LOUISVILLE (KY)
The Courier-Journal
By Paula Burba
pburba@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
Monsignor Alfred F. Horrigan, a well-known Louisville human-rights advocate and founding president of what is now Bellarmine University, died yesterday after a long illness at age 90.
Horrigan lived his last days at Nazareth Home, a healthcare facility overlooking the Bellarmine campus that he nurtured from its founding in 1949 as an all-male Catholic university and led for the next 23 years as president. ...
Horrigan did draw some criticism after the sexual-abuse scandal erupted in the Archdiocese of Louisville in 2002 -- well after his retirement. Horrigan testified in a deposition then that he took no action against a priest accused of molesting a girl.
He acknowledged that the girl's parents had accused the Rev. Kevin Cole, then a Bellarmine professor, of molesting their daughter in the early 1960s and that he took no action after Cole assured him that he had an appointment with a psychiatrist. Cole went on to molest at least four other girls, according to lawsuits filed against the archdiocese. Cole died in 1991.