BALTIMORE (MD)
Baltimore Sun [Baltimore MD]
August 21, 2024
By Darcy Costello and Alex Mann
Thomas Finnerty remembers, as a child, when a police officer pulled over the car he was riding in on Saint Paul Street.
After the driver handed over an identification showing that he was a Catholic priest, the officer let the car go, Finnerty, 61, recalled in an interview with The Baltimore Sun. What the priest said to him next still haunts Finnerty decades later.
“He’s like, ‘All I have to do is let them know I’m a priest and I can do whatever I want,’” Finnerty recalled. “He was like, untouchable. For the only reason: Because he had a collar.”
Finnerty’s Irish Catholic parents had arranged for John Banko, who was studying to become a priest at St. Mary’s Seminary and University, to provide the 8-year-old with a religious education. Instead of tutoring Finnerty, Banko sexually abused him for about seven years, beginning around 1970, a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Baltimore Circuit Court alleges.
Finnerty wasn’t just born into a family of devout Catholics in North Baltimore who raised him to believe priests and seminarians were holy figures. His father, Joseph G. “Bodie” Finnerty Jr., represented the Archdiocese of Baltimore through his work as an attorney for the firm now called Gallagher, Evelius & Jones — legal counsel to the church and archbishop for decades.
All of this led a young Finnerty to believe that he, not Banko, was in the wrong.
“I mean, God was saying it was OK. … So, if I feel like it’s not OK, then something’s wrong with me, right?” Finnerty said in an interview at the downtown office of his attorneys, Michael Belsky and Catherine Dickinson.
It took decades — and overcoming substance use disorder — for Finnerty to fully face the abuse he endured as a child. Still, he wasn’t ready to confront his abuser or the institutions that enabled his torment at first. It was when his own sons began approaching the age at which he was molested that Finnerty felt compelled to act.
In the early 2000s, Finnerty reported Banko to the Archdiocese of Baltimore and subsequently testified against him in a criminal case against the priest in New Jersey.
But he had no legal recourse himself. The statute of limitations for him to sue Banko, the church and seminary — as well as the separate religious order that runs it — had expired.
Finnerty is making his story public to bring attention to the law that allowed him to file suit many decades later, Maryland’s Child Victims Act of 2023. That law currently hangs in the balance in the face of a constitutional challenge currently before the Supreme Court of Maryland. Oral arguments in that case are set for Sept. 10.
“There might be people that won’t be able to come forward until they’re 80, but it doesn’t make it any less meaningful for them,” Finnerty said. “And if you’re told not to come forward because it won’t do anything because of the statute of limitations, it’s just like basically saying you can molest little children and get away with it if you can hide it long enough. Is that really what you want to send a message about?”
‘Immediate boundary issues’
Finnerty, who had a learning disability, was the only one of his siblings not to attend Catholic school, according to the complaint. Given the importance of religion to his family, his parents approached St. Mary’s for religious tutoring. The seminary set him up with Banko.
A diminutive figure, Banko sported a goatee, wore “a huge amount of cologne” and “immediately had boundary issues,” Finnerty recalled in an interview. “There was never a time where I felt comfortable around him.”
And the tutoring never happened, Finnerty said. “I mean, I didn’t even know the Hail Mary.”
Instead, the complaint says, Banko abused Finnerty in the seminary’s parking lot and in his private room in the seminary at the corner of Northern Parkway and Roland Avenue, where “he was permitted to bring a young boy unsupervised several times per week.” There was no question that adults around them knew what was going on wasn’t right, Finnerty told the Sun. But nobody intervened.
“You know how, like, you’re in a hospital or an accident and you look at someone that you know is in bad shape, and you kind of give them that look, that pity look? That’s the looks that I remember,” Finnerty said.
Banko’s abuse spanned from the early 1970s to 1980, a period when priests at St. Mary’s Seminary were “engaging in rampant sexual activity within the seminary building,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit, which alleges negligence and gross negligence, among other counts, targets St. Mary’s Seminary and University and the religious order that runs it, the Baltimore-based Associated Sulpicians of the United States. It does not name the archdiocese. That’s because the archdiocese, anticipating a deluge of lawsuits under the Child Victims Act, declared bankruptcy two days before the law took effect Oct. 1.
Elizabeth L. Visconage, senior vice president of administration and advancement at St. Mary’s, said the organization had not been served with the complaint and had no knowledge of the allegations. She declined further comment.
The Sulpicians did not return requests for comment Wednesday afternoon.
The archdiocese’s decision meant allegations slated to make up lawsuits against the church in state court had to be repurposed into proof-of-claim forms in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Finnerty filed a claim in the church’s bankruptcy case, but is still allowed to pursue separate civil actions against the St. Mary’s and Sulpicians, his attorneys said.
A wrongful death lawsuit filed last year similarly targets the seminary, alleging the son of a partner in the same Gallagher, Evelius & Jones firm was sexually abused at age 14 by a seminarian. It argues that abuse and subsequent trauma drove Frank Gallagher Jr. to an early death — a fatal overdose — in 2022.
Some of Finnerty’s suit pulls from the Maryland Attorney General’s report on sexual abuse within the Baltimore diocese, which names Banko, who died in 2016. Released last year, the report describes Finnerty’s complaint to the Archdiocese, as well as an earlier one about sexual advances Banko made toward a teenager in roughly 1972.
In an internal email quoted in the report, a church official described Banko’s file, along with four others, as the “bad boy” files — priests who’d committed abuse while seminarians. Each of the five, according to the report, was at St. Mary’s Seminary at some point in the 1970s.
In addition to complaints made to church leaders, Banko faced two criminal cases in New Jersey. In both, he was convicted of sexual assault against minors at the same church. Finnerty testified against Banko in at least one of the trials.
During the second, a court-ordered evaluation found Banko to be a “repetitive and compulsive” sex offender, the attorney general report said.
‘They knew it was wrong’
As a child, Finnerty said, he believed Banko’s behavior was condoned by church leaders. They were priests, he said, and people with positions of great authority in his life.
“I couldn’t trust anybody. Who was I going to tell?” he said. “I mean, how could I possibly tell someone?”
The abuse by Banko continued until Finnerty was 15 years old, and physically large enough to threaten Banko, he said. He told Banko if he touched him again, he would hurt him. That, Finnerty said decades later, was the “only thing that made him stop.”
“I couldn’t do that until I was physically big enough to do that. And no one else did that for me. Nobody at the church, nobody at the seminary,” he said. “And they knew it was wrong.”
Even though he confronted his abuser at 15, it took Finnerty decades to come forward to authorities, underscoring the merits of the Child Victims Act, his attorneys say.
Legal challenges from institutions like the Archdiocese of Washington, headquartered in Maryland, and the Key School in Annapolis — both of which have been targeted with several complaints under the law — contend that the law is unconstitutional.
Lawyers for the likes of the Washington diocese and Key School say that lawmakers granted institutions like theirs immunity from sex abuse lawsuits after a victim turned 38, when the legislature in 2017 expanded to a victim’s 38th birthday the period in which they could sue. They contend lawmakers can’t take away what they describe as a “vested right.”
In a legal brief filed with the state supreme court, a group of organizations representing businesses, insurance companies and civil defense attorneys in Maryland supported the defendants’ lawyers, arguing the Child Victims Act was unconstitutional. They contend that limiting the time for filing lawsuits makes the civil justice system more fair because witnesses’ memories fade and evidence is lost with time.
“The heavy cost of defending against or paying these decades-old claims will not fall upon the perpetrators of these crimes, but will be borne mainly by schools, nonprofit organizations, and other entities that provided services to children, impacting those they serve today,” the group wrote.
Attorneys for the people suing those institutions disagree. They say lawmakers never intended to, or did, create immunity for child abusers and that the legislature can change the time period for people to sue at any time. Several lawmakers behind the 2017 law — and subsequent Child Victims Act — filed a brief saying they supported the plaintiffs position.
“The General Assembly did not intend to eliminate their power to allow the filing of certain time-barred claims for child sexual abuse,” wrote University of Maryland law professor Kathleen Hoke, a leading expert on the Child Victims Act, in the lawmakers’ brief filed with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP.
“It is clear and unequivocal that in 2023,” Hoke continued, “the Maryland General Assembly used that power to give all living survivors of child sexual abuse the opportunity to file a lawsuit against an organization responsible for the abuse, regardless of when the sexual violence occurred.”
The Catholic church long fought against a law like the Child Victims Act through its lobbying arm, the Maryland Catholic Conference. In addition to being a partner at the firm that long represented the archdiocese, Finnerty’s father once served as executive director of the Catholic conference, according to his obituary in The Sun.
Teresa Lancaster survived clergy abuse in the Baltimore diocese and now represents other victims as an attorney based in Annapolis. She said Finnerty’s case underscored the importance of the law allowing survivors to come forward when they’re ready.
“I have a few clients that didn’t come forward until their parents died because their families were also very Catholic and they did have to deal with the additional emotional stress of their families shunning them,” Lancaster told The Sun.
Dickinson, one of Finnerty’s attorneys, emphasized that children face added obstacles to identifying and reporting abuse, a part of what she said makes the child victims’ law crucial. Her firm is looking for potential witnesses or other victims of abuse from St. Mary’s Seminary.
“When you’re a kid, you defer to adults. You especially defer to adults in power, and the Child Victims Act recognizes that,” Dickinson said. “If nobody in the room is saying anything, and you’re six years old, you think that you’re in the wrong. ‘Maybe I’m in the wrong that I think this is not a good touching, that this is not comfortable for me.’”