Posted on 03/18/2003 5:57:03 PM PST by ultima ratio
News - March 6, 2003
Files: Church understood priest abuse in 1950s By KATHRYN MARCHOCKI Union Leader Staff
BISHOP JOHN McCORMACK applies ashes to the forehead of a youngster during yesterday's Ash Wednesday service at St. Joseph Cathedral in Manchester to mark the beginning of the 40 days of Lent. (Bob LaPree/Union Leader) The late Rev. John T. Sullivan pursued an endless cycle of madness and human destruction, preying on young and teenage girls from Laconia and Claremont to Michigan and Texas for at least 35 years.
“What he’s done goes on into infinity,” said Pat Poling, 53, of Biloxi, Miss., who says she remains haunted by Sullivan’s fondling and rape of her in Texas 42 years ago.
“It really upsets me that he hurt so many people. It bothers me that I had to get hurt. It bothers me that people after me had to get hurt,” Poling said yesterday.
The story of Sullivan’s roundabout route to Amarillo, Texas, is as bizarre as Poling’s story is tragic.
A Concord native ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester in 1942, Sullivan fathered a child in 1949 with a woman in Claremont who had to be hospitalized after an attempted abortion and stalked a Boston College nursing student while he was stationed at Berlin’s St. Kieran Parish in 1952.
Other priests feared him. Parishioners accused him of pilfering church funds. By 1956, Manchester Bishop Matthew F. Brady had enough of his “scandal-causing escapades,” according to the priest’s personnel file the Attorney General’s Office made public this week as part of its agreement with the diocese.
Brady stripped Sullivan, who died in 1999, of his priestly faculties in 1952 and again in 1956.
“At times I have considered him insane, diabolically cunning, and again, as at present, sincerely remorseful,” Brady wrote the Very Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald, superior general of the Servants of the Paraclete’s Via Coeli monastery in 1957, asking if he would accept Sullivan.
Fitzgerald wrote back that men with Sullivan’s problems would be classified as “schizophrenic,” saying their repentance usually is a front to regain a position where they can resume their predatory behavior.
“A new diocese means only green pastures,” he said.
Fitzgerald said the church must develop a uniform code of “discipline” and “penalties,” adding “we are amazed to find how often a man who would be behind bars if he were not a priest is entrusted with the cura animarum.”
But Sullivan begged for parish work and wrote 17 dioceses from Bismarck, N.D., to Seattle, Wash. to Honolulu, Hawaii asking to be accepted.
Each time, Brady wrote the local bishops to warn them against taking Sullivan.
“My conscience will not allow me to recommend him to any bishop and I feel that every inquiring bishop should know some of the circumstances that range from parenthood, through violation of the Mann Act (interstate child prostitution), attempted suicide, and abortion,” Brady wrote in his standard response.
In his letters, Brady said the “only possible solution of his case seemed to me that he become a permanent guest at Via Coeli or that he be laicized.”
A state prosecutor who led the attorney general’s criminal investigation of the Manchester diocese’s handling of sexually abusive priests from the late 1950s to the 1990s was impressed with Brady’s “progressive attitude.”
“Each time, Bishop Brady wrote back in very blunt terms, ‘Don’t take this guy’,” Senior Assistant Attorney General N. William Delker said this week.
“It showed that, in the 1950s, the diocese understood this problem and understood it had to be dealt with aggressively. Bishop Brady knew it in the 1950s,” Delker explained.
By striking its Dec. 10 agreement with the state, the diocese avoided criminal prosecution by admitting its failure to protect minors from abusive priests could have resulted in a criminal conviction under the child endangerment statute.
Had charges been brought against the diocese, prosecutors planned to use Brady’s correspondence at trial to dispute the church hierarchy’s claims that they didn’t fully understand the problem of abusive priests in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Delker said.
“Their own documents showed they knew how to deal with this problem by warning people and putting people on notice,” he explained.
Despite Brady’s warnings, Sullivan was accepted at the Diocese of Grand Rapids, Mich., in November, 1958.
After three assignments in 1½ years, Grand Rapids Bishop Allen Babcock stripped him of his faculties.
“I honestly believe Father Sullivan is a psychopath,” Babcock wrote the Manchester diocese in 1960.
Last April, the Grand Rapids diocese confirmed it paid $500,000 to three siblings in 1994 who said Sullivan sexually abused them while he served at a Michigan parish when they were between 7 and 12 years old.
Sullivan returned to the Manchester diocese in 1960 only to molest a 17-year-old Keene girl and her 14-year-old sister, church records show.
Sullivan agreed to get help at a Via Coeli treatment center in Minnesota in the fall, 1960, but found an assignment in the Amarillo diocese in 1961, church records show.
Poling said she was about 11 years old when Sullivan began abusing her, first slipping his hand down her blouse and eventually raping her.
He told her that her father, who was studying to become a Catholic, would go to hell if she told anyone.
“He basically made me responsible for my dad’s soul,” the mother of three said.
“One day he scared me so bad. I thought he was going to kill me,” she said. Poling said she broke away from Sullivan and rode her bicycle to her grandmother’s house while Sullivan “followed me and kept shouting from his car that I was going to burn in hell and I better not tell.”
Poling said she told her grandmother what Sullivan did to her and two other girls she knew. The bishop was told and Sullivan was gone the next day.
Sullivan then went to New Mexico and was incardinated into the Diocese of Gallup, N.M., but returned to New Hampshire in 1983 as a priest with the Diocese of Arizona, church records show.
While assisting in a Laconia parish in 1983, Sullivan was accused of molesting a 13-year-old girl, church records show. Then-Chancellor Francis J. Christian, now auxiliary bishop, told Sullivan he could not function as a priest in Manchester and he needed medical help. Nothing in the file indicated if Christian reported the case to state child protection officials.
It's pathetic that this man was not sent to jail in the 50s. However, it does show that before the bishops hired spokespeople and pr agencies and secular psychological authorities, they seemed to know to do the right thing and just tell this guy to basically go to hell.
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