For more than two decades, "Opus Bono Sacerdotii" has been working in secret on behalf of priests accused of abuse. The co-founder's daughter is now making serious allegations.
The communion girl, dressed all in white, smiles shyly at the camera while Komlan Dem Houndjame has his arms around her. The priest at the Amption Grotto in Detroit is no stranger to ten-year-old Mary Rose. He was in and out of his parents' house. Her father, Joe Maher, had taken the West African into his care when police filed rape charges in 2002. The allegations stemmed from a 48-year-old woman who sang in the parish choir.
Multiple accusations of sexual assault
While the archdiocese in charge of Detroit asked Houndjame to return to his home country, Maher became involved as its spokesman. He found legal counsel who helped the priest to be acquitted for lack of evidence. It was word against word in court. The circumstantial evidence had admittedly heavily incriminated Houndjame.
Because of sexual assaults, the priest had to vacate a post in Florida already before. In addition, there were allegations by two other women in Detroit. Why they were not heard in court is unclear.
Helping suspected priests
What is certain, however, is that the Togolese had an influential patron in the Rev. Eduard Perrone. The arch-conservative Perrone had brought him into the fold, as well as another priest from Texas who later admitted to abusing 50 children. Joe Maher felt a bond with Perrone in the cause of helping suspected priests. And Houndjame was his first case.
After the acquittal, the phone never stopped ringing. Requests for help trickled in by the dozen. This was the reason for Maher to found an aid organization together with fellow campaigner Peter Ferrara: "Opus Bono Sacerdotii" (Work for the Good of Priests, OBS). The motto of the organization: "No priest is turned away."
Financed by donations
Between 2002 and 2016, the two founders raised more than eight million dollars in donations. Initially, they used the money to take accused priests out of the line of fire. They literally picked them up at night and placed them at addresses in rural Michigan. Money also went into legal aid funds to defend clergy suspected of sexual assault and child molestation. Some of the accused found jobs with the fast-growing organization itself.
Unobserved by the public, Maher and Ferrara built up a network that connected nondescript villages in Michigan with individual church leaders in the U.S. and prelates in the Vatican, without establishing a formal relationship. In promotional material of "Opus Bono," it says the organization has over the years 8.000 priests helped. It also features images of prominent church leaders, such as conservative U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, who died in 2014, and former Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O'Brien. The latter helped the "Opus" with donations.
Against punishments
One of the first supporters was priest John Neuhaus, one of the highest-profile voices among conservative U.S. Catholics. "More power to you," Neuhaus cheered in a 2002 letter. "The claim that a person 'must be punished,' no matter how long ago the assault or remorse and change on the part of the perpetrator, is nothing more than a form of revenge."
Mary Rose Maher, now the adult daughter of OBS co-founder Joe Maher, considers this view intolerable today. In 2017, she filed criminal charges against her father's organization for misappropriating donations. The prosecutorial investigation resulted in a settlement that forced the entire leadership of "Opus Bono Sacerdotii" to resign.
Counter organization Maher's daughter for victims
Separately, the Detroit archdiocese asked the Vatican to look into what was true about allegations that Father Perrone, who motivated Maher to found the organization, had himself assaulted a minor. Mary Rose Maher, meanwhile, is making "amends" for her father's work. For its part, it launched its own nonprofit organization to help victims of clergy abuse and sexual assault.