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July 30, 2009 | 10:24 am

Mother Teresa, Mass and another clergy abuse lawsuit

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Here’s an ugly story from the SF Weekly. A 30-year-old man is suing one of Mother Teresa’s spiritual adviser for sexually abusing him two decades ago, immediately after served as an altar boy at a ceremony honoring the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner. The Weekly’s way of retelling the boy’s ordeal is compelling for readers and damning for the priest, the Rev. Donald McGuire, but it also puts a lot of stock into accusations found in the lawsuit.

Here’s a portion of the lede:

It was at McGuire’s bidding that the 11-year-old came to serve as an altar boy that morning at St. Paul’s Convent, a boxy building of yellow stucco that rises from a tree-lined block near the intersection of 29th and Church streets. (The convent houses local novices in the international Missionaries of Charity order, founded by Mother Teresa in 1950.) The priest was close to the boy’s family: He had baptized the boy, and offered his mother spiritual and psychological counseling over the years. Indeed, within church circles, McGuire was something of a celebrity himself.

Steeped, as are all Jesuits, in the cerebral traditions of Catholicism, McGuire dazzled his many admirers with his command of ancient history and literature. He could speak eloquently about philosophy and theology, and deployed his rhetoric to powerful effect during multiday religious seminars based on the teachings of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits’ founder. He had silvering brown hair and a round, red Irish face that often creased into a puckish smile. He liked to give advice. And he liked to hear confession.

On that morning almost 20 years ago, however, McGuire’s interests were more profane than sacred. Following a morning Mass, he asked the boy to retire with him to a private chamber reserved for the priest at the convent. While the nuns and Mother Teresa milled about, McGuire closed the door to his room and asked his favored altar boy to join him, in his cot, for a nap. The boy lay down. The priest lay on the outside of the narrow bed and then reached across the boy’s body and into his pants.

So said the boy in a recent interview with SF Weekly. Now 30, he is suing the Jesuits for turning a blind eye to McGuire’s repeated acts of child molestation.

The headline, “For He Has Sinned,” also assumes guilt in this case. But that’s likely because of McGuire’s subsequent sex-crime convictions:

In 2006, the priest was convicted in a Wisconsin court of molesting two teenage boys he had taught decades earlier at a prominent Jesuit high school in the Midwest. Earlier this year, a federal judge in Illinois sentenced McGuire to 25 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of traveling abroad with a teenage boy to sexually abuse him. (For his part, McGuire still insists he is innocent and has appealed his latest conviction.)

Read the rest of the Weekly story here. And here’s the Bishop Accountability page on McGuire.

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There is an opportunity to address this issue through an initiative put forward by victims of clergy abuse across the globe. This is despite the Catholic church refusing all offers to come to the table together with members of clergy from the Jewish community and other Christian clergy.

The September 1 initiative aim is simply to bring to the world a definitive solution to the global clergy abuse crisis and can be found online at http:www.september12009.com

Comment by JohnB on 7/30/09 at 2:26 pm

Victims Ask San Jose, Calif. Police to Reopen Troubling Death of Jesuit Priest Case

Suspicious Death of Abused Jesuit Priest Ruled Suicide in Less Than 24-Hours

New Evidence May Have Been Unearthed, Family, Supporters Say

Jesuits Settled Wrongful Death Case With Family for $1.6 Million in 2007

In a June 1, 2009 letter addressed to a Bay Area law enforcement agency, victims of childhood sex abuse are asking that:

—a five-year-old suspicious death case be reopened by law enforcement,

The letter was written by victims of child sex abuse and their supporters who are members of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAPNetwork.org) and the family of Father James Chevedden, a Jesuit priest who died in 2004 after reporting that another Jesuit, Brother Charles Leonard Connor, sexually abused him in 1998. 

According the coroner’s report, Chevedden committed suicide when he fell from the courthouse parking garage in San Jose on his 56th birthday, minutes after he completed jury duty service.  There was no suicide note and the police did not check his computer. <http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2005_07_12/2005_08_06_Bunting_BehindA.htm>

Chevedden’s brother and SNAP are writing the San Jose police because of the agency’s renewed promise to reopen cold or suspicious cases.  <http://www.sjpd.org/BOI/Homicide> 

“We believe that new evidence may have been unearthed since the coroner quickly closed Fr. Chevedden’s case less than 24 hours after his death,” the letter to the San Jose Police says.  “A wrongful death lawsuit against the Jesuits for Chevedden’s death settled in 2007, and there may be a great deal of new and important information that was unearthed as a part of the discovery process.”

In addition, the Jesuits implicitly admitted that they “lost” or “disposed of” important evidence in Chevedden’s death, including his Bible, Rosary, note pad, glasses and some correspondence.

The letter also asks the cold case team to re-examine evidence at the scene and/or still in police or Jesuit possession. 

If there is any reason to believe that Chevedden was intentionally hurt for being a whistle blower, the group believes, then it is a public safety issue that the death investigation be reopened.

Chevedden was sexually abused at Sacred Heart, a Jesuit-run facility in Los Gatos by Jesuit Brother Charles Leonard Connor in 1998, while Chevedden was healing from two broken feet.  Connor also molested two mentally retarded men at the facility over a 30-year period and was convicted in 2001, although he is still allowed to live at the facility.  <http://www.bishop-accountability.org/ma-bos/settlements/SettlementLosGatos.html>

Comment by John on 7/31/09 at 6:41 am

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