December 21, 2005

Manifest Secrecy

SEATTLE (WA)
Seattle Weekly

by Nina Shapiro

A lawyer is deposing a potential witness in the case of a woman who alleges that in the 1970s, when a child, she was abused and impregnated by a Jesuit priest in Alaska. The lawyer represents her, and the man he is questioning, in preparation for trial, is a key figure who later served as the priest's supervisor. Key and prominent. Father Stephen Sundborg today is president of Seattle University.

Sundborg has just said that he can't talk about conversations he had with Father James Poole about sexual behavior because they were confidential communication between a priest and his supervisor, called "manifestation of conscience." At the time of those conversations with Poole in the early to mid-1990s, Sundborg was head of a regional Jesuit domain known as the Oregon Province.

Deposing Sundborg on Oct. 11, attorney John Manly offers a fantastical scenario to discern just how far the university president is willing to take such secrecy.

Manly: "If a priest while you were provincial, manifested to you that he had raped a seven- or eight-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 the authorities?"

Sundborg: "There is nothing that is said that I would learn in a manifestation of conscience that I would reveal to another person."

Manly: "So you wouldn't tell the police in that situation."

Sundborg: "I would not."

Posted by kshaw at December 21, 2005 06:11 AM