Today the Attorney General of Nebraska released a report on his three-year investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church of his state. This probe was sparked in part by the courageous 2018 testimony on this blog of Peter Mitchell, a former priest of the Diocese of Lincoln. I am so grateful to Peter for speaking up, and to the Nebraska Catholics who found the courage to raise their voices in subsequent conversations with me. If you follow the link above, you can download a copy of the report.

I’ve just gone over the report quickly. Here’s what stands out to me.

The most troubling finding from this report is the fact that on numerous occasions, when there was an opportunity to bring justice to the victims, those in authority chose to place the reputation of the church above the protection of the children who placed their spiritual care in the hands of those in church authority. The depth of physical and psychological harm caused by the perpetrators, and the decades of failure by the church to safeguard so
many child victims, is unfathomable. We can only hope that the victims have been able to find some sense of healing from a source higher than our justice system.

There it is, once again: the reputation of the Church mattered more to these men than the protection of children. This is damning.

More:

Perhaps the most concerning finding is that in many cases, church authorities, be it head or associate priests or other diocesan personnel, had knowledge of the abusive behavior of the offenders and did nothing to stop it. Numerous files document instances where high-ranking diocesan officials, up to and including the bishop or archbishop, were aware of the abusive behaviors of a priest but did nothing to remove him from ministry. Often, these offenders would be sent away for “counseling” but soon returned to ministry in situations where they had contact with children. Worse yet, some did not even receive counseling. They were summarily removed from their assignment, only to be immediately reassigned to a parish where more children were victimized.

More:

We also discovered instances where victims reported their abuse to a priest or other diocesan official, but no documentation of the report was found in the official file. Simply put, the dioceses did not create written records every time they were informed of incidents of sexual abuse. Then, when receiving an allegation of clergy abuse years later, that failure to document led the dioceses to claim it had never received a complaint. Past diocesan officials, however, were well aware of the abuse allegations. Also, that failure to document meant that current diocesan officials reviewing the allegation might not have been aware that it was not the first time the individual had been accused of sexual abuse.

They didn’t create records so they could claim that they didn’t know.

Though the AG’s report tries to downplay this fact, as others have done before, we see once again that this is overwhelmingly a crime of homosexual abuse:

And it is overwhelmingly a phenomenon not of pedophilia, but of priests going after sexually mature young males.

For many years, the now-retired Lincoln Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz had a reputation among American Catholics as a staunch and uncompromising upholder of Catholic orthodoxy. I was present in the room in Dallas, in 2002, when he told a group of lay Catholic supporters that his episcopal colleagues were a “hapless bench of bishops.” I thought that meant he believed they were failing to do what was necessary to bring justice to victims. Back then, I was a conservative Catholic and an admirer of Bruskewitz’s. In light of this report, I don’t know what he meant back then. This report shatters his reputation. He should never show his face in public again. For example:

Most recently, Victim #1’s sister contacted the Lincoln Police Department in 2018. The sister disclosed that Victim #1 told her Deonise provided him with alcohol and performed sexual acts upon him over a period of several years. Victim #1 was contacted and refused to give a statement. The sister alleged she reported the abuse to the diocese in 1994, but the diocese did not inform law enforcement. The 1994 report was likely the one referred to in the November 1994 note from the Bishop Bruskewitz. The sister also claimed a family member found love letters from Deonise to Victim #1, which were delivered to a priest in the diocese in 1994. There is no record of these letters in the file.

A. Nature of the abuse/misconduct: Unspecified sexual acts perpetrated on the victim

B. Date of incident: Mid-1980s

C. Reported to diocese: 1994; 1995

D. Gender/age of victim: Male – 11-13 years old

E. Abuse reported to diocese prior to incident described: No

F. Reported to law enforcement: 2018

Disposition: Deonise resigned as head priest of his parish in August 1994 and left the State of Nebraska. His priestly faculties were removed, and he was excommunicated in October 1994. In 2013, the bishop corresponded with Deonise, inquiring whether he desired to be removed from the clerical state. Deonise indicated he wished to remain a priest. The diocese never reported allegations of Deonise’s abuse to law enforcement. Deonise’s current whereabouts is not indicated in the file.

Look at these clerical liars, what they did:

The diocese became aware of Hrdlicka’s victimization of the minors from the camping trip in 1978. The file includes numerous reports which reveal that after the father of Victim #1 met with Monsignor Crowley, Hrdlicka was moved to a new parish. Ironically and unbeknownst to the father of Victim #1, Crowley was himself an abuser of multiple minor boys. The new parish was not informed of Hrdlicka’s molestation of the four victims from the camping trip. More troubling, Hrdlicka was given a state leadership role in a Catholic youth organization. [Emphasis mine — RD] He went on to victimize at least five (and possibly up to nine) other children. Law enforcement in Nebraska was notified about Hrdlicka’s sexual assaults in 2018.

After his 1993 military convictions, the father of Victim #1 reached out to the vicar general of the diocese to inform him about Hrdlicka’s sexual abuse of the four minors in 1978. Later that year, the diocese suspended Hrdlicka from ministry. In 2002, the victims from the 1978 camping trip contacted the diocese about their abuse at the hands of Hrdlicka. They said the national news of the sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese in 2002 motivated them to reach out to the diocese. They alleged the diocese never offered an apology for their abuse, nor did it offer any assistance when Hrdlicka’s military conviction became public.

Soon thereafter, the diocese issued a press release announcing the four victims from the camping trip had threatened to sue the diocese for $2 million. In essence, the diocese was accusing the victims of blackmail. The release stated that as of 1992, “there was no record of any complaints against Hrdlicka in the diocese.” While there may have been no written records of Hrdlicka’s abuse, his abusive behavior had been communicated to the highest levels of the diocese in 1978, including Bishop Flavin. There is no indication the victims ever sued the diocese.

Hrdlicka was released from military prison in 1999. He was permanently removed from the clerical state in 2005. Hrdlicka’s present whereabouts is unknown.

There’s a section on Monsignor Leonard Kalin (d. 2008), the longtime vocations director of the Lincoln diocese, and head of the University of Nebraska’s Newman Center. He was nothing but a dirty old man — and the diocese knew it. Excerpt:

It is evident from the accounts of Victim #5 and Victim #6 that church authorities were made aware of Kalin’s sexual advances towards seminarians in 1998. Victim #5 wrote he believed an investigation had been conducted about Kalin’s abuses, and he was surprised to learn the matter had only recently been publicly brought to light. The file summary recounts a 1998 meeting in which Bruskewitz asked Kalin to “list all sexual encounters he has had.” Kalin referred to one encounter which had occurred the previous month. Kalin then listed the names of 50 men he had “showered with in the gym” and had “kissed on the lips in a non-sexual way.” Bruskewitz issued a canonical warning and forbade him to be alone with any man under the age of 40, except for priests and family members. The summary later noted Kalin “does not strictly follow” the bishop’s precept. None of the source documents pertaining to the summary are in the file.

Here’s how pervy Monsignor Jerome Murray (d. 2016) was. This happened in the 1970s:

The file contains a summary of the sexual abuse of Victim #4. He was a student and in a boy scout troop led by Murray. He said Murray would undress completely in the presence of groups of boys. He recounted Murray would masturbate publicly and ask the boys to feel his penis. Victim #4 indicated that Murray would undress some of the boys personally. On one occasion, Murray used a floor mounted electric shoe buffer to masturbate in front of the boys. He claimed Murray’s inappropriate activities were “common knowledge among all of the boys.

The AG’s report said that parents on the Catholic school board had to threaten the diocese with going to the police in order to force the bishop to remove this freak from the schools. Even after all this time, it breaks my brain to contemplate how viciously adversarial bishops and church officials were to parents who wanted priests to stop molesting children.

The late Father John Fiala of the Archdiocese of Omaha was quit a piece of work:

A week after their conversation, the Ralston Police Department found Fiala in a parked car in a city park, with [13-year-old] Victim #3 sitting on Fiala’s lap. Fiala told the police he was teaching Victim #3 how to drive. The father related Fiala had been grooming Victim #3 for a while, and that Fiala “used a sick woman (Victim #3’s mother)” to gain information and access to Victim #3. After the incident in the park, Victim #3’s life began to fall apart. While he does not believe Fiala was responsible for all of Victim #3’s problems, the father believed Fiala added to his son’s decline. The father noted Victim #3 once told him, “That guy [Fiala] ruined my life.” There are no other details about the abuse suffered by Victim #3.

Shortly after the incident in the park, the father of Victim #3, along with the president of the parish council, and a priest met with Archbishop Sheehan to inform him about Fiala’s conduct. Archbishop Sheehan told them Fiala would not be assigned to a position which entailed working with children. Fiala was soon thereafter removed from his parish assignment. His personnel record reveals he had a leave of absence for a year before being assigned as an associate priest in 1989. There is no record of criminal charges being filed after the incident with Victim #3.

The father explained he reached out to the archdiocese again in 2010 after learning about Fiala’s arrest in Texas. In a 2010 correspondence with the chancellor, he stated “there is not a day that goes by that I don’t search for some reasonable explanation as to how my Catholic Church could have allowed such a horrible thing to continue after they knew what was going on.” He added, “How could the [archbishop] look me in the eye and tell me, promise me, that he would take immediate action to remove this man from any position that would put him in contact with children and then just transfer him into some other unsuspecting flock of Catholic children?” Victim #3 subsequently committed suicide.

Fiala’s monstrous deeds continued after he left Omaha:

 In 2008, Fiala was serving at a parish in Rocksprings, Texas. Early that year, Fiala began giving private catechism classes to Victim #4, a 16-year-old boy. In January, under the pretext of taking Victim #4 on an out-of-town trip to visit the boy’s girlfriend, Fiala took him to a hotel and raped him at gunpoint. He told Victim #4 he would hurt him and his family if he told anyone what happened.

He sexually assaulted Victim #4 two more times during 2008. Victim #4 later swallowed a bottle of pills and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. While at the hospital he told counselors about the sexual assaults. Fiala was arrested and charged with aggravated sexual assault.

While out on bail, Fiala talked to a man to see if he could arrange to have Victim #4 killed. The man contacted the police, who arranged for an undercover officer to meet with Fiala. Fiala’s offer to pay $5,000 to have Victim #4 killed was recorded. Fiala was charged and convicted of solicitation of capital murder in 2012 and sentenced to 60 years in prison. In 2014, he pled guilty to sexual assault of a child and received a sentence of 30 additional years in prison.

There are records indicating that the then-archbishop was aware of the magnitude of Father Fiala’s problems for a long time, and yet kept moving him around.

In a 1988 letter from Archbishop Sheehan to another priest, he recounted the numerous complaints he received about Fiala’s behavior around teenagers. He wrote that Fiala had “a history of doing some very strange things that worry me and also the pastors of the parishes in which he has been sent.” Sheehan continued, writing he believed that Fiala’s “actions indicate such a lack of maturity that it is very difficult to give him a pastoral assignment.”

Here’s something about Father Thomas Sellentin, an Omaha priest who got away with it for decades:

Reports of Sellentin’s sexual abuse date from the late 1960s through the 1990s. In over 35 years as a priest, he had 12 different parish assignments. Ten of these assignments lasted less than four years. The actual number of abuse cases is uncertain, but the file reveals there were close to 40 victims. In our determination, the file supports there were at least 36 victims. The cases fit the same general description of inappropriate touching and rubbing on the legs, buttocks, and genital area. Numerous church officials were aware of Sellentin’s behavior and attraction to pre-teen and teenage boys. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Yes, but who cares about laity? The Church exists for the pleasure of the clergy, right? What else could justify this behavior by church officials? The report says church officials started to learn about Sellentin’s abusive behavior in the late 1960s. And yet, on he went. More:

The file contains clips from numerous newspaper articles revealing the archdiocese knew of Sellentin’s proclivity for sexual abuse of boys. A World Herald article from April 2002 affirms reports of the abuse were made to Archbishop Sheehan in 1970, 1980, and 1985. The article states, “An inability to grasp the criminal nature of pedophilia and its long-term, tragic effects on victims could be one reason [the archbishop] transferred Sellentin from parish to parish even after being told Sellentin was sexually abusing children.”

I am told that during the press conference, the Attorney General became emotional several times.

I reached out this morning to ask Peter Mitchell, the laicized priest whose public statement on this blog in 2018 had a lot to do with prompting the probe, for his reaction. He wrote back:

When will faithful Catholics see through the smoke and mirrors of the institution they desperately want to defend as being “holy”?!?!

Today we have learned that the Diocese of Lincoln knew as early as 1998 that Vocation Director Kalin had over 50 male victims of inappropriate behavior, and yet its 2020 report merely said that Kalin had “on occasion” done inappropriate things. And yet we are expected to believe that the Diocese is committed to transparency.

The AG report tells an awful, sickening story. Nobody could believe that any basically decent human being could do these things to children, let alone priests entrusted with leading them to God. And yet the Diocese protected and enabled them, over and over and over.

The detail on page 49 that a letter of complaint about Monsignor Clarence Crowley was returned without any response from the Lincoln chancery in the early 2000s just says so much about how “wonderful” the Lincoln Diocese was and is.

The myth of the Diocese of Lincoln is completely shattered, despite the many lay people there who still don’t want to believe that it could have happened in “the Shire,” as Bishop Conley used to love to call the Diocese of Lincoln. The Catholic seminary system actually has far more in common with the Mines of Moria – a once beautiful place that is now overrun with demons and darkness.

It’s angering to think of how many young people – including me – were encouraged to go and listen to Monsignor Kalin because he would help them know how to follow Jesus and get to heaven. He was a fraud. Are devout Catholics in Lincoln still able to be in denial about this after reading the AG report? He was not a “saint.” He was a fraud.

It’s sad to think of how many good priests are harmed today by all of this news, because it’s not their fault that the system is so sick and corrupt.

It’s mind-boggling to realize that this pattern is undoubtedly repeated in diocese after diocese across this country. This report reveals the way the system works anywhere a Catholic chancery oversees clergy.

Is there any way to redeem and reform the “Catholic system”? I have yet to hear a reasonable proposal. I’m not talking about the Catechism and the Sacraments, which I fully believe in. I am talking about a system of control, exploitation, and homosexual power that has so intertwined itself with the “Church of Jesus” that it’s now impossible to accept the former without cooperating with the latter. What is a person of faith supposed to do???

This is not a problem that is all “in the past.” This is an ongoing effort to avoid talking or revealing even a small portion of the problem to lay people who still naively think that it couldn’t be as bad as people like me say it is.

I am not sorry that I felt had to blow the whistle on Lincoln in 2018. I only wish that more people would take the time to understand that the magnitude of the problem is far, far greater than what any of us are yet aware of. If today is a small step toward that happening, then some progress is being made. But there is still a long, long way to go.

Stan Schulte is another brave man whose name should be recognized and honored on this day. The priest who molested him was his uncle, Jim Benton, who is in the AG’s report. 

Schulte told me in the 2018 interview (linked in the previous sentence) that the Lincoln diocese was still at the time not being forthcoming with the public about why his uncle was no longer in ministry:

As a frustrated Stan Schulte said of his uncle, “He’s still actively friends with minors on Facebook.” Late Sunday, I captured these screenshots from Father Benton’s Facebook page.

He goes on:

I have been fighting all by myself for the past nine months. These unknowing parents are sitting there, with the children as Facebook friends with my uncle the priest. The diocese has not warned them about him. We have such blind trust for priests. He has access to their children. They don’t even know what’s going on because the diocese has hidden it under ‘health issues.’

One striking aspect of my intensely emotional interview with Stan Schulte, in which he broke down crying several times, is his repeated expression of love for priests, loyalty to the Catholic Church, and even love for the uncle he says molested him.

“I’ve lived my whole life loving my uncle,” Schulte says, sobbing. “I think he’s a good person, no matter how deep this problem goes. He hasn’t had anyone to help him. He just kept being moved from parish to parish.”

“I feel like my uncle is unable to even get support from fellow priests in regards to his problem because they too are left in the dark and are not able to show compassion or much-needed support. This, I am sure, makes him feel isolated and alone as well.”

Schulte continues, “There are a lot of amazing priests I respect and love, and I fear some of them don’t have a voice, knowing how much potential corruption there may be above them.”

Schulte told me then that he came forward in 2018 after reading Peter Mitchell’s piece on this blog. More:

“The thing that drove me to come forward to my family is that I didn’t want my nieces and nephews to suffer this,” he said. “How many other victims in this diocese have become alcoholics? How many have committed suicide? How many have not been able to have normal lives because of what was done to them? We the people of this diocese are the body of Christ. We deserve better.”

“I fear my uncle may have hurt more people,” he says. “How many priests like him are still in a position of power? How many other children are still vulnerable? How many priests who have allegations against them have moved up in the ranks, and stayed quiet to protect each other?”

He is also coming forward for the sake of Lincoln’s priests. “I think some of the most amazing priests in the country are in our diocese. They deserve to have honest, truly transparent leadership within the diocese that they love and serve.”

That said, Schulte feels that to this point, he has been abandoned by Lincoln’s clergy. Last week, he posted this on Facebook:

“I think it’s important to say that even having one priest come forward to support you is so important,” Schulte tells me. “I said on Facebook this week that I was a victim as well, and that this [problem] needs to be looked at. A priest put a heart sign on it. I cried for 30 minutes, because this was the first time in a long time that I felt love and support from the Church. I broke down and cried because as a victim, you start to feel like the whole church will hate you if you come forward and mess up the façade of perfection that the Church portrays itself to be.”

I hope today’s AG report brings some measure of piece to Stan Schulte, and all the other victims, and their families.

UPDATE: Just got this from Stan Schulte:

Your decades of inaction speak much louder than your blanket apologies.

They have lost our trust and put tens of thousands of innocent children in harms way.

If this was the public school system and the principal knew for decades that there were teachers abusing students and covered it up, that principal would be fired immediately. If the Catholic leadership doesn’t step down now, we are naive to think there will ever be any change.

In an extreme case like this, I would ask that the state legislature temporarily lift the statute of limitations, as many other states have done. This would allow survivors to be heard and justice to be served.

Instead of continuing to put tens of millions of dollars towards more extravagant churches, I think God would much rather have you devote that money to protecting our children and compensating your faithful laity who have been abused due to your gross negligence.