By Terence McKiernan
BishopAccountability.org
May 19, 2024
Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Fr. James N. Chevedden, S.J. Fr. Jim was a track star at Loyola High School, a talented pianist and composer, a fluent Mandarin and Taiwanese speaker, a Jesuit missionary to Taiwan for twenty-two years, a beloved minister to the Chinese Catholic community in the Bay Area for eight years, a Lord of the Rings fan, and a survivor of sexual abuse by a fellow Jesuit, Bro. Charles Leonard Connor, S.J.
I decided to write to you about Fr. Jim after his brother John shared with us a memorial book that preserves tributes to Jim in Chinese, Taiwanese, and English, as well as a one-page autobiography, a chronology of Fr. Jim’s devout life and ministry, and a selection from his writings. I hope you’ll explore the memorial book and get a sense of what a remarkable person Fr. Jim was, and how much his parishioners loved and respected him.
As you can see from this photo, Fr. Jim was very happy in the Bay Area’s Chinese Catholic community. He and the parishioners are celebrating his 25 years as a priest. After twenty-two years in Taiwan, he had refashioned his ministry as an apostolate to Chinese immigrants in the Bay Area. Fr. Xie, as they called him, was a talented preacher in flawless Mandarin and English, and a gifted Bible study teacher. But in a sense the shoe was on the other foot now – it was his parishioners who were in a strange land, evangelizing their shy American priest.
Some of them knew that he struggled with mental illness, but they could not imagine the anguish of his living situation at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos. He had suffered a breakdown in 1995, during his last lonely assignment in Taiwan. After an evaluation at the Menninger Clinic, Fr. Jim was placed at Sacred Heart with no ministry, and his condition deteriorated. In an emotional crisis or suicide attempt, he was seriously injured in a fall from a scaffold at Sacred Heart in 1998. While he was recovering from surgery, he was sexually assaulted by a fellow Jesuit, Bro. Charles Connor. Appallingly, Connor’s superiors had already been informed in 1995 that Connor was sexually abusing two intellectually disabled men who lived and worked as dishwashers at Sacred Heart. Connor was merely warned and left in residence, where he continued to abuse the vulnerable men, and also abused Fr. Jim, confined to a wheelchair after his surgery. At the time Fr. Jim was abused in 1998, Sacred Heart was home to seven Jesuits accused of sexual abuse, according to assignment records released by the Jesuits in the wake of the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report.
Connor’s crimes were revealed by the owner of a dress shop in town, Holly Ilse, who befriended John and James, the two disabled victims. Threatened with arrest, Connor was moved by his Jesuit superiors from Sacred Heart to a Jesuit residence on the Bellarmine Prep campus in San Jose. No one at the high school was informed why Connor had been transferred there. He pled guilty in 2001 to felony abuse of John and James, but instead of jail time, he was given six months of home detention, ordered to register as a sex offender, and prohibited from any contact with intellectually disabled adults or minors. The Jesuits paid a $7.5 million settlement to John and James, but after his home detention, they moved Connor back into Sacred Heart, causing Fr. Jim severe distress. Fr. Jim informed his superiors about Connor’s abuse but was not believed, though his Catholic psychiatrist, Dr. George Maloof, was certain he was telling the truth.
Fr. Jim begged to be relocated away from Sacred Heart and away from his abuser and the others, but the Jesuits failed to act. Instead, the Jesuit Provincial in California, Fr. Thomas Smolich, compelled Fr. Jim to meet with his abuser. In Smolich’s view, Fr. Jim’s accusation could not be proven credible and was likely delusional. He arranged a meeting with Maloof, Fr. Jim, and Fr. John M. Martin, S.J., the Sacred Heart Superior, in which Fr. Jim was pressured into silence. Maloof saw the meeting as “exerting damage control” to avoid additional disclosures and lawsuits, instead of providing Fr. Jim with the help he needed. The situation at Sacred Heart had become intolerable for Fr. Jim. By 2004, ten accused Jesuits were housed with him at Sacred Heart.
When Fr. Jim was summoned to jury duty in San Jose on his birthday, May 19, 2004, he was driven to the courthouse by one of the sex offenders, Fr. Jerold Lindner. Later that day, Fr. Jim died in a fall from the parking garage across the street from the courthouse. His death was ruled a suicide, though his family pressed for a full investigation. A year later they filed a wrongful death suit, and two days into the trial, after the judge indicated he would rule some documents admissible, the Jesuits settled for $1.6 million dollars. NBC Bay Area aired this four-minute video about the case in 2011.
Twenty years after Fr. Jim’s death, we still do not have full disclosure from the Jesuits. But the list they have released for the consolidated West Province does provide some insight into the actual number of known offenders among whom Fr. Jim was forced to live at the time of his death. Perhaps the transparency recently shown by St. Ignatius Prep in Cleveland is another sign that the Jesuits are becoming more open about the issues revealed so starkly in the Chevedden case.
Fr. James N. Chevedden, S.J. is by no means the only priest who suffered abuse by a priest or religious, and then was ostracized and mistreated when he came forward. Fr. Gary Hayes, who led The Linkup in the early 2000s and passed away in 2019, experienced retaliation for his activism as a survivor. The culture of sexual abuse and cover-up at Sacred Heart Jesuit Center, which persisted into the 2000s, must give us pause regarding the policy among religious orders to keep their offenders in community and not seek laicizations.
Early in my time at BishopAccountability.org, I visited Holly Ilse and spoke with her about her courageous activism on behalf of John and James, and I visited the imposing Jesuit Center that looms on its hill over Los Gatos. The abuse history of the place is personal for me. I was educated at Fordham Prep in the Bronx while Fr. Eugene O’Brien, S.J., later revealed to be a serial offender, was the headmaster. Until the Jesuits open their archives and provide full disclosure about the abusers in their ranks, their missions and charism will be in question. Their lists of accused still provide no details about the abuse that more than 300 U.S. Jesuit priests and brothers are known to have committed. That atrocious and unresolved history is still vivid in the case of Fr. James N. Chevedden, shown here in 1983 with his parents, who had been very generous supporters of the Jesuits and their missions, and Fr. Francis Rouleau – a famous, old-school Jesuit who inspired Fr. Jim to be a missionary in Taiwan.
Photograph Album
All the photographs on this page were kindly provided by John Chevedden, the older brother of Fr. Jim Chevedden. They provide a vivid record of his life as a priest in Taiwan and the Bay Area.
