Nashville Diocese Paid $65k Settlement to Priest's Alleged Abuse Victim

By Steven Hale
Nashville Scene
July 21, 2020

https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pith-in-the-wind/article/21140842/nashville-diocese-paid-65k-settlement-to-priests-alleged-abuse-victim

The Catholic Diocese of Nashville paid $65,000 in May to settle the case of an adult woman who says she was sexually abused by a priest who was working as a chaplain at Aquinas College and the Dominican Campus.

The settlement was revealed by the London-based Catholic Herald, which published an investigation over the weekend raising questions about how the diocese handled the abuse allegations. The woman reported to the diocese in March 2019 that Father Kevin McGoldrick had abused her in 2017 at Aquinas College, where she was a student. In her first-person account, published by the Herald, the woman says that McGoldrick — a relatively young guitar-playing priest who was her personal spiritual director — invited her to the rectory and got her so drunk that she vomited. Then, she says, he assaulted her.

When he started touching me, I was paralyzed. I wanted to run, to scream, to do anything, but I couldn’t. I was crippled by fear and confusion. “What the hell is going on? Is this really happening right now?” I remember asking myself over and over again. But my thoughts wouldn’t do me any good. Several hours went by, my consciousness fading in and out. Every time I woke up I hoped I was in a nightmare and the chaplain of my college wasn’t on top of me, touching me in ways I had never let anyone touch me. I was wrong each time.

Finally, in the early hours of the morning, I left. That evening I had gone with my friend to the rectory of the chaplain I admired as his spiritual daughter; I left as a suicidal victim of sexual assault.

The diocese never opened a formal investigation, and McGoldrick left Nashville in 2019 for Philadelphia. The woman reported the assault to Nashville police in February.

"The report made to us was significantly different than the description of sexual assault subsequently reported to others and contained in published media reports," reads a statement released by the diocese yesterday. "The report was immediately referred to the Dominic Sisters of St. Cecilia who had employed and supervised Father McGoldrick for six years and who had the authority and purview to investigate and respond to this matter."

After an attorney representing the woman contacted the diocese to inform them of a possible lawsuit, the diocese says it settled the case "in an effort to work toward a level of healing as a matter of pastoral concern for the person making the report."

In a statement of their own, the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia say the "Diocese did not describe the alleged behavior as having been of a criminal nature civilly or canonically" when it relayed the report to St. Cecilias in March 2019.

“In light of the circumstances,” the Dominican Sisters said in a statement to the Herald, “the Congregation chose to allow Father McGoldrick’s three?year contract to come to an end in June 2019 presuming that he then would return to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.”

After its own investigation, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia determined the allegation to be credible, and now, the Herald reports, McGoldrick "is quietly seeking a voluntary laicization" — that is, a voluntary dismissal from the priesthood.

In 2018, the diocese released a list of 13 former priests accused of sexual abuse.