The 456 page investigative report detailing decades of sex abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore was recently by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office.
It names 146 people, including priests and other clergy members, who were either accused of sexual abuse or helped cover it up.
Despite the report being made public, there were still some names that were redacted.
Attorney General Anthony Brown called out the Baltimore Archdiocese for redacting 10 names of people who are living and accused in the report of committing child sexual abuse.
In a statement he says, “The Archdiocese can, at any time, publish those 10 names on their website as individuals who have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse, yet they have not done so, despite having the full and completed report since November, as well as information about those 10 individuals for many years.”
Brown’s full statement can be found below:
The Archdiocese of Baltimore made a public statement on their website regarding the redaction of the names of 10 individuals who are living and who are accused in the Report of committing child sexual abuse. To be clear, the redactions were done pursuant to the requirements set forth by a Court order. The Archdiocese can, at any time, publish those 10 names on their website as individuals who have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse, yet they have not done so, despite having the full and completed report since November, as well as information about those 10 individuals for many years. They are uniquely positioned to legally release those names to the public at any moment as part of their credibly accused list, should they choose to do so.”
Sheldon Snell, 52, and Kurt Francis, 55, are two of four members of the Penobscot Nation have sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland and Bishop Robert Deeley claiming they were sexually abused when they were children by three priests assigned to St. Ann Catholic Church on Indian Island.
Four members of the Penobscot Nation have sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland and Bishop Robert Deeley claiming they were sexually abused when they were children by three priests assigned to St. Ann Catholic Church on Indian Island.
They are the first lawsuits filed by Native Americans against the diocese since the statute was lifted that allowed decades-old abuse claims to go forward.
The priests named in the complaints are Marcel L. Robitaille, David Paul Cote and Leo James Michaud.
Robitaille, who was removed from ministry in 1993 after relatives accused him of sexual abuse, is dead, according to Michael Bigos, the Lewiston attorney handling the men’s cases. The Vatican in 2008 assigned Robitaille a life of penitence and prayer in 2008 when he was 70.
Sheldon Snell, 52, is one of four members of the Penobscot Nation have sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland and Bishop Robert Deeley claiming they were sexually abused when they were children by three priests assigned to St. Ann Catholic Church on Indian Island. Sitting at left is Pat Graffam, sexual assault advocate for Penobscot Nation.
Michaud, then 51, was removed from ministry in 2002 after he was accused of abusing a teenage boy 25 years earlier while he was a seminarian working at the Christian Life Center in Caribou.
Cote retired in 2013 at age 70.
Cote and Michaud, who are believed to be still living in Maine, were not sued individually. The lawsuits claim that the diocese and its bishops knew or should have known the priests had sexually abused children and removed them from ministry sooner.
Three of the plaintiffs, Kurt D. Francis, 55, and Sheldon L. Snell, 52, both of Indian Island, and Dale N. Mitchell Sr., 62, of Orono agreed to be named publicly. The other man asked to remain anonymous.
The Bangor Daily News does not identify victims of sexual abuse unless they agree to be named.
St. Ann Catholic Church on Indian Island.
Sheldon and Francis participated in a press conference at their attorneys’ Bangor offices on Thursday. Sheldon did not answer media questions and quickly left as soon as it ended.
Francis said Thursday that he learned from an article in the BDN last year that the statute of limitations had been lifted. As he read the news story, members of the abuse came flooding back to him, Francis said.
“It was hard to read,” he said. “Everything came back to me and I felt a ton of weight on me. I talked to [Bigos] and that weight just lifted off of me.”
Francis said he also talked to his childhood friends and realized he was not the only victim, which he had not understood before speaking with lawyers.
“I know there are more victims on Indian Island,” he said. “I hope they will come forward and not be too ashamed to do that.”
Kurt Francis, 55, shows a childhood photo of himself that was in the complaint filed in Penobscot Superior Court today. Four members of the Penobscot Nation have sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland and Bishop Robert Deeley claiming they were sexually abused when they were children by three priests assigned to St. Ann Catholic Church on Indian Island.
Three of the victims were allegedly sexually abused between 1972 and 1979 when the men were between 7 and 12 years old, according to Bigos. In the fourth case, the abuse allegedly took place in 1987, when the victim was 16 years old.
Mitchell claims he was abused by Robitaille in the St. Ann’s rectory, located next to the church, in 1972 when he was 12. Francis and the man who wishes to remain anonymous allege that Cote sexually abused them in the late 1970s when they were 10 and 11, respectively.
Snell was 16 and working as a groundskeeper at the church in 1987 when Michaud allegedly sexually assaulted him, causing serious injuries.
While the cases were filed Thursday in Penobscot County Superior Court, they are expected to be consolidated with more than 20 other cases pending before the Business and Consumer Court in Portland that have been filed since June.
Dave Guthro, a spokesperson for the diocese, has declined to comment on the abuse lawsuits. Attorneys for the diocese have filed motions seeking to dismiss the complaints.
Superior Court Justice Thomas McKeon, the judge handling all of the cases filed against the diocese, last week asked the Maine Supreme Judicial Court to determine if the retroactive clause in the law is constitutional and whether it may be applied to organizations and institutions rather than individuals.
The lawsuits will not go to trial until those questions are answered, but more lawsuits are expected to be filed as other victims come forward.
Bigos also has asked Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey to seek information from the diocese about the handling of sexual abuse cases and a list of names of priests against whom credible reports of childhood sexual abuse have been made that would be made public. Former attorney Steven Rowe released a similar report in 2004 that outlined some of the most egregious cases.
Kurt Francis, 55, is one of four members of the Penobscot Nation have sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland and Bishop Robert Deeley claiming they were sexually abused when they were children by three priests assigned to St. Ann Catholic Church on Indian Island. At left is attorney Michael Bigos, Berman & Simmons.
The spokesperson for Frey’s office did not immediately return a request for comment on Bigos’ suggestion.
Indian Island is part of the ancestral homeland of the Penobscot Nation in Maine. Historically a part of the former Panawamské Parish, the church was established on the shores of the Penobscot River in 1668 by French-Catholic missionaries some 185 years before the establishment of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland in 1853.
Today, it is part of the Parish of the Resurrection of the Lord, which is made up of churches in Old Town, Orono, Bradley and Indian Island.
— While the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal erupted decades ago, details in official investigative reports are incredibly powerful for survivors
Mary McHale was abused as a Catholic high school student in the 1980s, but she says last week’s report did not impact the Catholic community as she expected. “As time marches on, people move on. People who are practicing tell themselves ‘It’s just a few bad eggs.’ But it’s not. It’s systemic coverup.”
Since the 1990s, when Jean Wehner started to remember the “sexual torture” she endured as a Catholic high school student, she has sued the Baltimore Archdiocese, written a memoir and appeared in a Netflix documentary about her abuse. But the release last week of a Maryland attorney general’s report citing decades worth of internal church records about her abuser — it all brought a kind of bitter validation, Wehner says, to that terrified little girl.
“I’m my own worst detective as an adult. I was taught by my faith system to be a good girl, not to lie, not to believe something that isn’t true. I’m always still doubting myself and dissecting everything and challenging myself,” said Wehner, 69, now a wellness practitioner in Elkridge. “This puts the detective to rest. The adult me, who has been trying to integrate with this child, can now say: ‘Oh hell yes, I will 100 percent stand up for you.’”
The report released Wednesday into Catholic clergy abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore is added to at least 20 others that have been done in Catholic dioceses by government officials around the country. While the topic of clergy abuse has been a steady drumbeat in the news for more than two decades, the impact of these reports — these official words on official documents — is incredibly powerful for survivors, even those who are now-greying.
Survivors in Maryland and other parts of the country where reports have happened said these are extremely intense documents that can collapse the decades, in both healing and terrifying ways.
For people whose abuse was denied in the past by officials, seeing their suffering affirmed in print brings both relief and anger. Some learn that specific, intimate details of their abuse were repeated with other youth, and that they share a horrible secret with other wounded strangers. Some believe the stamp of societal institutions like the attorney general and the Catholic Church will awaken a numb populace to the fact that sexual abuse’s damage can be lifelong. Some will never even read a document thick, for them, with trauma.
Jean Whener, right, talks after the release of the Maryland Attorney General’s report into clergy abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore, in Baltimore, MD. Behind her is fellow survivor Teresa Lancaster.
Teresa Lancaster decades ago sued the Archdiocese of Baltimore for alleged mishandling of Father Joseph Maskell, who had abused her in the late 1960s when he was her counselor at Archbishop Keough High School. While the archdiocese says in its statements that it learned only in the 1990s that Maskell had “abused,” the new report shows multiple instances starting in the mid-1960s when top figures in the archdiocese were told that Maskell would interview Boy Scouts about their sexual fantasies and practices and was alone with young girls in the rectory for hours under “suspicious” circumstances.
“There were a lot of reports on him. If they had stopped him, [I and other victims of Maskell] would never have been abused. When we needed to be believed, we weren’t,” said Lancaster, now an attorney.<
She has only read a slim slice of the graphic, 463-page report so far, saying it’s “overwhelming." Overwhelming but essential, she said.
“When people see it in print they realize the extent of the torture. When you say: ‘I was abused,’ they don’t realize the neatly planned coverups by higher-ups that enabled it to spread like wildfire. The details are important. It’s different to picture yourself 16 years old, naked on a priest’s lap. How would you like your son or daughter to be in that position?”
Mary McHale said it felt empowering in 2018 when then-Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro released and read at a news conference parts of a grand jury report that included the Rev. James Gaffney, who abused her when she was a Catholic high school student in Reading in the 1980s. At the time she was coming to terms with being a lesbian and he used the secret as a basis for the abuse, she says. She told her parents and others at the time, but asked them not to report it because she was terrified her sexuality would become public.
Multiple priests and survivors from her childhood community were in the report, she said, andit “felt good seeing it in print. Over the years I was sick of people minimizing” abuse in the Catholic Church, said McHale, 51, a physical therapist and trainer.
But McHale’s initial expectations after the report came out weren’t met, she says. “I thought it would have this huge impact here, in a Catholic culture, everyone you live around, work with — you’re all Catholic. To stand up and speak against it, a lot of people aren’t too pleased with that even now. As time marches on, people move on. People who are practicing tell themselves ‘It’s just a few bad eggs.’ But it’s not. It’s systemic coverup.”
Survivor and longtime prominent advocate David Clohessy said the government investigations, of which there are at least 20, “are a very mixed bag.” While they can have a healing affect, many are very superficial and skim the surface, he said. He praised reports in Maryland and Pennsylvania.
“These reports are welcome but are a very poor substitute for real justice, criminal prosecution and harsh punishments which are most effective at deterring future coverups, inside and outside the church. And none of the attorneys general have really done the kind of aggressive outreach to victims, witnesses and whistleblowers that will really help more people who saw, suspected or suffered abuse to speak up,” he said
According to Bishop Accountability, an archive and advocacy group for abuse survivors, the new Maryland report includes the names of 33 clergy members who were not previously identified as abusers by the archdiocese.
In a detailed FAQ published last week about the report, the Archdiocese of Baltimore said it “does appreciate some aspects of the report” and that “acknowledging the painful reality of child sexual abuse in the Church is a significant source of support for victims and a moment of transparency that helps in the effort to protect children.” However, it criticized the report as giving an unfair picture of the modern-day archdiocese. It “does not acknowledge the full scope of the Archdiocese’s efforts to protect children in recent decades” and doesn’t give enough weight to the fact that the number of new allegations dropped dramatically, the church said.
Survivors interviewed for this story describe the new anger generated by reports — like Maryland’s — that have agreed to redact for now some names of alleged abusers or those who facilitated a coverup, or church leaders framing abuse as a historic issue. Part of their suffering, some say, happens when Catholic officials fight to keep the lawsuit windows very small, or to file for bankruptcy when faced with costly mandates to pay survivors, or to go along with redactions.
“They didn’t give those [internal church records] over until they were subpoenaed. When they speak to the past, I’m not hearing them speak to the survivor in front of them who still carries that wounded child,” said Wehner, whose brother had to read and then summarize for her the parts of the Maryland report that pertained to her.
“There are people who couldn’t go out that front door” the day the report was released, “who couldn’t go to that meeting” [Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown held with survivors that day], who haven’t told their families because of that fear.” To her, when church leaders characterize abuse as a problem in the past, that fear is triggered.
Lara Fortney-McKeever and four of her nine sisters were sexually assaulted by a priest in the Diocese of Harrisburg, Pa., in the 1980s. They believed they were forbidden from talking about it for more than two decades, McKeever said, until the grand jury probe started around 2016. In the report they learned that several high-ranking clergy — including then-Harrisburg Bishop William Keeler, who went on to become the archbishop in Baltimore — received a complaint about the priest, the Rev. Augustine Giella, but failed to remove him.
Reading the report “was bittersweet. It validated what we felt we knew, but then we saw five years could have been saved.” Her younger sisters’ assaults could have been prevented, they learned. She’s still searching for how she feels about what she learned in the report.
“I was able to hide in a happy place for years, and it made me face a reality that I may not have been ready to face. But in hindsight, it did end up becoming healing for me because it’s helped me reach so many that were afraid to come forward,” she said. “Sunlight is disinfectant for evil.”
Baltimore Catholic Archbishop William Lori greets parishioners after delivering Sunday Mass at Holy Family Catholic Church in July 2019, in Randallstown, Md.
In 1987, a lawyer for the Archdiocese of Baltimore contacted a prosecutor with a question: was the church obligated to report a priest who had recently been accused of attempting to rape a teenage girl a decade earlier?
The answer was no, according to last week’s extensive report into sexual abuse and coverups in the archdiocese. But the priest could be charged with assault, battery or attempted rape, the assistant state’s attorney said.
Neither the lawyer nor the archdiocesan official who spoke to the prosecutor provided the name of the priest, Father Thomas J. Bauernfeind, or officially reported that a woman had named Bauernfeind as her abuser and that Bauernfeind had admitted to abusing the woman when she was a teenager.
Bauernfeind was not prosecuted, and there is no sign the archdiocese investigated further.
The lawyer who reached out to the assistant state’s attorney was from Gallagher Evelius & Jones LLP, the church’s longtime law firm in Baltimore.
Few lawyers are named in the attorney general’s 463-page report into the archdiocese’s handling of sexual abuse since the 1940s, and the investigation does not specifically allege wrongdoing or ethical breaches by church attorneys. But the report sheds light on the role that lawyers played as the archdiocese spent decades covering up and minimizing abuse.
“Philosophically, you get into, ‘How could they do this?’” said Robert Rubinson, a law professor and professional ethics expert at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “But on the other hand, … this is what lawyers do. They represent clients. That’s a cornerstone of our administration of justice.”
Gallagher Evelius managing partner Thomas C. Dame acknowledged in an email to the firm’s employees last week that the attorney general’s report would mention the firm several times.
In the email, which the firm provided to The Daily Record in response to questions, Dame said the firm had “helped deliver transparency and cooperation on behalf of our client during the attorney general’s four-year investigation.”
He also pointed to the firm’s work in strengthening the archdiocese’s child protection policies in recent decades.
“I believe it is important for you to know that our attorneys have helped the archdiocese establish what outside groups consider one of the most thorough and accountable child protection programs in America,” Dame wrote.
“Further, the attorney general’s report made no recommendations to improve reporting, screening, training, investigations or the operation of the Archdiocese’s Independent Review Board,” which reviews sexual misconduct allegations against church employees, Dame said.
In Bauernfeind’s case, the archdiocese would not remove the priest from ministry until 2002, according to the report, despite his earlier admission to sexually abusing a 16-year-old. The victim, who came forward in 1987, said that Bauernfeind repeatedly fondled, kissed and “attempted sexual relations” with her a decade earlier when she was working in the rectory at St. Anthony of Padua in Baltimore. Bauernfeind at that time held the office of chancellor of the archdiocese, an administrative role that included advising the archbishop.
On one occasion, the woman said, Bauernfeind locked her in his room and attempted to rape her. She tried to report the abuse to other priests or archdiocesan officials twice before coming forward in 1987, she said, and was not taken seriously.
In 2002, when Bauernfeind was added to the archdiocese’s list of credibly accused priests, another woman came forward and said Bauernfeind had abused her in 1974, when she was 17 years old. The woman said Bauernfeind attempted to rape her while providing her with pre-marital counseling; she managed to escape, and a deacon saw her running away with her pants down, according to the report. She also tried to report the abuse several times.
“The Archdiocese made the mandated reports regarding this abuse in 2002,” according to the attorney general’s report. Bauernfeind died in 2003.
In the mid-1980s, archdiocese officials began receiving a growing number of reports about another priest, Father William Q. Simms, who was working at a parish in Anne Arundel County.
A pair of lawsuits alleged that Simms forced two boys to wear “sexually provocative” outfits and molested them while the children served as altar boys. According to one lawsuit, Simms “forced the child to act out sexual and sadistic fantasies, telling him that Christ had been similarly tortured and then put to death.”
Simms agreed to enter long-term therapy as the abuse reports came out. A few months later, a lawyer from Gallagher Evelius secured a broad immunity deal for Simms with an Anne Arundel County assistant state’s attorney, according to the report. Under the deal, the prosecutor agreed not to prosecute Simms for any child abuse he told law enforcement about, purportedly to encourage Simms’s cooperation.
“In the following decades, counsel to the archdiocese, when reporting new allegations of abuse by Simms to state law enforcement authorities, would remind prosecutors of the immunity from prosecution granted by Anne Arundel County in 1985,” investigators wrote in the attorney general’s report.
The report also explains how church lawyers tried to discourage victims’ families from suing.
In 1986, a lawyer from the firm Anderson, Coe & King, LLP, wrote to a lawyer for one of the victims’ families on behalf of the archdiocese. The letter claimed that Simms’s conduct “amounted to ‘a hug and perhaps a kiss as a reward following various church services,’ that there would be ‘no evidence … of any other molestation,’ and that litigation would not be ‘as harmful to the Church’ would be ‘detrimental to the young [] boy and the [boy’s] family.’”
Three years later, the same attorney wrote that if the family declined a settlement offer, “‘a great deal of investigation will be made and depositions taken’ to identify ‘any other problems the [family was] having which would be a source of young [victim’s] problems as opposed to the encounterance [sic] with Father Simms.’”
In a 2002 article, The Baltimore Sun reported that the archdiocese’s lawyers “routinely sought to have alleged victims who brought abuse allegations against the church publicly identified in court records,” as opposed to allowing the use of a pseudonym. That’s what happened in the two lawsuits involving Simms, the Sun reported.
In an email, Anderson Coe managing partner Greg VanGeison said that no attorney at the firm “has any recollection of the case involving Father William Simms, nor does the firm have any records regarding that case.”
“Therefore the firm cannot comment on the accuracy of the attorney general’s characterization of communications referenced in the report nor does the firm know who authored the communications referenced,” VanGeison said.
Church lawyers also raised questions about the credibility of a 2009 report against Father Francis LeFevre, who by that point had admitted to a long history of sexually abusing children and had been prohibited from engaging in ministry.
The victim in that case reported being abused when he was 11 or 12 years old, when he answered phones at St. Ursula in Baltimore County. He reported being orally raped and fondled, including on car trips to Avalon, New Jersey, with other altar boys in the vehicle, according to the report.
The allegations were consistent with other abuse reports the archdiocese had received about LeFevre, according to the attorney general’s report.
Even so, “an attorney for the Archdiocese with the firm Gallagher Evelius & Jones LLP wrote a letter to the victim’s attorney indicating they investigated the allegations and have strong concerns about it being credible,” investigators wrote.
— The clergymen lived and worked at St. Mark Parish in Catonsville from 1964 to 2004, according to a state attorney general’s report.
St. Mark Church in Catonsville
By Corky Siemaszko
On the day after Easter, the pastor of a Roman Catholic parish in Maryland that was home to a dozen priests accused of sexual abuse will be saying the rosary for their victims.
The Rev. Santhosh George made the announcement on the homepage of the St. Mark Church in Catonsville on Thursday, the day after that the state’s top prosecutor accused the Archdiocese of Baltimore of covering up the sexual abuse of more than 600 children for over a half-century.
“I write with a heavy heart to share the news of the release of a report issued by the Attorney General of Maryland, which outlines horrific abuse by some priests of the Archdiocese of Baltimore in years past,” George wrote. “In particular, is the sickening notification of several sexual abusers of children living and working here at St. Mark between the years of 1964 and 2004.”
Of the 156 priests in the report, 12 served stints at St. Mark, which was founded in 1888 about 10 miles west of Baltimore in downtown Catonsville. The attorney general said 11 accused priests served at St. Mark, but NBC News counted 12 in the report.
George, in the note to his flock, did not say how many of the 600 victims accounted for in the report were past or current parishioners. But he apologized to them all.
“While there is little I can do to make amends for this, I do offer you my prayers and extend myself to you should you want to talk,” he wrote, adding that the rosary service would be held at 7 p.m. Monday and that several more services for the victims would be held over the next few weeks.
George, which is an Anglicization of his given last name, Kozhippadan, has only been pastor of St. Mark since July 2021, long after the bulk of the alleged sexual abuse described in the report occurred.
And, unlike most of his predecessors, George had to prove he wasn’t a sex offender before taking the helm of the parish, archdiocesan spokesman Christian Kendzierski said in an email.
“St. Mark’s employees and Fr. George and anyone employed at St. Mark’s follow the same policy…criminal background checks — including a check of the sex offender registry,” Kendzierski wrote. “All employees and volunteers must complete training on preventing and reporting child abuse.”
David Clohessy, a sex abuse victims advocate at the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, said that because the Catholic Church is struggling with a severe shortage of priests, the bishops “let their clergy slide on matters like this.”
While the AG’s report noted that St. Mark had been home to the biggest number of accused priests, Kendzierski insisted the parish was not a magnet for predator priests. He said the archdiocese did not know these priests were accused of sexual abuse when they were assigned to St. Mark.
“While recognizing the horrific scope of past child sexual abuse, it is not true that the 11 priests were sent to St. Mark’s after the Archdiocese had knowledge of an allegation of child sexual abuse,” Kendzierski wrote.
State Attorney General Anthony Brown, in his damning report, named 12 priests who served at St. Mark. He also said the leaders of the archdiocese knew that problem priests were being moved from parish to parish.
“Time and again, members of the Church’s hierarchy resolutely refused to acknowledge allegations of child abuse for as long as possible,” he said. “When denial became impossible, Church leadership would remove abusers from the parish or school, sometimes with promises that they would have no further contact with children.
“Church documents reveal with disturbing clarity that the Archdiocese was more concerned with avoiding scandal and negative publicity than it was with protecting children.”
Back in 2002, when it was first revealed that a large number of accused priests had served at St. Mark, church officials dismissed it as a coincidence and noted it is one of the archdiocese’s biggest parishes, so it makes sense that a lot of priests would log time there.
Terry McKiernan of Bishop Accountability, a nonprofit that monitors abuse allegations against Catholic priests and officials, said it may not be a simple coincidence that so many alleged predators wound up at St. Mark. He said “clusters” of predatory priests have been found in certain parishes.
“Yes, priests who do this kind of thing do tend to congregate, they seek each other out,” McKiernan said. “But the bigger issue are the higher-ups who are aware of these priests and assign them to parishes that have had other problem priests.”
And one of the higher-ups in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, the report stated, was a now-dead former priest accused of abuse named Thomas Bauernfeind.
Prior to serving as interim pastor at St. Mark from 1978 to 1979, Bauernfeind “worked as Assistant Chancellor and Vice Chancellor in the Chancery of the Archdiocese from 1968 to 1975, and he served as Chancellor from 1975 to 1978,” the AG’s report stated.
“In these roles, while he was abusing children himself, he was responsible for overseeing much of the work of the Archdiocese and was involved in many personnel matters,” the report stated.
The fact that Bauernfiend only spent a year at St. Mark is also a red flag, McKiernan said.
“To move somebody a year after he gets there is weird,” McKiernan said. “He was not accused of sexual abuse at that parish, but there had to be a reason why he was moved out of there so quickly. Also, before he was assigned to St. Mark, he was a chancellor in the archdiocese and was involved in personnel matters and things like that. So he was a problem priest who probably knew who the other problem priests were.”
Kendzierski said he could not explain why Bauernfeind only spent a year at St. Mark because the archdiocese turned over all the documents from that era to the AG’s office.
In the AG’s report, it said Bauernfeind in 1987 admitted abusing a 16-year-old girl a decade earlier. It said that in 2002 a second female victim reported “extensive abuse by Bauernfeind while he was Chancellor.”
Bauernfeind was already retired when the second woman came forward, and he died in 2003, the report stated.
During the 1970s, four other accused priests were assigned to St. Mark. They were identified in the report as Marion Helowicz, David Smith, James Dowdy and Frederick Duke.
The Baltimore Sun reported in 2002 that Smith pleaded guilty to “perverted sexual practice” after a then-45-year-old man came forward and accused Smith of plying him with beer before molesting him at the St. Mark rectory between 1973 and 1976. It is unclear whether Smith is deceased.
Helowicz pleaded guilty in 1988 to committing “perverted sexual acts” with a learning-disabled teenage boy while serving as an associate pastor at St. Stephen Church in Kingsville, which is also a Baltimore suburb, according to The Washington Post.
Records indicate Helowicz is now 77 and living near downtown Baltimore. He did not return a call placed to his home.
The other accused priests who lived and worked at St. Mark Parish were identified as Robert Lentz and Ronald Belschner, who were there in the 1960s; Edward Heilman and Charles Rouse, who were there in the 1980s; and Ross LaPorta, Francis Ernst and Henry Zerhusen, who were there in the 1990s.
LaPorta, Ernst, Duke, Lentz, Zerhusen, Bauernfeind and Heilman are listed as dead in the report. When asked if any of the other priests were still alive, Kendzierski referred to an earlier archdiocesan list of accused priests that also lacked that information.
NBC News, however, was able to track down Dowdy, who is 79 and lives in another Baltimore suburb. Reached by telephone, Dowdy acknowledged he was a former priest but declined to discuss the allegations laid out in the AG report that he repeatedly preyed on teenage boys.
“I really don’t want to talk about that,” he said.
Dowdy, who the report showed was associate pastor at St. Mark from 1975 to 1980, also insisted he did not angle to be sent to that parish.
“The idea that I had any choice in going there is a crock of crap,” he said. “I was just assigned there.”
