CINCINNATI (OH)
Enquirer
[Father Tarlton files – Jeff Anderson & Associates]
Dan Horn, dhorn@enquirer.com
May 9, 2015
Soon after the Rev. Allen Tarlton asked for a job with the Archdiocese of Cincinnati in 1969, church officials got a confidential letter about him from his abbey in Minnesota.
Tarlton had a problem, the letter said. He’d been treated a few years earlier at a facility that catered to priests with sexual issues, including those who sexually abuse kids.
Treatment was successful, the letter said, and Tarlton was ready to “prove his value as a priest.”
Archdiocese officials were convinced. They offered Tarlton a job – and a prayer.
“I join with you in praying that any past difficulty that Father Tarlton may have had may not manifest itself again,” an official in the chancellor’s office wrote back to the abbey.
That prayer would go unanswered. Tarlton, a Cincinnati native, spent the next several decades drinking heavily, flouting church rules and, by his own admission, engaging in sex with men and students.
Sometimes the sex took place in bath houses and public restrooms, Tarlton said in a statement he wrote in the early 1990s. Once, he said, he and another priest in Cincinnati had a “kind of orgy” with a 17-year-old boy from the church choir.
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