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	Woe to Him by Whom Scandal Comes By Jim Bowman Chicago Daily Observer August 27, 2007 http://cdobs.com/our-columns/woe-to-him-by-whom-scandal-comes/ There is no joy in Jesuitville today, or less of it than a week ago when another Rev. Donald McGuire sexual-abuse victim filed suit. This one is not proven as victim, like those who testified in McGuire's conviction last year in Wisconsin, but far more recently abused – 1999 to 2003 – per the complaint, and in Cook County, coming well under the statutory limitation, which heretofore has ruled prosecution out here. The Jesuits heard the accusation, by a 21-year-old college student, in January and informed the office of Loyola Academy alumnus and state's attorney Dick Devine soon afterward, they say. This was news to the state's attorney's people, who say they learned from complainants' lawyers only this week. t was also news to the Wisconsin court where McGuire was sentenced to seven years in prison and 20 years probation. If Wisconsin had known about the accusation, a prosecutor said, McGuire would have had to escape to Wisconsin from Oak Lawn, where he's been staying in a private home. McGuire's freedom during his appeal, handled by a new lawyer after he fired famed Milwaukee criminal lawyer Gerry Boyle, has been impossible to discover in Internet-available news accounts. But now it's being reported, along with the accusation by a 21-year-old student of what he says he experienced at McGuire's hands and where – in 13 states, including Wisconsin, and six countries. Locally, it happened at McGuire's base for worldwide travel as confessor and retreat-giver for Mother Teresa's nuns, if not for Mother Teresa herself, was a Jesuit writers' residence on Dempster street a block from the lake, Canisius House. It's aptly named, Peter Canisius being one of the earliest of Jesuits, a prolific writer called the "hammer of heretics" for his defense of Roman Catholicism in those early decades of Protestant revolution. It's a big old mansion in a neighborhood of the primest of prime real estate. A Jesuit could walk off his morning meditation on the nearby beach, disturbed by nothing but screaming gulls and occasional gabby women out for a stroll. But the idyllic atmosphere was shattered within the big house, according to the suit, when McGuire, up to his old tricks from Loyola Academy days of the late '60s, moved a kid into his quarters and took him on his trips and abused him. The kid's mother gave the OK, trusting the good father as "spiritual mentor." Jesuit superiors in the '60s apparently knew of or suspected McGuire's activities and for a solution shuffled one of the abused off to St. Ignatius High on the West Side. By 1970 McGuire was on his own for Mother Teresa, with the world as his oyster. In 2007 another set of superiors are being sued for ignoring and condoning or culpably being ignorant of the same horrible pattern. They "knew or should reasonably have known" what was going on but failed to intervene, says this week's suit. McGuire's past was apparently not permitted to haunt him, even as victims were haunted terribly, even suicidally. In the 60s, very few realized the horrors of pederasty, especially by priests, and of pederasty-related behavior, as fondling – recently downplayed with cold-blooded ignorance by the Chicago chancery spokeswoman in another case. That was then. Now is the hour of enlightenment. This week's case is one that will never be heard in court, unless the pattern in such matters is reversed. The Chicago Province is about to pay for its failure to be enlightened.
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