Exposing Our Sexually Abusive Jesuit Teachers and the Fifty Year Cover-up
I was a student at Xavier High School in Concord, Massachusetts from 1964–68. It was an all-boys Catholic prep school, founded and staffed by Jesuits (Society of Jesus), known among Catholics as the intellectual heavyweight religious order. At our fiftieth reunion last Spring my friends and I wondered, not for the first time, whether any of our faculty would ever be implicated in a scandal we found distressing and depressing. Yesterday, after an inexcusable delay, the Northeast Province of the Society of Jesus released their list of cases deemed “credible after investigation.”
And there they were: Revs. James Ennis, Philip Moriarty, and James Sheehan. Abuses committed by Ennis and Moriarty extended from the year before they came to Xavier through their years there. Sheehan’s abuses were committed while he was at Boston College High School, years after Xavier.
Moriarty taught Latin and Greek and made students in his Freshmen honors section come to class fifteen minutes before school was supposed to start — a great way to establish his pre-eminence and power. He engaged in what I would later recognize as grooming of his favorites. He displayed contempt for those who resisted his sarcasm and flattery. He seemed to me, even by the time I was a senior, to be a man without a shadow — in other words, no recognition and integration of the dark sides of his psyche, and therefore, no remorse for his cruelties.
Ennis came to Xavier late in his career — as the dean of discipline. Oh, he could be tough. Sheehan’s problem seemed to be anger management — he would occasionally yank a student by his hair and he kicked one down half a flight of stairs.
We couldn’t know how shame and frustration might have driven them.
The deeper shame is institutional and I think largely attributable to clericalism. Garry Wills explained this recently in the Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/01/03/celibacy-isn-cause-church-sex-abuse-crisis-priesthood/cinI3OcoEqyg7l51YHD72K/story.html
Clericalism led the faithful to give excessive deference to priests and led priests to have a greater loyalty to their brothers than to the people, including children, they were supposed to serve.
The vows of poverty and obedience were as problematic to the abuse crisis as the vow of chastity. Like other priests, Jesuits vowed to obey their superiors in the Society of Jesus and the larger Church. Unless they had wealthy families they were also financially reliant on the Society. If they had been priests for many years they could ill afford to leave and/or blow the whistle on offenders and the cover-up. This financial reliance can be infantilizing.
Xavier alumni have engaged in an e-mail exchange in the past two days. Two of them, following the argument of many Church leaders, indicted homosexuality as the problem. They also protested attempts to blame the institutional Church as anti-Catholic attacks. Others have shared the research that shows gay men are no more likely than straight men to abuse children. The John Jay College of Criminal Justice report, commissioned by the Church, also concluded that homosexuality was not the problem. Gender of victims was determined by proximity and opportunity — and priests clearly had more access to boys, as in the case of Xavier. We may also hear more about the male to male abuse because we are relatively and tragically inured to the sexualization (and abuse) of post-pubescent but underage girls.
In the 1970’s I helped develop and staff the Justice and Peace Commission of the Archdiocese of Boston. What I saw there, in addition to some solid and dedicated priests, was emotional immaturity on the part of many priests and seminarians. The celibacy requirement lowers the bar for admission to seminary and the priesthood. Here’s an analogy: baseball pitchers are typically not good hitters because they have a valuable attribute that makes irrelevant their ability as a hitter. By the 1960’s, if not earlier, seminaries were accepting men who were neither particularly talented nor emotionally mature but had the rare attribute of willingness to forego family life and a commitment (on the record) to be celibate for a lifetime (starting at age 18–22).
Among the fifty members of the Justice and Peace Commission were three Catholic women who had attended divinity school or a doctoral program in theology. They were all spectacularly well-qualified to be clergy though they knew they would likely never be eligible for ordination as priests. It’s hard to overestimate how greatly women priests would have changed the Church over the past fifty years. I am convinced they would have been more vigilant about the possible sexual abuse of children — and would have undermined the patriarchal form of clericalism that still infects the Church.
Married clergy would also loosen the bonds of brotherly solidarity that made cover-ups nearly universal— on the part of peers as well as the hierarchy and leaders of religious orders.
Our alumni group agrees on one thing. We had some great teachers at Xavier. We were well-educated in many ways and we are grateful for many of the priests we knew there. Some of us went to them for spiritual direction in subsequent years and benefited greatly from their counsel and wisdom.
But one last note. When we were seniors two Freshmen were found engaging in sexual acts in a bathroom. They were expelled immediately. The hypocrisy and lack of pastoral care was and is breathtaking. Some of us on the student council who heard of this expulsion were outraged. We thought we should do something about it but we didn’t know what or how. The administration had all the power. So we didn’t do anything.
I don’t blame us. But that’s how this all worked — denial, repression, homophobia, the various types of victimization, and the cover-ups — for many, many years and for many thousands of victims. I am very grateful to the survivors, whistle-blowers and journalists who fought for the truth. As we learned at Xavier where Latin was a required subject — Cognoscetis veritatem, et veritas liberabit vos. You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.
James Hannon, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist in private practice in Acton, Massachusetts. He has worked with victims of sexual abuse in several settings and with perpetrators at the Massachusetts Treatment Center, a state prison facility.
If you were a victim of clergy sexual abuse, or want to help or learn more, please contact Survivors’ Network of Those Abused By Priests at SNAPnetwork.org.
jthannon@gmail.com and @Jim_Hannon
