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For He Has Sinned
A New Lawsuit Sheds Light on the S.F. Years of
Mother Teresa's Spiritual Adviser – Who Is Also One of the Jesuit Order's
Most Notorious Convicted Pedophiles
By Peter Jamison
San Francisco Weekly
July 27, 2009
http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-07-29/news/for-he-has-sinned/
Two decades ago, an 11-year-old boy from the Bay Area was honored with
an invitation most devout Catholics would envy. Mother Teresa of Calcutta,
winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her work among the developing
world's poor, was celebrating Mass at her order's convent in Noe Valley.
The ceremony was part of a retreat led by one of the famed humanitarian
nun's close spiritual advisers, a Jesuit priest and former University
of San Francisco professor named Donald McGuire.
It was at McGuire's bidding that the 11-year-old came to serve as an altar
boy that morning at St. Paul's Convent, a boxy building of yellow stucco
that rises from a tree-lined block near the intersection of 29th and Church
streets. (The convent houses local novices in the international Missionaries
of Charity order, founded by Mother Teresa in 1950.) The priest was close
to the boy's family: He had baptized the boy, and offered his mother spiritual
and psychological counseling over the years. Indeed, within church circles,
McGuire was something of a celebrity himself.
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McGuire at Doe 129’s baptism in
1978. [Photo courtesy of] John Doe 129 |
Steeped, as are all Jesuits, in the cerebral traditions of Catholicism,
McGuire dazzled his many admirers with his command of ancient history
and literature. He could speak eloquently about philosophy and theology,
and deployed his rhetoric to powerful effect during multiday religious
seminars based on the teachings of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits'
founder. He had silvering brown hair and a round, red Irish face that
often creased into a puckish smile. He liked to give advice. And he liked
to hear confession.
On that morning almost 20 years ago, however, McGuire's interests were
more profane than sacred. Following a morning Mass, he asked the boy to
retire with him to a private chamber reserved for the priest at the convent.
While the nuns and Mother Teresa milled about, McGuire closed the door
to his room and asked his favored altar boy to join him, in his cot, for
a nap. The boy lay down. The priest lay on the outside of the narrow bed
and then reached across the boy's body and into his pants.
So said the boy in a recent interview with SF Weekly. Now 30, he is suing
the Jesuits for turning a blind eye to McGuire's repeated acts of child
molestation. His lawsuit was filed this winter in Cook County, Ill., home
of the Chicago Province of the Jesuits, where McGuire kept his primary
residence.
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McGuire was known for captivating audiences
with his talks on theology. [Photo courtesy of] John Doe 129 |
The boy — who is identified in court documents only as John Doe
129, and requested that SF Weekly not publish his name or hometown to
spare him the stigma attached to childhood sexual abuse — is accusing
the Chicago Province of negligence and fraud in failing to keep McGuire
away from children. He and his attorneys allege that over a period of
about 10 years beginning in 1988, McGuire forced the boy to massage the
priest's genitals and watch him masturbate, among other acts of abuse.
Doe 129 is not the first to accuse McGuire, now an ailing 79-year-old,
of such misdeeds. In 2006, the priest was convicted in a Wisconsin court
of molesting two teenage boys he had taught decades earlier at a prominent
Jesuit high school in the Midwest. Earlier this year, a federal judge
in Illinois sentenced McGuire to 25 years in prison after a jury found
him guilty of traveling abroad with a teenage boy to sexually abuse him.
(For his part, McGuire still insists he is innocent and has appealed his
latest conviction.)
While the federal case rested on molestation charges involving only one
boy, investigators believed McGuire had abused dozens during his career.
In fact, Jesuit leaders first received complaints about the priest in
1969, although he was not officially defrocked until last year. Some of
the ex-priest's alleged victims — many of them now grown men —
and their family members were permitted to address U.S. District Court
Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer during his sentencing hearing. Their statements,
not surprisingly, were emotionally charged. The Arizona father of two
boys McGuire allegedly molested said he would like to hand down his own
sentence on the ex-priest using a baseball bat.
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In 1985, McGuire plays with Doe 129 at
the boy’s home. [Photo courtesy of] John Doe 129 |
One of those who traveled to Chicago to speak out was the mother of the
altar boy allegedly molested at the Missionaries of Charity convent in
San Francisco. "I told the judge that I thought that he deserved
the maximum sentence," she said. "Even we, as adults, couldn't
stand up to someone who was Mother Teresa's confessor. Can you imagine
children that have no voice?"
Doe 129's lawsuit is just one of multiple pending civil cases against
McGuire nationwide. But it is the first to draw attention to the strong
San Francisco ties of the man who is arguably the most prominent convicted
child abuser in the Jesuits' 470-year history. Interviews with McGuire's
former colleagues, associates, and admirers cast light on the pivotal
phases of his life that took place in this city — it was in San
Francisco that he began his working relationship with Mother Teresa —
and suggest that the disgraced ex-priest committed acts of abuse here
for which neither he nor his superiors have ever been held to account.
In 1976, Father Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit instructor at the University of
San Francisco, was busy recruiting students and professors for a new classics
program. Called the St. Ignatius Institute, it would focus on a traditional
"great books" curriculum, functioning as an autonomous college
within the university. As he organized the institute, Fessio got a call
from a well-known Jesuit teacher from the Midwest who was interested in
joining. His name was Donald McGuire.
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McGuire, Doe 129, and Mother Teresa at
the Missionaries of Charity convent in San Francisco in 1991. [Photo
courtesy of ] John Doe 129 |
Fessio had heard of McGuire. By reputation, he was "very dynamic"
and "a very exciting teacher," Fessio recalls, known for his
orthodoxy and loyalty to the church. The truth, as documents unearthed
in McGuire's subsequent criminal and civil cases would later reveal, was
more complicated. As a matter of fact, at the time he came to USF, McGuire's
Midwestern superiors had already received complaints that he had sexually
molested two boys at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit high school in Illinois.
(The same incidents eventually led to McGuire's first criminal conviction
in 2006.)
Fessio, now an editor at Ignatius Press, a San Francisco–based publishing
house, said in an interview that he didn't know about the skeletons in
McGuire's closet back then. But once McGuire moved to San Francisco and
began teaching freshman seminars in ancient Greek literature and history,
it didn't take long for Fessio to notice that his new colleague had a
dark side.
"He loved the classics, and he communicated that to the kids. That
was the positive side," Fessio said. "There was a negative side.
He seemed like he had to have people around him. He needed to have an
audience. ... For all of us, our failings are pretty well interwoven in
our personalities. There was a talent, but it was kind of a dangerous
talent, and I was always a little bit reserved toward it."
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Known for his conservatism, McGuire liked
women to wear long skirts in his presence. [Photo courtesy of] John
Doe 129 |
McGuire was mercurial, quick to turn on colleagues or friends, and inclined
to nurse grudges. He was also prone to bragging — even about his
own piety. "Joe, I can pray circles around you," Fessio recalled
McGuire once saying to him. "It was a weird claim."
Father Cornelius Buckley, a former history teacher at the St. Ignatius
Institute, said he was troubled by the strangely intense attachments McGuire
cultivated among select groups of students. (In contrast to his strained
relations with other teachers, McGuire was always wildly popular with
those enrolled in his classes, former colleagues say.) Those students
who followed the Greek professor's banner "seemed to be more involved
with him than they were with the program," Buckley recalled in a
telephone interview from Santa Paula, Calif., where he is now chaplain
at Thomas Aquinas College.
McGuire taught at the St. Ignatius Institute for four years. Jesuit records
from that period show that Buckley wasn't the only one vexed by McGuire's
closeness to his students. Father Alfred Naucke, an official at the California
Jesuit Province, said his office's files on McGuire indicate that USF
officials frowned upon the priest's practice of inviting students into
his private room. (Those students were most likely boys, since women would
not have been permitted to enter the university's Jesuit residences.)
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The Missionaries of Charity convent in
Noe Valley as it looks today. [Photo] Justin Page |
In May 1981, then-USF Dean David Harnett wrote a letter to California
provincial officials, obtained by SF Weekly, explaining that McGuire would
not be rehired for the following academic year. Among the reasons Harnett
cited for the priest's sacking were "highly questionable acts on
his part" and "interactions with a student." Reached by
telephone in Philadelphia, where he now lives in retirement, Harnett said
he did not recall the letter or the circumstances of McGuire's departure.
Father Joseph Angilella, academic vice-president of the university at
the time, declined to comment on McGuire's firing or whether it was linked
to incidents of abuse involving USF students. "It's unfortunate you
have that letter, but I'm not going to add to it," he said. "This
material is confidential in terms of the decision that was made. I assure
you that nothing that happened during these times has anything to do with
the present legal matters that are happening in the Midwest."
Doe 129's attorneys plan to depose California Jesuits, including some
formerly associated with USF. However, university records — as opposed
to those kept by the California Province — illuminate almost nothing
about McGuire's time as a professor in San Francisco. Apparently, that's
because they no longer exist. When Doe 129's lawyers requested the school's
personnel records on the priest from the four years he taught at the St.
Ignatius Institute, they were told that the file on one of the church's
most notorious predators had been thrown out.
In an e-mail response to questions about McGuire from SF Weekly, USF spokesman
Gary McDonald offered this explanation: "USF retains employee records
for seven years after an employee leaves the university, and USF has few
employee records dating back 30 years, including those of Donald McGuire."
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Father Donald McGuire and John Doe 129
at the boy’s first communion in 1982. [Photo courtesy of] John
Doe 129 |
McGuire's ouster from the university's St. Ignatius Institute did not
signal the end of his career. Far from it. Throughout the 1980s and '90s,
he took up the life of an itinerant spiritual adviser. Based at a Jesuit
residence in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, McGuire trotted the globe,
leading the Ignatian spiritual retreats that had become the hallmark of
his ministry. The retreats typically involved daylong prayer and ritual
interspersed with talks from a priest. During these trips, observers say,
McGuire was often accompanied by teenage male attendants who he said helped
him manage his diabetes.
It was during this time that McGuire first met Mother Teresa. Fessio said
he introduced the pair after the nun had asked him during a visit to San
Francisco to recommend a priest who could lead retreats for the nuns of
her order. Despite the two men's prickly relationship while academic colleagues
in the late 1970s, Fessio suggested she seek out McGuire.
From the beginning, Fessio said, Mother Teresa's opinion of McGuire was
"very high." Though he was probably not — as he liked
to boast — her most esteemed spiritual adviser and confessor, observers
of the pair agree that she respected McGuire, and would occasionally confess
her sins to him.
Judie Hockel and her husband, Jack, often hosted McGuire's retreats in
Northern California at their Walnut Creek home. The couple met him through
their oldest son, who was a student at USF during McGuire's time there.
(On his subsequent trips to the Bay Area, McGuire often stayed at a house
attached to a Carmelite monastery adjacent to the USF campus.) Even now,
Judie Hockel, 70, finds it hard to reconcile McGuire's charisma and intellectual
heft with his acts of abuse.
"Everything seemed to combine together to give him a really superhuman
ability — it probably was superhuman; Satan is pure intelligence,
and maybe that's where it came from — to make you feel that you
were liked by God, that you were worthy of being loved by God, that Christ
was calling you to be closer to him," she said. "Catholicism
is an adult religion. I certainly would not want to deny the significance
of faith, but a lot of times people need a grasp of the rational thought.
They're not getting the depth or the richness of Catholicism from the
pulpit these days, and Donald McGuire filled that need in many people's
lives."
In contrast to other Jesuits, who tend to occupy the liberal end of the
Catholic spectrum on political and cultural issues, McGuire was a staunch
conservative on doctrinal questions, including those involving gender
and sexuality. Brigid Crotty, a 40-year-old Napa resident whose family
became close to McGuire in the 1980s, recalled that the priest demanded
that women wear long skirts in his presence.
Looking back, Hockel said she could pick out "red flags" that
signaled an unstable personality. "There was always a chaos that
surrounded his presence," she said. Meetings started late; appointments
were not kept; people were made to wait, or to indulge McGuire's eccentricities.
He was something of a control freak, forcing his hosts to cater to strict
demands regarding his schedule, accommodations, and diet.
"He always wanted a salad with his meal," Hockel said. "He
always wanted four ounces of fresh-squeezed orange juice. I can't believe
every time he came I actually made an effort to squeeze orange juice.
You look back ..." She paused. "I think deep down inside he
enjoyed the coronation that we laypeople gave him, because we felt so
lucky that we had this time with this brilliant, devout prophet."
It was this later phase of McGuire's life, as a traveling Jesuit guru,
that federal authorities investigated as they built their case against
him. They discovered that the priest, while he preached the virtues of
intensely orthodox Catholicism to his followers, was subverting the traditions
of his calling in startling ways. According to a sentencing memorandum
filed by federal prosecutors after McGuire's conviction, one of his primary
means of "grooming" young abuse victims was the ritual of confession.
For example, when the primary victim in the case confessed to McGuire
at the age of 13 that he masturbated, McGuire "seized on it"
and said the boy had an "addiction" that could send him to hell,
according to court documents. He then demanded to "inspect"
the boy's penis using a magnifying glass and baby oil.
Doe 129 said he was never abused in the confessional. But he does recall
other strange twists on McGuire's vocational interests. During a visit
to the Jesuit residence in Evanston, Doe 129 said, McGuire began masturbating
in front of him in a private upstairs room. The classics scholar had allegedly
preceded this exhibition with a discourse on how gay sex was a common
practice among the ancient Greeks.
There is reason to believe that Doe 129 was not McGuire's sole local victim
during his post-USF decades of world travel. A colleague of McGuire's
within the church said in a recent interview that he received a complaint
from a Bay Area family that McGuire was molesting their teenage son in
the years after the priest left the university. The church official, who
requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from his superiors, said he had
passed the complaint on to McGuire's Jesuit higher-ups. (Doe 129 confirmed
that he was not the complainant.)
Likewise, Crotty said her father, Fran Crotty, a former administrator
at a North Bay Catholic school, was informed "in no uncertain terms"
sometime in the last few years by a local man that McGuire had abused
his son in the past. Reached by telephone, Fran Crotty declined to comment.
"I'm not at liberty to discuss anything concerning McGuire,"
he said.
Stephen Komie, McGuire's Chicago-based lawyer, said in an interview that
his client continues to maintain that the allegations leveled at him are
lies intended to wring money from the church — and that his criminal
convictions are simply by-products of accusations that drove the civil
suits against him. "Father McGuire has always said that these are
stories made up for the financial benefit of the persons who are bringing
the case," Komie said.
It is true that the interplay among abuse victims, private attorneys,
and law-enforcement officials in McGuire's case has at times been complicated.
The victim whose complaint led to McGuire's federal conviction —
his identity was withheld during the trial, and he is named in court records
only as Dominick — originally consulted a private attorney known
for representing plaintiffs in priest-pedophilia civil suits in Southern
California. That attorney's name is Kevin McGuire, and he is Donald McGuire's
nephew.
Kevin McGuire said he urged Dominick to take his allegations to federal
authorities, and accompanied him to the U.S. Attorney's office on the
day he filed a complaint. "I traveled in the same Catholic circles
that a lot of these same victims traveled in," he said. "I realized
it was my obligation to turn my uncle in. I'm doing it because it's the
right thing to do."
Kevin McGuire is also representing Doe 129, who claims he is motivated
by desire to hold the priest's superiors to account, rather than the prospect
of financial gain. The litigation "certainly hasn't made my life
any easier, and it's certainly not fun, and I certainly question whether
there's any justice that can be done," said Doe 129, who still lives
in the Bay Area. "I'm just really disgusted and furious about the
fact that they knew about this for so goddamn long, and didn't do anything
about it. If you had a carpet-cleaning business and a guy was a rapist,
you wouldn't let him out and about working for you."
In response to questions from SF Weekly about Doe 129's lawsuit, Chicago
Jesuit Provincial Edward Schmidt (the regional head of his order) said
in a statement that the province was "aware" of the suit. "Because
this matter involves a court action, we do not plan to make any further
comment about these particular allegations at this time," he said.
Kevin McGuire said his uncle's time as a professor in San Francisco, and
his later trips to the Bay Area and around the world, were encouraged
by superiors as a "pass-the-trash" strategy to keep the predator
priest far from his home base. "USF was a place where the Chicago
Province sent Father McGuire to get him the hell out of their hair,"
he said. "That's why this guy was allowed to roam around the country.
They wanted him everywhere but Chicago."
And he said that while there's no evidence Mother Teresa herself was consciously
covering up for the priest whose piety she admired, the nun, who died
in 1997, should have known something wasn't right.
"I think Mother Teresa had plenty of evidence in front of her that
something was wrong," Kevin McGuire said. "When you see Father
McGuire seven to nine times a year at your retreat houses or nunneries
around the world, and he's constantly with teenage boys who are essentially
his slaves, and to have these boys in your bedroom — yeah, I think
that's plenty of notice to anyone with oxygen in your brain. I don't care
how holy you think your confessor is. Something's wrong."
While Doe 129's lawsuit moves forward in Illinois, McGuire, who according
to his lawyer is legally blind and suffers from diabetes, has begun serving
his 25-year prison sentence at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners
in Springfield, Missouri. His federal conviction is pending before the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. (In May, the Wisconsin
Court of Appeals denied his request for a new trial in that state related
to his earlier abuse charges.) Absent a successful appeal, Komie said,
his client "is not going to survive this prison sentence."
As the disgraced priest faces his earthly end, he has resolutely declined
to embrace a concept at the very core of Catholicism: repentance. McGuire,
the great confessor, has never admitted guilt in any of the instances
of abuse for which he stands accused or convicted. He has also taken what
could be interpreted as a less-than-Christian stance toward the victims
who have chosen to speak against him.
"I want my accusers to be sentenced," he said during the postconviction
phase of his first trial in Wisconsin in 2006. McGuire took advantage
of his opportunity to address the judge prior to sentencing to profess
his innocence in a rambling soliloquy in which he compared himself to
Socrates, St. Thomas More, and Jesus. "I am humbled when I think
of the company of saints I'm called to join here," he said, according
to a trial transcript.
Earlier that day, McGuire said, he had meditated on his life. "I
plead with the Holy Spirit to enlighten me, show me, in what way am I
not living truthfully," he said. He added that he had resolved "to
be more truthful, more like Jesus. I don't know how other people live,
but that's the only way I can live." He continued, "Your Honor,
I did all of this with the image of Christ crucified before me. I've never
been closer to the crucified Christ, never in my life. It's a terrible
experience, but it's glorious."
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