Posted on 05/07/2002 8:44:46 AM PDT by aculeus
Bishop Thomas O'Brien continues to harbor priests who molest children.
In doing so, O'Brien continues to heap anguish and injustice on the children and parents in the Phoenix Diocese who were betrayed, and forever damaged, by their parish priests.
One such parent is Doris Kennedy, who contacted me last week following my column about O'Brien's sordid history of obstruction in cases of child molestation by his priests. Her son is one such child.
"First we were outraged at what the priest did to our son," Doris says. "Now I've spent the last 22 years outraged by what the Diocese didn't do. They just brushed it all under the carpet and let this priest continue on." The accused priest is Father Pat Colleary, who O'Brien has bounced from parish to parish in the Phoenix Diocese over the last two decades, apparently without ever notifying parishioners about the sexual misconduct allegations that fester in his wake.
What O'Brien has done, instead, was attack the victims.
O'Brien must now do what I asked him to do two weeks ago, something several other Diocese around the country have already done:
Turn over to authorities the record of sexual allegations for review by law enforcement and parishioners. It is time for O'Brien to clear the skeletons he has been hiding in his closet.
Skeletons such as Father Patrick Colleary, who, after 20 years of credible complaints regarding despicable behavior, still spends his Sunday's preaching the gospel from the pulpit of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Scottsdale. Colleary has already admitted to fathering a child by a woman who came to him for counseling in 1978 after the death of her sister. The woman, Sharon Roy, told me Colleary raped her. Roy only began receiving $400-a-month child support from the Diocese in 1995, after blood tests proved what she had said all along - that Colleary was the father.
Besides alleged rape and admitted paternity, there are lingering allegations of child molestations against Colleary.
Colleary did not immediately return calls made to him Sunday afternoon.
In 1979, Colleary oversaw youth programs at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Tempe, where Doris and Jack Kennedy's 11-year-old son was an altar boy.
One evening that spring, Doris Kennedy says, Colleary came to their home in north Chandler for dinner.
After dinner, as Doris and Jack cleared the table, Colleary descended the basement stairs to their son's bedroom.
"I didn't think anything of it at the time," Doris says.
She gives this account of the events that followed:
"All of sudden, Father Pat comes up and says he's gotta go," she says. Our son "comes out to our rotunda and he's as white as a ghost."
Our son "goes back to his room," she says. "Then my 16 year old comes up and his eyes are as big as saucers."
The 16 year old explained that he walked into his younger brother's room and saw his brother with his pants unzipped and Father Colleary with his hand down the boy's pants.
Doris says she went down to her 11-year-old's room. The boy was hiding beneath his covers. She asked what had happened.
"He wouldn't talk," she says.
The son, now 34, has only just begun talking about that incident, and two others, in which he was allegedly molested by Pat Colleary.
But Doris and Jack Kennedy talked. They demanded to see the bishop at the time, James Rausch. Instead, she says, they were directed to the bishop's assistant, Vicar General Thomas O'Brien.
And Thomas O'Brien, Doris says, ignored them and pressured them to remain silent.
"We wanted them to get therapy for (our son) and for Father Pat - that was it," she says.
Instead, she says, O'Brien said that Colleary would be transferred.
Then, she says, O'Brien asked: "Have you said anything to anyone about this?"
She said she had told several people.
"You should not have done that," Doris says O'Brien replied. "I was so angry," she says. "I jumped up and ran into the corridor and yelled back at him, 'You tell your pastor he shouldn't have molested my son!'"
The Kennedys then went to Tempe Police and filed a complaint. Officers questioned Colleary, Colleary denied the incident and "that apparently was the end of it for them," she says. The police did not investigate further, she says. They did not press charges.
My request for that police report had not been answered by press time.
A second source, who taught religious education classes at Holy Spirit at the time, was appalled at how the Diocese handled the incident. She says that O'Brien and Holy Spirit's head pastor refused to talk to parishioners about the allegations surrounding Colleary.
"After the incident, Father Pat disappeared for awhile," she says. "We kept asking what was going on. They just told us that Father Pat was up in Flagstaff for awhile."
Colleary returned to Holy Spirit after a few weeks where, according to our source, he continued to run the church's youth and altar-boy programs.
"It was all very strange," she says. "All the boys in my classes said they were afraid of him, that they couldn't stand him. Considering what had happened to Doris and the strange things I was seeing, I began telling parents that they needed to keep their boys away from Father Pat." O'Brien became bishop of the Phoenix Diocese three years later, in 1982.
According to New Times sources, Colleary was later transferred to a church in Buckeye, then to Glendale, then to Chandler, and most recently, to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Scottsdale.
Bishop O'Brien refuses to discuss this issue, or any issue, with New Times.
Doris Kennedy lost track of Father Pat's whereabouts through those years. But she did know he had been transferred somewhere in the West Valley.
"I worried about the children out there," she says.
Doris Kennedy says her son refused to talk about the incident. A month ago, though, she says her son, now 34, saw O'Brien and area priests on television talking about how they did not, and would not, tolerate child molestation in their Diocese.
"That was it for him," she says.
Two weeks ago, she says, "my son spent four hours at the Phoenix Chancery ... giving them his story of abuse by Father Pat. They gave my son a list of therapists and said they would pay for him to go to one and apologized profusely for the pain he had been caused. They said they would confront Father Pat and quote: 'We will come down hard on Father Colleary.'
"They were supposed to call my son (April 23) but he hasn't heard a word. We smell the Wall of Silence being put in place, once again."
Her son refused to discuss the issue with me. His mother says he is worried about the pain the public disclosure would cause. He has, however, contacted an attorney regarding a possible civil suit, she says.
Although her son asked her not to talk publicly, Doris Kennedy says she feels she must. She says she is worried that there are other children, and other parents, who have suffered. She says she feels compelled to stop any further abuse.
"It's awful, it's so hard, but somebody has to talk," she says. "This whole problem goes on and on because people are afraid to talk. And that just allows the Diocese to keep covering it up. And that just allows the predators to keep abusing children."
In the case of Father Colleary, it appears the prey was anyone who was vulnerable.
Sharon Roy says she went to Colleary in 1978 for solace and counseling following the death of her sister.
After several counseling sessions at the church, Roy says, Colleary asked to meet her at her apartment.
"He charges in and says, 'You don't know how long I've been waiting for this,'" Roy says. "He raped me then and there. Then I'm sitting there crying saying we need to talk about what just happened, that I need some answers. And he just turns on the 10 o'clock news."
A few months later, Roy says she told Colleary she was pregnant. She says he told her to have the baby adopted, or get an abortion.
But she kept the girl and raised her. She asked for help paying for the child, but Colleary and the Diocese refused.
In 1994, she again went to the Diocese asking for help in supporting her child. She felt that was the least she deserved since she had been raped by one of the Diocesan priests.
"They told me it couldn't be rape because I was an adult," she says. "They said that meant it was consensual. I just couldn't believe it."
Not only did Bishop O'Brien's diocese refuse to supply child support for the priest's little girl, they kept him on the payroll in the face of continued complaints of abominable sexual behavior.
Finally, in 1995, Roy filed for child support with the Department of Economic Security's Child Support Enforcement Administration in Phoenix. The Diocese quietly garnished $400 a month from Father Colleary's wages to support his daughter.
"It is awful dealing with them," she says. "They intimidate you to the nth degree, make you feel like you're the bad person.
Roy says that her and Colleary attended parent-counseling classes together after his paternity was confirmed. During counseling, she says, Colleary talked about the secret troubles he was having within the Diocese.
She says he told her about another allegation against him, an anonymous letter sent to the Diocese from a person who says they witnessed Colleary fondling a student at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Glendale.
She alleges he described another incident in Tempe where he was caught by a mother in bed with the woman's two sons.
"The incident with this Kennedy family must be yet another one," she says.
In after the Glendale incident, Roy claims that Colleary spent a short sabbatical at St. Luke's Institute in Maryland, a Catholic psychotherapy hospital that treats priests for pedophilia and lack of sexual control, as well as other diseases.
Roy tracked his return. She says he was transferred to St. Timothy's in Chandler, home of the church's internationally known teen program, Life Teen.
In January, a Life Teen church volunteer, Mark Gherna, was charged with 15 counts of sexual conduct with a minor and one count of furnishing obscene materials to a minor. After the stint at St. Tim's, Roy says, Colleary was moved on to Scottsdale.
All of this is news to most of Colleary's parishioners. That's because Bishop Thomas O'Brien and his attorneys have quietly fielded all the allegations and quietly slapped Colleary on the hand each time.
It is time for Bishop O'Brien to come clean.
He must open up his personnel files so we can see how many credible accusations of child molestation have been swept under the rug. He must answer all the questions that have been asked about past abuse and the effectiveness of present programs to rid the Diocese of molesters. Bishop O'Brien must remove Father Pat Colleary.
And for the good of Arizona, and for the good of the Roman Catholic Church, other mothers like Doris Kennedy, and other women like Sharon Roy, must find the courage to come forward with their tales of abuse.
Enabling child abuse is a CRIME. If he did not report the allegations to the police, the Bishop belongs in jail!
Agreed, along with all but a handful of the US Bishops. How did the US episcopate ever get to be infested by such scoundrels?
A few months later, Roy says she told Colleary she was pregnant. She says he told her to have the baby adopted, or get an abortion.There was a time when I would have simply dismissed such a claim as fantasy. Sad to say, at this point I have no trouble believing her. Absolutely none.
I've been saying this for months. Their butts belong in jail. I wouldn't desecrate the good bishops by referring to those jerks by that title.
...yep, outrage, lotsa outrage. And then the outrage gave way to a realisation that the Diocese has big bucks, and we can get a share of the pie", added Doris. "Because...we're gonna need it. Chances are, somewhere down the track, our son will sue us, for doing nothing, 22 years ago."
The Kennedys then went to Tempe Police and filed a complaint. Officers questioned Colleary, Colleary denied the incident and "that apparently was the end of it for them," she says. The police did not investigate further, she says. They did not press charges.
This article is a horror story.
Ask yourself this question: if the Vatican had insisted that US bishops bounce these priests and report them to authorities, don't you think they would have done so?
Remember, Fr. Thomas Doyle, who's been on Meet the Press, said that during his stint as Secretary to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, he regularly referred these accusations of abuse to the Vatican. He never heard a thing from anybody.
The cover-up goes all the way up the line, folks. If the Vatican can get stewed about renovations to a Cathedral in Milwaukee, why didn't these Curial dilettantes get stewed about priests abusing children?
I think I'm at the breaking point with all this evil. I actually started posting again on TNS just to get away from it all!
The United States Catholic Conference of Bishops led by the likes of the late Cardinal Bernardin who provided in his will that the Windy City Gay Men's Churus provide the music at his funeral was president of the USCC. So was his AmChurch leftist pal and successor in Cincinnati, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, who, as we post is ducking and dodging subpoenas and notices of deposition from the actually Catholic Cincinnati prosecutor trying to clean out Cincinnati's AmChurch den of iniquity. Off hand, it looks like the man who is now president of USCC, the black Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, is the first president of USCC, possibly ever who is prepared to step up to the plate and have an administrative backbone in his own diocese, where he inherited this pederast priest problem and instead of chanting Kumbaya or turning his cathedral into a pagan temple by wreckovation like Weakland in the usual direct public disobedience to the Vatican, named a panel of non-Catholic laity, established a hotline to them and regularly asked the general public to report the perverts. The line was established ten years ago and has been silent for two. He purged the offending pederasts systematically.
The fact is that the same bishops who have covered for the perverted pederasts for a couple of generations are the cutting edge of those who defy Vatican authority. You know it. I know it. The enraged Catholic laity knows it and the problem will continue to be addressed by a Vatican policy of attrition starting with Milwaukee where pal Weakland threatens libel suits against those who complain to him about perverts in his diocesan priesthood until there is a conclave to elect a successor to the physically crippled and dying pope. Now Weakland is running "listening sessions" as his final dodge of the issue. He has been running "listening sessions" as his response to abortion so that the women we have supposedly offended by Catholic doctrine and who have turned to abortion will know that he is "listening." Of course, he lifts not a finger on behalf of the babies. Before he dies, he will probably try ordaining a few feminazi rebels.
The ongoing attempt by the progressive set to try to take advantage of this situation by diverting attention from the task of fixing responsibility on the homosexual pederasts and their protectors where it belongs and purging accordingly is a disgrace.
We don't need married priests or women priests or democracy in the pews or pushy laity making the pastor's religious decisions or any other aspect of Kumbaya spinelessness or foolishness. What we need is discipline of the disobedient, purging of the priestly offenders and of their protectors. Nothing less will do.
When the longtime wish of the progressives comes to fruition in the end of the current magnificent restorative papacy, they are going to miss John Paul II, particularly in his current period of physical disability because the next conclave will focus like a laser beam on the disgrace that is AmChurch and a new and vigorous pope will set aside that principle of subsidiarity for now as procedural, pierce the protective veil under which AmChurch has operated and impose substantive justice. May he restore the anti-modernist disciplines of Pope St. Pius X which were foolishly discarded by Benedict XV.
We have reached the point where a recent newspaper article claims that the Connecticut General Assembly's House of Representatives has passed, by a margin of 144 to 2, a bill requiring priests to violate the seal of the confessional. Do you think that "Catholic" legislators voting in favor should be flat out excommunicated (not that I expect the marshmallow Archbishop Daniel Cronin of Hartford to do anything even when he is not on Cape Cod).
When will enough be enough? Any priest who complies with a legislative command to violate the seal of the confessional should be defrocked and excommunicated. Any bishop who refuses that duty should be treated likewise. May there be strict obedience or severe Church justice or preferably both.
Those ignored or abused by their bishops in the sense of obtaining no justice or by priests or bishops who cover up or sexually abuse may file canon lawsuits and there is the St. Joseph Foundation in your own State of Texas (at San Antonio?) which gladly takes up these suits without fee on behalf of American Catholics wherever they may reside. I am not aware of any such suits having been filed by complainants over the sexual abuse cases.
No, not necessarily. American Bishops have been known to ignore the Vatican quite a lot. That's because the Vatican lets them get away with it. The pope issues all kinds of directives and then doesn't do anything to enforce them. This has been the modus operandi for the last 30-40 years. It's what Vatican 2 called "collegiality."
Remember, Fr. Thomas Doyle, who's been on Meet the Press, said that during his stint as Secretary to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, he regularly referred these accusations of abuse to the Vatican. He never heard a thing from anybody.
I believe it.
The cover-up goes all the way up the line, folks. If the Vatican can get stewed about renovations to a Cathedral in Milwaukee, why didn't these Curial dilettantes get stewed about priests abusing children?
Good point. This crisis is result of John Paul II's (and Paul VI's) failure to govern the Church. If he had been more interested in maintaining discipline than in traveling the globe, we would not be in this mess.
If only John Ashcroft had the guts.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.