NEW YORK
The New York Times
By ANDY NEWMAN
Published: November 3, 2005
All Hallows High School in the Bronx is a handsome brown-brick structure overlooking a park off the Grand Concourse, home to 530 students and to a reputation for academic success. Its link to a notoriously abusive orphanage in Canada, 1,500 miles away and long demolished, seems hard to fathom.
For decades, though, the school and the orphanage were owned by the same Roman Catholic order, the Congregation of Christian Brothers. And as lawsuits against the brothers over the orphanage scandal grind on, an internal Christian Brothers memo written 15 years ago surfaced on Tuesday in a complaint filed at a Bronx courthouse.
All Hallows High School was owned by the Christian Brothers, who were responsible for a notoriously abusive orphanage in Canada.
The internal memo, lawyers for orphanage victims charge, shows that the Christian Brothers' 1990 sale of All Hallows was a sham transaction designed to hide their ownership, part of a strategy to minimize the amount victims could recover in a suit.
The Bronx complaint asks a judge to rule that the high school, which a commercial real estate broker recently valued at between $3 million and $10 million, really belongs to the Christian Brothers after all. The school is not the subject of any abuse complaints, but to the orphanage victims, it is fair game.