Final Catholic Misconduct Files Reveal New Sexual Assault Allegations, Including at Anaheim's Servite High

By Tony Saavedra And Deepa Bharath
Orange County Register
May 2, 2015

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/sharkey-660279-order-servite.html

The last of the internal misconduct files on Roman Catholic clergy in Southern California were released Friday, offering new allegations of extensive sexual assaults in Orange County’s Servite community.

Amid thousands of pages of records were letters on the Rev. Joseph Sharkey, who came from Ireland in 1967 to Servite High School in Anaheim.

A year later, Sharkey was accused of sexual misconduct “with at least five students ... four of whom are minor seminarians,” said a letter from the Rev. Stephen Ryan at the Provincial Center in Buena Park to the Very Rev. Terence M. O’Connor, Eastern Province of the Servites.

“I'm terribly sorry about the misfortune of Joe Sharkey. I really hadn't the slightest idea that he was a sadomasochist,” O’Connor wrote in that letter.

Ryan said he’d heard Sharkey committed the same misdeeds at Benburb Priory in Ireland, where a 1956 novice report called him a “mature, solid” person with virtuous character.

Joelle Casteix, an abuse victim and activist from Orange County, called the news “jaw-dropping.”

The Rev. John Fontana, Provincial Superior of the Servite Order in the United States, said Friday that improvements have been made to prevent future assaults on children.

“We’re consistently audited by an outside professional organization,” Fontana said. “We take safety incredibly serious as it deserves to be taken for the sake of our children's well-being.”

Sharkey was sent from Servite to USC’s Newman Center to receive psychological treatment. The order informed the parents of the minor seminarians, but generally kept the matter confidential to protect “Joe's reputation as much as possible,” Ryan wrote.

Sharkey, then 35, was interviewed at Loyola University’s Student Conference Center on Feb. 7, 1968. The test report said Sharkey showed signs of “a primitive combination of psychosexual needs and aggressive needs traceable perhaps to the presence of a very dominating mother figure.”

O’Connor asked the order to take Sharkey back to Ireland and put him under rigorous psychotherapy.

Order administrators said in correspondence that Sharkey’s “serious problems” could “burn itself out given the proper circumstances and conditions.”

“It would be necessary to keep as much of the details as possible of his illness from the community. ... My first reaction was to put a tie on Joe and kick him out of the order. But when I spoke to (a Jesuit who has his doctorate in clinical psychology), I was informed this would be impossible and immoral: that Joe simply couldn't function outside the order,” O’Connor wrote to church officials in Ireland in April 1968.

Sharkey got his order to return to Benburb, Ireland, in June 1968. Less than a year later he was released from the order. In a letter from January 1969, O’Connor wrote to the Vatican, “On several occasions, (Sharkey’s) fails have been the source of serious scandal.”

Sharkey is long deceased, Fontana said.

The long-awaited files of Sharkey and others were released by a Woodland Hills law firm that represented victims of clergy abuse. They come eight years after the Archdiocese of Los Angeles paid $600 million to settle abuse lawsuits and 10 years after church leadership in Orange County paid $100 million.

The files represented the Carmelites, Redemptorists and Servite orders. The criminal statute of limitations for these cases has passed.

Included were records on Servite Brother Gregory Atherton, accused of molesting four boys between 1967 and 1986 at St. Philip Benizi Church in Fullerton, as well as on trips to San Francisco and Oregon. According to court records in the file, Atherton molested the boys after Sunday Mass, after piano and organ lessons and – in one case – after the child’s mother had died.

Attorney John Manly represented one of Atherton’s victims.

“He took my client on a trip to Palm Springs, told him he was taking him to a tennis club there, and sexually assaulted him,” Manly said. “The order has not apologized to my client to this day.”

Atherton is now 89 and is retired at an undisclosed monastery, Fontana said.

“We've put him under a safety plan. He reports to a supervisor. He mostly stays home and does some work like bookkeeping or helping around the house.”

Jeff Anderson, the St. Louis-based lawyer who represented three of Atherton’s alleged victims, said the release of the documents would provide some sense of closure for his clients.

“These documents expose the dangerous practices of the past,” he said. “We know that the present is better and safer because of these men’s courage.”

Contact the writer: tsaavedra@ocregister.com