SEATTLE (WA)
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
By CLAUDIA ROWE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Before the Rev. Stephen Sundborg became president of Seattle University, he held annual, private meetings with another Jesuit priest who has since confessed to repeatedly molesting a 12-year-old, a 10-year-old and two adult women. Sundborg, however, never reported these crimes.
As Provincial of the Northwest Jesuits from 1990 to 1996, the distinguished, nationally known academic had at least 10 conversations with Alaska priest James Poole about improper sexual acts, but he has maintained that these discussions were privileged and, therefore, secret.
John Manly, a California lawyer who has filed several cases against Poole, dismissed such reasoning as little more than an excuse for criminal cover-up.
"If a priest, while you were provincial, manifested to you that he had raped a 7- or 8-year-old little girl on the day of her first communion, he chopped her head off after the rape, buried her body, had sex with her body after he chopped her head off and was hiding it, and you knew that the parents and the police were looking for that child, would you alert authorities?" he asked Sundborg during a deposition in October.
No, the university president replied. Everything said in his annual "accounts of conscience" with Poole -- and hundreds of other priests -- remains secret, no matter how heinous.