
Shortly after his first major research was published, Sipe was integral to creating and hosting a conference of clergy abuse survivors, advocates, media, and attorneys. Sipe was the catalyst for bringing all these disparate groups together with a common goal – accountability for survivors of clergy abuse.
“As he comes to the podium,” recounted Jeff Anderson in Sipe’s 2018 eulogy, “his arms [were] as wide as his heart has always been.”
Among the eulogists were fellow clergy abuse revolutionaries and longtime friends, Fr. Tom Doyle and Anderson.
The conference was a catalyst for action. Gathering together, they started the move to change the rules regarding the statute of limitations across the country. That has led to work that has made an indelible mark on survivors’ lives in states like Minnesota, California, New York, Illinois, and elsewhere.
“Window laws” passed in some states allowed survivors to bring civil lawsuits against their abusers during a certain period of time.
Until the changes were made, “we are protecting the wrong class of people — the predators and those who would choose to protect them instead of our kids,” Anderson said.
Sipe was known as someone who, constantly and continually, was seeking to fight for justice in the Catholic Church, even though they eventually removed – through the church’s formal laicization – him from his official position as a former priest.
But he was not someone who wanted to do away with the church. According to his son and those around him, he was still a deeply religious man.
“The boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not by the radicals seeking to overthrow the system, but by true believers who cling with unusual fierceness to their convictions,” Anderson said.
Sipe was one of those true believers.
Yet he was shunned by the church, repeatedly, throughout his career.
Anderson said Sipe was “black-balled, uninvited, and unwelcomed by the San Diego Diocese Bishops Chancery.”
Despite this shunning, Sipe never lost his motivation for this work. After bringing early findings in 1986 to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and was met with no response, Sipe found other ways to make a difference. In all, he testified in roughly 250 trials as an expert witness.
“Ignored, scorned, attacked,” Anderson continued to read at Sipe’s eulogy, “finding the ineffable, idiosyncratic, seeds of possibility already planted inside, the seeds of hope sown into action.”
Even in his later years with deteriorating health, Sipe didn’t stop advocating for the cause he spent his life working on.
“24/7, day and night, he answered the call,” Anderson said.
Sipe’s work in the clergy sexual abuse space is invaluable, and still remains as is one of the most influential voices in the field.
“Aquinas Walter Richard Sipe leaves for all of us, and all of those to come,” Anderson said,
“a life of light and grace for a safer world.”
Read the full text of Anderson’s eulogy below:
“A beautiful soul, unable to reconcile a deep faith with the indifference of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy. Elie Wiesel says, ‘The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.’
“Aspiring to follow the path spoken in the Gospel of Thomas — bringing forth.
“Scholar, teacher, brother, monk, priest, counselor, seeker.
“Tensely, very tensely, adhering to the confliction and the torment. Hearing confessions, yet observing. The superior requiring the young seminarians to sexual submission. A soul awakening conflict, holding fulfillment in devotion to helping others cope.
“Led by conscience, assembling the data, following the exhortation of Emerson: ‘Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail.’ Always on the trail of the truth, the deeper truths.
“This must be understood. This must be recorded. This must be reported.
“The stakes are high. The decisions complex. The data damning. There is no escape.
“Just as Thomas Merton came to precisely the same conclusion after decades of spiritual practice, he wrote, ‘Every man has a vocation to be someone, but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation, he can only be one person — himself.’
“Unable to live a lie or to let the lie live. In that surrender, there is the choice: compliance or courage, obedience or disobedience, assent or descent.
“Jane Goodall, the world’s leading primatologist, spent decades studying, observing the behaviors of chimps in Africa. The first scientist to document chimps making tools, not just using them. Her observations revolutionized our view of the primate world.
“As she is publishing A Reason for Hope, A Secret World was published after decades of documentation and observation. The observations designed and dedicated to revolutionizing the clerical culture and to awaken the world to the peril within it.
“Ignored. Scorned. Attacked.
“Finding the ineffable, idiosyncratic seeds of possibility already planted inside. The seeds of hope sown to action. Inspired now by the pillars of faith, courage, and freedom — from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to Mandela — civil disobedience.
“In 1992, the first national conference and assembly of survivors, survivor advocates, Chicago, Illinois — journalists and media are in attendance. And the man in the middle, the man in the middle, opens the conference. And as he came to the podium, he opens his arms wide as his heart has always been, open and wide, with the declaration:
“‘Welcome to Wittenberg. The second Reformation has begun!’
“After the man in the middle opened with the exhortation to reform, Tom Doyle, who had been blowing the whistle from the inside for almost a decade, followed with the reality he had been living and knowing.
“I followed Tom Doyle with the exhortation and the invitation to lawmakers, survivors, advocates, and public policymakers across this country: that, if we and you, want to protect our kids, we must reform and repeal statutes of limitations across this country. And until we do, we are protecting the wrong class of people — the predators and those who would choose to protect them instead of our kids.
“Andrew Greeley, priest, sociologist, commentator, and critic, followed. Then by Jason Berry, journalist, who had been breaking this story as it had been unfolding for almost a decade, and now just finishing his leading work, Lead Us Not Into Temptation.
“Like Martin Luther, centuries before, also married to a former nun, now a radical religious reformer, bold leader. The boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not by the radicals seeking to overthrow the system, but by true believers who cling with unusual fierceness to their convictions.
“Now full solidarity with the survivors. The authoritative source; the expert witness to the horrors that have been and continue to be; the chronicler of the painful truths.
“Scrupulously rigorous, yet all publications, all declarations, all expressions — never copying or plagiarizing anybody that had gone before. Original in all his work, with one exception.
“He copied my glasses.
“He is, and this is, Exhibit A, he is a copycat.
“24/7, day and night, answering the call – from the media, from the moviemakers, from the survivors, from the survivors’ families, from other authors and essayists – he writes, he records, and he takes these calls.
“Marianne knows this. Day and night.
“There lies within him an ever-present, pugnacious verb laced with grace and an impish sense of humor. He would always laugh, and I’ll never forget it, as he would recount having been blackballed, uninvited, and unwelcomed from the San Diego Diocese Bishop’s Chancery because he was, and had declared himself to be, a friend of Jeff Anderson.
“Aquinas Walter Richard Sipe creates and now leaves for all of us, and those to come, a legacy of love, light, and grace.
“A safer world for every child born and yet to be.”
