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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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