<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.19019">
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT size=2>From: <EM>The New york Times</EM></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV class=timestamp>March 28, 2011</DIV>
<DIV class=kicker></DIV>
<H1><NYT_HEADLINE type=" " version="1.0">Suit Says Jesuits Ignored Warnings
About Priest</NYT_HEADLINE></H1><NYT_BYLINE>
<H6 class=byline>By <A class=meta-per title="More Articles by Erik Eckholm"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/erik_eckholm/index.html?inline=nyt-per">ERIK
ECKHOLM</A></H6></NYT_BYLINE><NYT_TEXT>
<DIV id=articleBody><NYT_CORRECTION_TOP></NYT_CORRECTION_TOP>
<P>Jesuit leaders in Chicago largely ignored or kept secret numerous reports,
spanning four decades, that a prominent priest was sexually abusing teenage
boys, lawyers for victims charged on Monday in a motion for punitive damages in
a Chicago court. </P>
<P>Included in the <A title="Copy of filed motion on plaintiff lawyer web site"
href="http://andersonadvocates.com/Files/345/Jesuits-and-McGuire---Punitive-Damages-Motionpdf">motion</A>
were more than 65 recently obtained church documents and depositions that, the
lawyers said, demonstrated “a reckless disregard for the safety of others in the
face of repeated reports of sexual misconduct” on the part of Chicago Jesuit
leaders. </P>
<P>The former priest, Donald J. McGuire, now 80, was convicted on several counts
of sex abuse in state and federal courts in 2006 and 2008, and is serving a
25-year federal sentence. </P>
<P>The newly public documents date from the early 1960s, when a concerned
Austrian priest, in imperfect English, first observed in a letter to Chicago
Jesuits that Father McGuire, newly ordained and studying in Europe, had “much
relations with several boys.” The reports extend into the last decade, when
Father McGuire reportedly ignored admonitions to stop traveling with young
assistants, molesting one as late as 2003, as law enforcement was closing in.
The legal motion argues that Father McGuire’s superiors in Chicago turned “a
blind eye to his criminal actions.” </P>
<P>The current case started with a civil suit brought by six men who say they
were victims. Three have since settled with the Jesuits, but three others,
identified as John Doe 117, John Doe 118 and John Doe 129, are still pursuing
the suit against the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus and Mr. McGuire.
Most of the newly released documents were obtained in the discovery process for
the suit: letters and memos the church was required to produce from its files,
and transcripts of depositions. </P>
<P>The motion filed on Monday asks the Cook County Circuit Court to take the
unusual step of considering additional, punitive damages, given what the motion
says is the evidence of a long trail of credible warnings about the priest’s
behavior and ineffective responses by church officials. </P>
<P>Terence McKiernan, president of <A href="http://bishopaccountability.org/"
target=_>BishopAccountability.org</A>, a victim advocacy group that has long
monitored the church’s response to sexual abuse charges, said that the series of
warnings given to Jesuit leaders by parents and fellow priests was unusually
long and clear. </P>
<P>“I have never seen such detailed and frequent notice received by the priest’s
superiors, so many ‘directives’ regarding the priest’s future behavior, and so
much evidence presented to his superiors that those directives were being
violated, without the priest being removed from ministry,” Mr. McKiernan said.
</P>
<P>His group has posted a <A title=" "
href="http://www.bishop-accountability.org/docs/jesuits/McGuire_Donald/Punitive_Damages_Motion/">history
of the case and many of the key documents</A>. </P>
<P>Mariah E. Moran, a lawyer for the Chicago Province, said she could not
comment on the motion because she had not had a chance to study it, and a
spokesman for the province did not respond to requests
<STRONG><EM></EM></STRONG>for comment. In depositions and settlement meetings
over the last three years, senior Jesuit officials have said that until recent
years they had not heard firm-enough evidence of sexual abuse to justify
stronger action against Father McGuire. </P>
<P>Last week, the Jesuits’ Oregon Province agreed to pay $166 million to
hundreds of victims of sexual abuse, which occurred decades ago at remote Indian
boarding schools. The two cases shed rare light on how religious orders have
dealt with charges of sexual abuse, as opposed to the Catholic dioceses and
bishops at the center of most recent scandals. The Jesuits are the world’s
largest Roman Catholic religious order. </P>
<P>The motion filed on Monday charges that the church misled prosecutors in
2006, with its lawyers claiming that they had little information about the
priest — despite the lengthy record of complaints. </P>
<P>The case has been acutely troublesome for the Jesuits, an order known for its
scholarship and its elite high schools and universities. Father McGuire was by
all accounts a mesmerizing teacher, and after he was barred by some Jesuit
schools in the 1960s and 1970s for suspicious behavior, including having
students share his bedroom, he went on to became a popular leader of eight-day
spiritual retreats around the country and the world. </P>
<P>For about two decades, starting in the early 1980s, he was a spiritual
adviser to <A class=meta-per title="More articles about Mother Teresa."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/teresa_mother/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Mother
Teresa</A>, who put him in charge of retreats for the nuns in her worldwide
order, Missionaries of Charity. Several times each year, in India, the United
States, Russia and other countries, he led retreats for the sisters. </P>
<P>In these travels he routinely took along a teenage boy as an assistant,
saying he needed help administering his diabetes treatment. In complaints voiced
by some parents and priests at the time, and in later depositions, those
assistants said their duties often included sleeping in the same bed as Father
McGuire, showering and reading pornography together, providing intimate massages
and watching him masturbate. </P>
<P>The Jesuits have their own administrative structure, with a leader in Rome
and regional provinces in the United States, although they also operate with
permission from local bishops. </P>
<P>On his return from Europe in the 1960s, Father McGuire was assigned to live
and teach at <A title="School Web site."
href="http://www.goramblers.org/">Loyola Academy</A>, a high school in Wilmette,
Ill. Two boys stayed with him in his room for about two years each, where he
constantly abused them, according to the 2006 trial. </P>
<P>In 1969 the second of those boys, then 15, ran away and described the abuse
to his parish priest, who contacted the Jesuit president of the academy. The
school responded by removing Father McGuire, but, according to a letter released
on Monday, publicly described his departure as a “sabbatical.” </P>
<P>In 1991, in another of the many warnings revealed on Monday, the director of
a retreat house in California reported to the Chicago Province’s leader that
Father McGuire was traveling with a teenage boy from Alaska and sharing a bed
with him, and that the boy’s mother had expressed her concern that “her son has
in some way changed.” </P>
<P>That year, the Chicago Province’s leader, the Rev. Robert A. Wild, imposed
the first set of “guidelines” on Father McGuire. In written instructions he
said: “I ask that you not travel on any overnight trip with any boy or girl
under the age of 18 and preferably even under the age of 21.” But Father McGuire
was left to police himself, and Father Wild said in a 2009 deposition that he
had regarded the case as “a serious matter” but also “ambiguous.” </P>
<P>The province sent Father McGuire in 1993 for a psychiatric examination and
six months at a treatment center in Maryland — but in the week before he was to
report for the evaluation, he was allowed to conduct a retreat in Phoenix, where
he molested another boy, the documents indicate. </P>
<P>As late as 1998, the new documents show, the Chicago provincial wrote a
letter of “good standing” for Father McGuire to allow him to minister in a
diocese, stating that “there is nothing to our knowledge in his background which
would restrict any ministry with minors.” </P>
<P>As the reports of abuse accumulated, the Chicago leaders issued one set of
restrictions after another on Father McGuire, finally, in 2002, saying he could
minister only to nuns in the Chicago region. But none of these directives were
enforced, the court motion asserts. </P>
<P>Father McGuire was formally removed from the priesthood in February 2008
after a conviction in Wisconsin and after a federal indictment had been issued
in Illinois. </P><NYT_CORRECTION_BOTTOM>
<DIV
class=articleCorrection></DIV></NYT_CORRECTION_BOTTOM><NYT_UPDATE_BOTTOM></NYT_UPDATE_BOTTOM></DIV></NYT_TEXT><BR>
<CENTER></CENTER><NOSCRIPT class=noscript-show></NOSCRIPT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>________________________________________</FONT></DIV><FONT
size=2>
<DIV><BR>Wayne A. Fox<BR>1009 Karen Lane<BR>PO Box 9421<BR>Moscow, ID
83843</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><A href="mailto:waf@moscow.com">waf@moscow.com</A><BR>208
882-7975<BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>