UNITED STATES
BishopAccountability.org
Summary of Case: Chester John “Chet Warren” was ordained for the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales in 1957. He was on staff at a boys’ high school in Philadelphia until 1960, when he was assigned to his order’s monastery in Toledo, Ohio. From 1963 to 1974 Warren was an assistant priest at Toledo’s St. Pius X parish and school. In 1974 he was transferred to a Taylor, Michigan parish in the Archdiocese of Detroit, then was returned in 1978 to the Oblates’ headquarters in Toledo. Warren resided during at least 1986-1992 at the St. Francis de Sales High School faculty house, while working as a chaplain at St. Vincent Medical Center.
In 1985 a young woman, Barbara Blaine, reported to the Oblates and later to the diocese that Warren had sexually abused her from the time she was a 13-year-old 7th-grader in 1969 at St. Pius X school, until she was a senior in high school. She said that the order told her that no one else had complained about Warren. In 1989 Blaine founded the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). After she named Warren publicly in 1992, two women contacted her to say that they, too, had been sexually abused by the priest as girls; both said they reported the abuse to Warren’s superiors in the early 1970s. By 2002 at least eight women had come forward with similar allegations. In 2003 a woman said she was abused by Warren as a preschooler in the context of ritual abuse involving a group of priests. In a 2005 press conference a nun stated that she was raped by Warren at age 6.
Warren was allowed to stay in ministry until 1992, just before he was named as a perpetrator by Barbara Blaine on national television. (Blaine had informed the Oblates that she was going to name him.) He was suspended, and later dismissed by his order. He was not laicized.
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