VIRGINIA
Blue Ridge Muse
March 21, 2019
By Doug Thompson
Wife Amy grew up in a Catholic family in Belleville, Illinois, a moderate-sized city across the Mississippi river from St. Louis.
This week, a report from the Archdiocese of Chicago, identifies 22 priests from the Diocese of Belleville as child sexual predators.
One is Father Garrett Neal Dee, who served in Belleville from 1974-76 and from 1965-68 in Alton, where I lived and worked for 12 years at The Telegraph. He went “absent on leave” while at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Groom, TX, in 2003 and his whereabouts now are “unknown,” the report says.
Another priest, now retired served at St. Bernard’s in Wood River, which lies just East of Alton, from 1958-69. Another was in Alton in the 60s and returned to another church there in 1981. He died in 1983. Same for Father J. Cullen O’Brien. He began his priesthood at SS Peter and Paul’s Catholic Church in Alton in 1943, then two other Catholic Churches in the area before returning to St. Patrick’s in Alton in 1969 but left in 1970 and died eight years later.
Father Frank Westhoff began mass at St. Patrick’s in Alton in 1962, moved to a Springfield church in 1969 and then to Decatur before being listed as “absent on leave” in 1976 and again from 1986-88. He died in 2006
The “Spotllight” Boston Globe investigative team, who discovered widespread sexual abuse by priests in and around Boston and then nationally and worldwide, found that “absent on leave” was the church’s way of saying a priest is receiving treatment for his predatory sexual abuse of children.
When I showed the list, Amy shook her head and “no, that number of too low.” She suggested the number of sexual predators in and around her home down is easily more than double what the report claims.
The report named close to 400 in Illinois. Many are now dead or their whereabouts is “unknown.” Some live in “retirement residences” of the Catholic Church. Many remained priests until they died.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.