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EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece is a follow-up to
"Scranton
Scandal," which appeared in NRO on Feb. 7, 2002.
 he
Roman Catholic bishop of Scranton, Pa., says a campaign against
him and the Society of St. John, a conservative religious order
based in his diocese, is being waged by a "very determined,
very vengeful, and very talented" ex-Society employee who was
hired to head a fledgling college under Society sponsorship.
But Bishop
James Timlin stopped just short of accusing Dr. Jeffrey Bond of
paying him back for refusing to allow the separation of the school
from the Society.
"This
public campaign began after I refused to give [Dr. Jeffrey Bond]
permission to have the college. What his motivations are I cannot
say," says Timlin. "I thought we were friends until that
happened. He turned on me immediately."
Fr. Dominic
O'Connor, a Society priest, echoed the bishop's comment, telling
NRO that he finds it odd that Bond only began complaining about
alleged sexual improprieties after the bishop, on October 15, 2001,
officially turned down Bond's request for the college's independence.
Yet Bond has
long maintained he sent an e-mail to Society priests on September
27 — nearly three weeks before the official break — asking
them to denounce Urritigoity's alleged bedroom practices.
In a wide-ranging
interview, Timlin addressed several allegations made against him
and the Society by Bond and others once affiliated with the 19-member
religious order. Last Thursday, NRO reported
on a scandal involving allegations of sexual and financial impropriety
against priests of the Society. Critics also faulted Timlin for
what they consider to be his protection of the Society.
In Timlin's
version of events, Bond and Fr. Richard Munkelt, an ex-Society priest,
approached him last summer to ask if they could separate the College
of St. Justin Martyr — which was then, as now, still on the
drawing board — from the Society over "liturgical differences."
According to the bishop, Bond and Munkelt wanted to use a 1962 Latin
rite mass at the college, and not a more modern liturgy preferred
by the Society.
"I was
trying to be the go-between here and try to make things amicable,"
Timlin says. "I said [the separation is] all right with me
as long as it's all right with the Society. It's their baby. For
you to run with it sounds like a hostile takeover."
Bond denies
that questions of liturgy ever entered the dispute, and says he
sought the separation because the Society wouldn't give the college
proper funding, and because he was becoming convinced there were
homosexual problems among some Society priests that would compromise
the college's mission.
Timlin says
Bond then began making accusations that Fr. Carlos Urritigoity,
the superior-general of the Society, was sharing his bed with teenage
boys — though not necessarily engaging in sexual relations
with them.
"When
I heard that this was going on, I called the whole bunch of them
[Society priests] in and ordered them to stop it," Timlin says.
"They denied any wrongdoing, and said they did things like
that only when they were crowded. They denied any immoral activity.
I told them that they had to understand that in this climate, this
is outrageous. You have to avoid even the appearance of evil."
The bishop
says the priests were "very obedient" and promised to
stop. He insists that there is no evidence that anything "immoral"
— by which he means homogenital activity — happened between
Urritigoity and the teenage boys. Timlin says he told James Bendell,
a lawyer representing Bond, that Urritigoity "may have slept
with boys, but that's not a sin. I agreed with [Bendell] that it
didn't look right, and it should stop."
Bond still
maintains the bishop is being naïve at best, saying that, "People
should know their bishop doesn't think there's anything immoral
about a boy of 15 or 16 sleeping in bed with a priest in his private
chambers."
Timlin says
he also dressed the Society priests down over reports that they
had served alcohol to minors. According to the bishop, the priests
only did so at meals and receptions, and did not get boys falling-down
drunk, as some critics have alleged. The bishop said the Society
priests told him they didn't realize social drinking of that sort
was against the law, and would stop.
In 1999, Timlin
learned that a priest-in-training at Urritigoity's previous home,
a Society of St. Pius X seminary, had formally accused Urritigoity
of having made an unwanted sexual advance on him. Timlin says he
sent a fact-finding team to the seminary at once, and they returned
with evidence they then presented to an independent review board.
The case against Urritigoity, the board decided, amounted to the
accused priest's word against his accuser's, and was therefore deemed
inconclusive.
"They
unanimously recommended that there wasn't anything proven here,"
Timlin says. "On the basis of that, we put that to rest."
In e-mails
and telephone conversations, Bond has said the bishop ought to have
informed St. Gregory's Academy, an all-male boarding school where
Society priests were functioning as chaplains, of the accusations
against Urritigoity (the bishop tells NRO he cannot remember if
he did or did not do this). Bond further says that the bishop, with
an "inconclusive" judgment from his advisers, should have
erred on the side of caution and removed Urritigoity from a ministry
in which he had close contact with youth.
Bond has also
criticized the bishop for not performing background checks on the
Society's priests before allowing them to live and function as chaplains
in the boys' school — something that diocesan policy requires
of all priests who have close contact with children.
Timlin responds
that no background checks were performed because "it never
seemed to be indicated. We still don't think it's necessary."
Yet last month,
the bishop suspended Urritigoity and his deputy, Fr. Eric Ensey,
pending the outcome of an investigation into formal allegations
of sexual molestation made by a father on behalf of his son, a former
St. Gregory's Academy student.
Both the bishop
and the Society's O'Connor lament that graduates of St. Gregory's
who have had contact with Urritigoity find their moral integrity,
and the Society's, in question.
"I've
gotten all kinds of letters from students who were there, who praised
[Society priests] to the skies for giving them a manly faith, because
of the way they were treated there," Timlin says.
Adds O'Connor:
"There's a certain amount of anger developing not only among
the Society of St. John, but among alumni of St. Gregory's Academy,
that someone would make these suggestions about young men who are
not only not homosexual, but who are actually very virile."
Alan Hicks,
the headmaster at St. Gregory's, which is controlled by another
priestly order, denied that any priest of the Society, while living
at the school, shared a bed with teenage boys at the academy. He
provided an October 24th letter from Bond in which Bond said there
was no evidence that Urritigoity slept with boys of the Academy,
and attested to Hicks's prudence.
"That's
what I believed at the time happened," Bond replies today.
"I thought St. Gregory's was a victim. I now believe Alan Hicks
was negligent."
Bond says a
former St. Gregory's dorm father admitted to Hicks that he had shared
a bed with Urritigoity. When asked by NRO about this allegation,
Hicks replied, "I'm not going to comment on that."
Timlin admitted
that Urritigoity had been sent for evaluation for homosexual tendencies
once before, and was cleared by a psychologist. And the bishop angrily
denies Bond's claim that he told lawyer Bendell that he would give
Bond a college if Bond would cease his criticism. Says a fiery Timlin:
"That is absolutely untrue. There's not a shred of truth in
that at all."
Both the bishop
and Society priest O'Connor questioned the character and credibility
of those making accusations of sexual impropriety against the Society.
The bishop said the young man whose formal complaint sparked the
January suspension of Urritigoity and Ensey was a "problem
child" at St. Gregory's student.
Says O'Connor:
"As alumni of St. Gregory's will testify, he was constantly
making up stories at the Academy. Two years after the [molestation]
incident he alleges occurred, he applied to join the Society"
— which doesn't make sense, the priest reasons, if a Society
priest had truly harmed the boy.
O'Connor calls
"unstable" an ex-postulant who claims to have witnessed
on several occasions teenage boys being served alcohol to the point
of drunkenness by Society priests, and leaving Urritigoity's room
in the morning in their underwear. He characterizes the man as self-centered
and resentful, and says the 32-year-old left the Society after several
unhappy months for "health reasons."
According to
the California man, who asked NRO to withhold his name, he quit
the Society because he couldn't stand seeing Urritigoity behaving
in what he regarded as a sexually predatory fashion toward teenagers.
"It doesn't
surprise me that they would start a disinformation campaign against
anybody who accuses them," Bond tells NRO. "I remember
before I met Matt Sawyer"-an early donor and adviser to the
Society, who pulled out over what he considered its financial irresponsibility
— "they were calling him mentally unbalanced. Their willingness
to defame people is amazing."
Turning to
the allegations of financial misconduct against the Society, Timlin
strongly denies that he was unresponsive to complaints made by Catholic
laymen advising the Society. The men previously told NRO that they
had explicitly warned Timlin that the Society was spending money
lavishly and unwisely. Timlin says today that indeed there were
serious problems with the Society's finances, but that he moved
responsibly to force the priests to clean up their act.
"These
are young men, inexperienced in these matters," Timlin says,
of the Society. "And I know they have very good taste. They
may have been outlandish in their spending, but we've taken steps
long ago to correct that. ...Their finances have been under control
for some years."
O'Connor says
the criticism from the ex-advisers comes because they resented Urritigoity's
not taking their recommendations for how best to run the Society.
And he denies that luxurious furniture was a foolish purchase.
"They
would say to buy an expensive dining-room table was imprudent,"
says O'Connor. "We have, on the other hand, a benefactor of
ours who says the opposite, that what attracted him to the Society
was the image of stability we projected."
Though no lawsuits
have been filed against either the Diocese of Scranton or the Society
of St. John, Timlin is not hopeful that any of these matters will
stay out of court.
"There
might be a settlement here," he says. "I'd like to bring
it to some conclusion, but the lawyers claim there's nothing [to
the accusations] at this point. I don't want a lawsuit, but I don't
see how we can settle matters without going to court."
O'Connor says
the Society still has faithful donors, and that it will weather
this crisis and continue with its plans. He believes that Bond is
slandering Urritigoity and Society priests, but says no defamation
lawsuit will be filed against Bond, owing to expense and the public
scandal that would arise from forcing St. Gregory's alumni to testify.
Says Bond:
"I've been on the phone with boys from St. Gregory's who say
they slept alone with Father U. in his quarters, because that's
how he gave spiritual direction. If all the boys say they got their
manly faith from these guys, how could it harm them to give depositions?
The reason [the Society] won't sue is that we could then put Timlin,
Urritigoity, and others under deposition."
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