ST. LOUIS (MO)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
August 10, 2024
By Nassim Benchaabane and Jesse Bogan
Five years ago, when the Archdiocese of St. Louis released a long list of clergy it said were credibly accused of sexually abusing minors, there was a sense of finality.
The acknowledgment, though delayed and slim on details, came with a sense that the local Catholic Church could move past clergy sex abuse headlines and be better known for its ministry.
Now, lawsuits filed in St. Louis and four surrounding counties bring dozens of new allegations of abuse and claims of a systematic coverup. The suits, while voluminous, raise questions about how much new information is revealed. Many of the accusations are vague and date back decades. Some contain errors. Many use partial names or nicknames of the accused. The lawsuits appear to be the fruits of an ongoing ad campaign targeting Missourians who may have been abused.
“Good grief,” said the Rev. Robert Reiker, shown by a reporter that he was mentioned in one of the filings. “I thought we were past this.”
J.H., a plaintiff from O’Fallon, Missouri, claims in a lawsuit filed in St. Charles County that Reiker sexually abused him in 1997 when he was an altar boy at Immaculate Conception in Dardenne Prairie.
“I’ve never done anything of any kind of nature to be accused,” Reiker said in an interview this week at St. Justin Martyr in Sunset Hills, where he’s currently based. The Most Rev. George Lucas, archbishop of Omaha, Nebraska, and a former church official in St. Louis, had a similar reaction to being named when the news initially broke.
The long-time priests were among more than a dozen clergy and staff who were publicly accused of abuse in St. Louis parishes for the first time in the lawsuits, according to a Post- Dispatch review of available church and public records. They also include a deacon in Kansas City, a longtime homeless services leader in Colorado, recently retired St. Louis priests, and a former De Smet High School teacher and basketball coach.
In an apparent strategy to work around the statute of limitations on child sex crimes, the main defendants named in the lawsuits are the Archdiocese of St. Louis, which oversees the Catholic experience in the city and 10 counties, and its current chief executive: Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski. Other than “John Doe I,” those accused of sexually abusing minors aren’t named defendants, but they are named in the lawsuit narratives.
The lawsuits point to dozens of victims and accused abusers:
- In all, 60 plaintiffs — each identified only by initials — say they were victimized.
- Fifty-four people — most of them described as priests, but also nuns, two teachers and a guidance counselor at a boys’ orphanage — are accused of abuse.
- Of those accused, 21 are identified by name. Another 19 were known to victims only by a partial name or nickname. The identities of 12 others are left anonymous. Another two cases involve alleged abuse at institutions — a school and a hospital — that were run by Protestants, not the Catholic Church.
- Eighteen of the priests named in the lawsuits were included in the list the archdiocese publicized in 2019.
- It was unclear whether another 15 priests were previously known abusers, because they could not be identified through available records. Allegations against five nuns, a teacher, and counselor did not appear to have been previously made public.
- The accounts of abuse span seven decades, from 1945 at St. Mark Catholic School in south St. Louis County to as recently as 2015 at St. Ambrose Catholic Church in the city.
While some allegations are explicit, many are vague. Many, such as the ones made against Reiker, only list partial names or nicknames. Some contain errors, like misspelling priests’ last names and placing a parish in the wrong county. Some of the accused clergy are members of Catholic religious orders, not the archdiocese.
Three plaintiffs alleged that they’d previously brought their complaints directly to the archdiocese, apparently without resolution.
The lawsuits assert that the plaintiffs expect to obtain the full identify of the accused clergy and staff through discovery.
“Our survivors are showing tremendous courage in bringing these claims to light against the archdiocese,” D. Todd Mathews, a local plaintiffs’ attorney, said by telephone in late July. “We are alleging sexual abuse at the hands of priests and other members of the archdiocese.”
After the initial filings, Mathews couldn’t be reached by phone for a scheduled interview.
“For now, we will let the allegations in the complaint be the operative facts,” he last told the Post-Dispatch by text.
Other attorneys representing the plaintiffs, based in New York and Kansas City, didn’t respond to messages left by the Post-Dispatch. The lawsuits appear to be the fruits of an ongoing ad campaign targeting Missourians online.
“If you or someone you love were sexually abused by a member of the Catholic clergy in Missouri, you may be entitled to compensation,” says the ad, which notes personal injury lawsuit victories in other states that brought millions of dollars in damages.
The archdiocese has also been quiet.
“We have yet to be served with any of these lawsuits, and we will not be commenting on the anonymous allegations, all of which preceded Archbishop Rozanski’s arrival in St.
Louis,” spokesman Brecht Mulvihill said Friday in an email.
He said two priests — Reiker and the Rev. Dennis Doyle — were instructed to refrain from ministry until there is more clarity.
“Meanwhile, they enjoy the presumption of innocence, and Archbishop Rozanski has not made a prejudgment to the contrary,” Mulvihill said. “The Archdiocese of St. Louis is committed to examining each claim individually in a search for the truth so that justice may be served for all involved.”
Prior disclosures
Taken together, the lawsuits are unprecedented in the number of victims coming forward to name abusers, according to longtime advocates for victims of abuse by priests.
And the lawsuits appeared to build on discoveries of alleged abuses and coverups over the years from church disclosures, past civil lawsuits against the archdiocese and law enforcement investigations.
Advocates had long called on the Archdiocese of St. Louis to provide an accounting of credibly accused clergy, particularly since the archdiocese was court-ordered in 2014 to turn over a matrix of 240 complaints against 115 priests and other church employees as part of a lawsuit filed by an alleged victim of the since-defrocked Rev. Joseph Ross.
In 2019, then-St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson released the names of 64 clergy with credible allegations of sexual abuse or possessing child pornography. A Post-Dispatch review found the archdiocese’s list included 26 clergy who were never publiclyknown to have been accused of abuse before. The list, which grew by five after additional investigation by the church, was released after an explosive grand jury report by the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office in August 2018 that detailed abuse of more than 1,000 people by hundreds of priests in the state, reigniting tensions over cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Also in 2019, then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s office said it reviewed church records and found 163 cases of abuse involving Roman Catholic clergy in Missouri dating to 1945 and referred 12 cases to local authorities for potential prosecution. The attorney general’s report said “the church refused to acknowledge the victims and instead focused its efforts on protecting its priests” by moving priests into “short-term treatment” and then reassigning them without notify lay people.
The newly filed lawsuits draw on the 2019 list and the attorney general’s report, as well as the parish assignments of 10 known accused priests, to allege the Archdiocese of St. Louis “ratified the abuse by the Abusers by continuing to place one or more of them in parishes even after receiving multiple reports of sexual misconduct.”
Newly named
In the wake of the five lawsuits, the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph placed a deacon, Ralph Wehner, on “precautionary suspension” as it investigates local activists’ claim he is the “Brother Ralph” accused in the lawsuits of groping and fondling a teen boy on at least three occasions in the early 1980s at St. Alban Roe church. Ralph Wehner moved to the Kansas City diocese in 2009 but is a St. Louis native, according to his official biography.
In Omaha, Archbishop Lucas announced his resignation July 31 but said it was unrelated to the allegation against him, which he called “a complete fabrication.” Lucas said he offered his resignation in June because it is required when a bishop turns 75, but was instructed by the church to continue in his role until a successor is named.
The lawsuits also named several of the accused by nickname or partial name but specified the years, parish, and other details about the alleged abuse, allowing for connections to be drawn through public church records listing the full names of clergy assigned to each parish over the years.
The lawsuits alleged, for example, a “Father Tom” sexually abused a girl in 1982 during a two-week camping trip sponsored by St. Vincent De Paul Parish.
Parish records said Thomas W. Luehrs was assigned to the parish that year. Reached by phone, Luehrs, of Denver, Colorado, said he was unaware of the lawsuit and denied the allegation.
“I’m just kind of shocked,” said Luehrs, a former longtime homeless services nonprofit leader in Denver. “That’s completely false.”
He was at St. Vincent in 1982 and was part of a group that took kids out to camp, he said. But he said the accuser is misidentifying him as the abuser, decades later.
“I didn’t do it,” he said. “And I think my name might have come up because people remembered me and they didn’t remember the perpetrator, if indeed that happened.”
In St. Louis, Reiker was among at least three priests identified through parish records who recently retired but are still active at local churches.
Doyle, one of the two priests asked by the archdiocese to refrain from ministry, said he was unaware of the allegation against him when reached by phone Thursday.
“Am I being accused?” Doyle said.
Doyle confirmed he was assigned to the former Corpus Christi Church in Jennings from 1989 to 1990. That year, according to the lawsuit, a “Father Doyle” found a boy drinking wine in the rectory and then ordered him to undress and fondled him.
Doyle denied the allegation.
“It certainly wasn’t by me,” Doyle said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Other newly accused priests could not be reached for comment. One was away on a long retreat. A handful are dead.
One of them, Friar John Rausch, was recently named by his order as one of several brothers restricted from public ministry because of sexual abuse allegations. The St. Louis- based Franciscan Friars of Sacred Heart Province published the list in January. The lawsuits accuse Rausch of abusing a teen boy in the St. Francis of Assisi parish in St. Louis County in the late 1970s in a van he used to transport teen boys in his youth group, Catholic Youth Counsel. He also allegedly abused the boy at his house, where the boy worked a job answering phone calls and completing other tasks.
The lawsuit also named in full a former De Smet High School teacher and basketball coach, Gerry Boehm, as allegedly abusing a teen boy in the late 1970s at Boehm’s home and after basketball practice at school.
Boehm, 80, of O’Fallon, Missouri, denied the allegation when reached by phone and said he was unaware of the lawsuit until the Post-Dispatch contacted him.
“I don’t know what this is all about,” he said. “This is 40 years ago. I don’t even remember.”
The former Rev. James Grady was included in the archdiocese disclosure in 2019 because he was convicted of possession of child pornography in 2010, a year after he was arrested in an FBI sting for agreeing to pay for sex with a 16-year-old girl. The church placed him on leave from St. Raphael the Archangel in the city’s St. Louis Hills neighborhood after he was arrested; Grady was laicized after his conviction.
A lawsuit now accuses Grady of sexually assaulting a girl years prior at Holy Innocents
Parish, near Tower Grove Park.
The girl, who was enrolled in the parish school’s special education program, was separately abused by both Grady and a nun, “Sister Annette,” from 1999 to 2002, according to the lawsuit.
Shortly after Grady’s abuse, “Sister Annette” said “she heard about Father Grady’s sexually abusive behavior” and told the girl she was a “bad girl,” the suit said. The nun then began sexually abusing her every weekday and gave her school detention when she resisted.
Other priests and the school principal accused the girl of lying when she reported the abuse, the lawsuit said.
Grady didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Post-Dispatch was unable to locate a “Sister Annette” who matched the victim’s account. According to church records, there were 2,106 nuns in the archdiocese in 2000; three of them were named Annette. Of those three, two are dead. The remaining one told the Post-Dispatch that she was never at Holy Innocents.
After Holy Innocents, the plaintiff went to a new school, Epiphany of Our Lord parish, in 2002. There the girl was abused by another priest almost daily for two years, the lawsuit said.
That priest remains unidentified.