Father Wild Asks Name Be Removed from Residence Hall

A letter to the entire university from President Michael Lovell:

Dear Marquette community:

I wanted to share the letter below from Father Robert Wild, Marquette’s 22nd president and chancellor, requesting his name be removed from our newest residence hall, as well as my response.

Father Wild has requested that his name be removed because he regrets not using his authority to do more to protect victims and prevent future clergy abuse. We know that when we stand behind Marquette’s mission and Guiding Values, we have a framework to help us during difficult times.

May God help our Catholic community, both here at Marquette and throughout the world, come closer together to support victims of abuse and further the healing process.

Sincerely,
Dr. Michael R. Lovell
President
Marquette University

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Letter from Father Wild to President Lovell and Board of Trustees
Dear Mike and members of the Marquette Board of Trustees:

As a Jesuit, Catholic priest, I am filled with sorrow and abhorrence at any incident of abuse committed by a religious leader. While those feelings cannot atone for what people endured who have been sexually abused, I still want to express my regret for their suffering and for the terrible wrongs done by their abusers.

As Provincial Superior of the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) from 1985 to 1991, I was invested with authority over all Jesuits belonging to that particular three-state region. During my six years in office, accusations of sexual abuse of minors were lodged against three of our members. Looking back, I would have handled certain aspects of those cases rather differently than I did then. The restrictive measures I thought quite sufficient to restrain the behavior of one of those priests, for example, proved in practice to be insufficient to do so. I very much regret that and apologize especially to those victimized for my mistakes in that regard.

In a recent letter to the whole Church, Pope Francis describes the sexual abuse of minors and other vulnerable people as something demonic and cites in that connection Matthew 17:21, where Jesus explains to his disciples, “This class of demons can only be expelled by prayer and fasting.” After much thought and prayer, and careful consideration, I have decided that one aspect of the “fasting” I should undertake is to formally request that Marquette University remove my name from our new residence hall complex. Therefore, after careful discussion of the matter with Marquette University’s leadership, I formally request that the University remove my name from the building that was recently named for me.

Sincerely,
Robert A. Wild, S.J.

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Statement from Marquette University President Michael R. Lovell
Marquette University’s Board of Trustees received today a thoughtful letter from Rev. Robert A. Wild, S.J., stating his request to have his name taken off of our new residence hall. I respect Father Wild’s decision as laid out in his letter, and the Board unanimously agreed to honor his request. We are in agreement with Father Wild that this is the right decision for both Marquette and survivors of clergy abuse. The residence hall, which includes Ray and Kay Eckstein Tower and Wells St. Hall, will be known as The Commons. We have tremendous respect for Father Wild and are grateful for his leadership as Marquette’s president from 1996 to 2011 and again from 2013 to 2014. Anyone who knows Father Wild understands that he values the Gospel message of love and forgiveness and we move forward together as a Marquette community in that spirit. We offer our prayers for continued strength and healing for all survivors of clergy abuse.

We have blogged about Wild and the sex abuse scandal, breaking the story locally, and providing follow up coverage.

Evaluating Wild

We were never a big fan of Wild, viewing him as easily manipulated. He was easily persuaded by the (dishonest) claim of the Gay/Straight Alliance of Marquette that they would do nothing to contradict Catholic sexual teaching. They have done little else.

He was easily persuaded by Wisconsin Indian chiefs to reject the nickname “Warriors” as offensive.

He was easily manipulated by a cabal at Marquette to hire a lesbian Arts & Sciences Dean (Jodi O’brien), then when local Catholics and the Archbishop got wind of it and objected, he withdrew the offer. Then when politically correct leftists on campus raised a ruckus, he started pandering to them, inviting a lesbian consultant to campus to give advice as to how to do that, and established the ill-fated Gender and Sexuality Resource Center.

Wild was, to be blunt, easily manipulated.

But on the other hand . . .

. . . Wild’s failure as Provincial Superior of the Chicago Province appears not to have been the result of ill-will, or mendacity, but rather the bland assumption that the abusive priest (one Father Donald J. McGuire) would follow orders. Wild gave the following charge to McGuire:

I ask that you not travel on any overnight trip with any boy or girl under the age of 18 and preferably even under the age of 21.

But Wild naively left it up to McGuire to police his own behavior.

A brief from plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Jesuits seems to show that Wild should have taken the situation far more seriously.

But even after Wild left the post of Provincial Superior the abuse continued. According to the New York Times:

The province sent Father McGuire in 1993 for a psychiatric examination and six months at a treatment center in Maryland — but in the week before he was to report to there, he was allowed to conduct a retreat in Phoenix, where he molested another boy, the documents indicate. As late as 1998, the new documents show, the Chicago provincial wrote a letter of “good standing” for Father McGuire to allow him to minister in a diocese, stating that “there is nothing to our knowledge in his background which would restrict any ministry with minors.” As the reports of abuse accumulated, the Chicago leaders issued one set of restrictions after another on Father McGuire, finally, in 2002, saying he could minister only to nuns in the Chicago region. But none of these directives were enforced, the court motion asserts. Father McGuire was formally removed from the priesthood in February 2008 after a conviction in Wisconsin and after a federal indictment had been issued in Illinois.

As we noted in our first post “Where this scandal is concerned, [Wild] looks no worse than many other Catholic clerics. But neither does he look any better.”

Wild Response

When this case was first exposed in the New York Times, Marquette’s response was absurdly tepid. The university announced:

As a Catholic and Jesuit university, Marquette University fully supports the protection of any victims of sexual abuse. Next week, the Marquette University Law School’s Restorative Justice Institute annual conference is on the topic of “International Dialogue on the Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal,” which will include discussions with both church officials and victims.

That’s right. the university arranged a conference.

Wild’s current response, assuming it has not been forced on him by machinations of which we have no knowledge, is much more appropriate. Indeed, it looks like repentance and contrition commensurate with the sin — or at least, the best that can be done more than a quarter century after the offense.

Taking Wild’s statement at face value, we are inclined to think that God has forgiven him. We actually would not mind seeing his name on that dorm.

Warrior Blogger on Breitbart Radio

A particularly good interview, with some cogent questions about academia, done by Breitbart Radio.

Professor John McAdams of Marquette University appeared on Breitbart News Daily Friday morning to discuss his defense of traditional marriage, and how politically-correct enforcers are threatening his position at the university.

Sirius XM host Stephen K. Bannon pointed out that Marquette is a Jesuit university, and wondered how a position in defense of traditional marriage could make trouble for a professor at such an institution.

“I didn’t actually even defend traditional marriage,” McAdams said. “Simply the right of a student to defend traditional marriage without being bullied and demeaned. That was the whole point about my blog post.” In that post, McAdams described the case of a student who was told to drop a class by an angry leftist professor, who exclaimed that defending marriage between men and women was intolerably “homophobic, racist, and sexist.”

“As for so-called Catholic universities, first you have to understand that Jesuits are thin on the ground these days,” McAdams continued. “The president of Marquette’s not a Jesuit, the provost isn’t, the dean of arts and sciences isn’t… there are so few Jesuits that so-called Jesuit institutions pretty much aren’t run by Jesuits.”

He added that the Jesuit order itself was no longer a “bastion of Catholic orthodoxy.” This left universities like Marquette to suffer at the whims of “whatever fads prevail in academia generally.”

“For example, if it’s pandering to the gay lobby, they’ll pander to the gay lobby, and they’ve done so a lot,” said McAdams. “If it’s pandering to racial minorities – blacks, American Indians, Hispanics – they’ll do that, too. And, like all universities, there’s kind of a confluence of ideology and bureaucratic interest – that is to say, the administrators who run the university have an interest in hiring bureaucrats that work in their offices, so they’re always very happy to hire another assistant provost for things Hispanic, or associate provost to set up a bias reporting system, which Marquette has now.”

The once-great institution of Marquette has been hit especially hard by political correctness, but McAdams warned there was a general trend of “nonsense in academia” sweeping through institutions of higher learning across the country, citing the example of Emory University students claiming they “felt so hurt and were so unsafe” because someone “put pro-Donald Trump messages on the sidewalk.”

As for his own case, McAdams reported that Marquette University said they would suspend him without pay for the remainder of the calendar year. He would be allowed to return in January, “if I abase myself and apologize” for his blog post.

He also said he would be required to “promise to adhere to Marquette’s guiding values and mission statement… which of course, in my view, I’ve done.”

Unfortunately, McAdams noted the bureaucrats at Marquette seem to interpret their mission statement not as a high-minded commitment to academic inquiry and free expression, but simply as, “you don’t make trouble for the institution.”

Professor McAdams declared he would not make the apology demanded by P.C. enforcers. “I’m not going to sign any ‘loyalty oath’ to Marquette’s mission – since I’m, in fact, probably a stronger proponent of Marquette’s claimed mission than the people running the university,” he chuckled. “But I’m against loyalty oaths. Interestingly, a lot of older liberals remember loyalty oaths in the 1950s, where professors were required to swear they were loyal to America and had no sympathy for Communism… liberals hated that. And now what you have is a liberal administration at Marquette demanding a loyalty oath from me.”

He declared his determination to fight the university, cheerfully noting that his lawyers are working pro bono, so “Marquette can’t run me away by having me build up huge legal bills.”

“I think it’s pretty clear, the odds are there’s going to be a huge lawsuit,” he predicted.

A Jesuit Pope

Some comments on the new Pope from George Weigel, published in National Review:

The first Jesuit pope? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. Bergoglio is an old-school Jesuit, formed by classic Ignatian spirituality and deeply committed to an intelligent, sophisticated appropriation and proclamation of the full symphony of Catholic truth — qualities not notable for their prevalence among members of the Society of Jesus in the early 21st century. I suspect there were not all that many champagne corks flying last night in those Jesuit residences throughout the world where the Catholic Revolution That Never Was is still regarded as the ecclesiastical holy grail. For the shrewder of the new pope’s Jesuit brothers know full well that that dream was just dealt another severe blow. And they perhaps fear that this pope, knowing the Society of Jesus and its contemporary confusions and corruptions as he does, just might take in hand the reform of the Jesuits that was one of the signal failures of the pontificate of John Paul II.

There will be endless readings of the tea leaves in the days ahead as the new pope, by word and gesture, offers certain signals as to his intentions and his program. But the essentials are already known. This is a keenly intelligent, deeply holy, humble, and shrewd man of the Gospel. He knows that he has been elected as a reformer, and the reforms he will implement are the reforms that will advance the New Evangelization. The rest is detail: important detail, to be sure, but still detail. The course is set, and the Church’s drive into the Evangelical Catholicism of the future has been accelerated by the pope who introduced himself to his diocese, and to the world, by bowing deeply as he asked for our prayers.

The failings of the Jesuit order are very visible at Marquette, which is less a Catholic university than a typical secular, politically correct place.

Will the new Pope change that? We doubt it, but if he provides strong moral leadership it may have the effect of making campus bureaucrats less bold in thumbing their noses at Catholic teaching.

More Problems for Chicago Jesuits, Dating from the Era of Fr. Robert Wild

Hard on the heels of a scandal over Marquette’s handling of rape cases comes a reminder of another scandal involving Marquette’s President Robert Wild.

From Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit:

An Illinois judge sharply criticized the Jesuit order in a ruling issued yesterday for not taking adequate steps to rein in defrocked priest and twice-convicted child molester Donald McGuire, asserting that McGuire was preying on teenage boys “right under the noses” of his superiors and that rules established to protect minors from him were “a sham.”

The ruling allows punitive damages to be levied against the Jesuits if they lose a lawsuit over McGuire’s four-decade career as a predator priest that is now pending in Cook County Circuit Court. The lawsuit names as a defendant the Chicago Province of the Jesuits, where McGuire was technically based. McGuire -- an eminent Jesuit who served as spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa -- taught at the University of San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, and ministered to Bay Area families extensively throughout the 1990s.

“The court accepts that the Jesuits are a religious order with a rich history of service to the faithful,” Judge Jeffrey Lawrence wrote.

“However, the leaders of the Chicago Province fell far short of this ideal. Plaintiffs have amply demonstrated a reasonable likelihood of proving facts at trial which would support an award of punitive damages.”

The lawsuit is being brought by several victims of McGuire, including one of two boys from Walnut Creek he allegedly molested. The Jesuits had argued that punitive damages should not be permitted in the suit because McGuire’s bosses had no way of controlling him and the wayward priest flaunted his order’s vows of obedience. But Lawrence,

. . . noting that the Jesuits received nine “credible” complaints against the priest over 33 years, rejected that argument.

He stated that rules the Jesuits issued forbidding McGuire from ministering to minors were never enforced. “The guidelines they set for him were a sham,”

he wrote in his ruling. Moreover, Lawrence noted, the Jesuits proactively lied to other church officials about McGuire’s troubled past.

Of course, Marquette President Robert Wild was the Jesuit Provincial in Chicago who failed to bring McGuire under control.

It is hugely ironic that Wild, who has caved in to the campus gay lobby, giving them essentially everything they have demanded this year, has failed to handle matters involving sex competently when upholding Church teaching would have demanded it.

While he was lenient with a child molester, and his administration has given the impression that they don’t really much mind campus rapes, he has pandered to homosexual activists.

He is leaving the University with his own personal reputation, and the status of Marquette, much diminished.

Understanding the Jesuits

From the late Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. in First Things, a classic essay:

At a press conference one day last summer, a newspaper correspondent asked me how I could combine being a Jesuit with being a cardinal. I at first imagined that she might be alluding to the fact that as a cardinal I might have to compromise on my vows of poverty and obedience to my Jesuit superiors, but then the true meaning of her question became clear. She explained that cardinals are supposed to support the teaching of the Pope, while Jesuits belong to the intellectual opposition, secretly if not publicly contesting the official doctrine of the Church. Are they not cleverer and wiser than the hierarchical Church, the subversive vanguard of the future Church?

I replied that she had been guided by the chauvinist myth about the Society of Jesus, but not by the reality. The Jesuit order, I explained, has been from its origins at the service and disposal of the papacy. With its headquarters in Rome, it has a long and distinguished record of collaborating with the Holy See and of rendering assistance in the preparation of papal and conciliar documents....

Many of the works of the Jesuit order are prospering. Its universities in the United States have larger enrollments and more academic prestige than ever before, Jesuit high schools are attracting large numbers of excellent students, and some Jesuit publications and parishes are very successful. The quality of young men joining the Society is as high as ever, but the number of new recruits is dramatically down, and the decline is bound to have a negative impact on traditionally Jesuit apostolates.

Many blame the dominant “consumerist” culture for the downturn in vocations, which has in fact affected most religious orders and diocesan churches in Europe, North America, and Australia. But some religious orders, even in the United States, are increasing rapidly, and some dioceses are attracting large numbers of seminarians. The vocations seem to be there, but the Jesuits, at the moment, are getting too few of them....

If a wake-up call is needed, we have it in Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits, a new book by Peter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi. It contains an abundance of useful information, even though it is in many respects a flawed study.

The thesis of the book may be summarized roughly as follows. The Society of Jesus is caught in a bind. The hierarchical Church is a rigid institution striving in vain to bring the behavior and ideas of its members into line with traditional orthodoxy. Especially under the “restorationist” regime of Pope John Paul II the Church has stubbornly rejected the democratic reforms that are needed. The bishops are impotent creatures of the Vatican. Jesuits, for the most part, are to be praised for deploring the repressive structures but at the same time pitied for their inability to change the situation. As a religious order, the Society is bound to preserve at least the appearance of conformity. Even among Jesuits, therefore, dissent has for the most part gone underground.

For my part, I can say that I recognize among Jesuits, as among other priests and religious in the United States, the various trends reported in [the book’s] survey. The opinions of traditionalists, moderates, liberals, and radical reformers are dutifully recorded-even to the point of tedium. Some distinctions are made between older and younger Jesuits. But little light is thrown on the inner dynamics of recent decades, which have affected not only Jesuits but other religious orders, diocesan clergy, and laity.

The distinction, I believe, is not between older and younger Jesuits-the categories most often used by the authors-but rather between those whose attitudes were shaped by the ideological revolutions of the 1960s and the rest of the Society. For the most part, the Jesuits who had completed their formation before Vatican II have remained faithful to their previous vision of the Church and the Society, and were able to integrate Vatican II into that vision. But then came a group who belonged to the restless “baby-boom” generation. Like many of their contemporaries, they became wildly optimistic about secularization in the early 1960s, and then in the early 1970s deeply involved in protests against the Vietnam War and in fighting for various social causes. They interpreted Vatican II as a kind of “palace revolution” in which the bishops put limits on the papacy, decentralized the Church, and transferred to the laity many powers formerly reserved to priests. The Council, some believe, renounced the high claims previously made for the Church and put Catholic Christianity on a plane of equality with other churches and religions. It also ostensibly embraced the modern world and the process of secularization.

Armed with their “progressive” reading of Vatican II, American Jesuits of this transitional generation became more committed to the struggle for social reform than to the propagation of Christian faith. They saw little but evil in pre-conciliar Catholicism. Drifting from historical consciousness into historical relativism, some of this generation questioned the current validity of the accepted creeds and dogmas of the Church. At the present moment members of this intermediate age group hold positions of greatest power and influence in the Society, but they no longer represent the cutting edge. A younger group is arising, much more committed to the Church and its traditions.

It is, of course, the younger group that holds out the hope for a vital Catholicism among the Jesuits.

But it’s the “baby-boom” generation that has power today, especially in supposedly Jesuit universities like Marquette.

A few Jesuits in their fifties and sixties believe that the Church “as we know it” is destined soon to collapse. This group tends to be critical of Pope John Paul II and his alleged attempts to silence dissent. Some express perplexity about the sacerdotal aspects of the Jesuit calling. Especially in the theological schools, which have a large enrollment of women students, Jesuit faculty members are reluctant to bring up the topic of priestly ordination. Some formation directors seem to have been infected with a critical attitude toward hierarchy and priesthood. One is quoted as saying:

I see the hierarchical Church’s direction today as different from but not antithetical to that of the Society. The hierarchical Church is often concerned with orthodoxy, clerical advancement, maintenance of church power, univocal thinking, and being right. I think these concerns hurt the whole Church.

Ignatius might indeed want to restrain the craving for clerical advancement, but he could hardly be imagined making light of orthodoxy. He would have swiftly removed any formation director who showed hostility to the “hierarchical Church.”

A new generation of seminarians and religious is arising, not only in the Jesuits but in the nation at large. This generation is not interested in denigrating the past or in liberating itself from the shackles of orthodoxy. On the contrary, it consists of young men eager to retrieve the tradition of former centuries and to serve the hierarchical Church as it exists today. This generation receives little recognition in the McDonough-Bianchi study, but some indications are nevertheless given.

The testimonies of Jesuits under forty are encouraging. A thirty-seven-year-old Jesuit says, for instance, that “our order, by its very constitution, cannot ever separate itself from the Catholic Church.” It must always be in union with Rome. We cannot be a “church within the Church” or an “alternative church.” A thirty-six-year-old theology student has this to say: “I entered to help support the direction that Pope John Paul II has given the Church. The Society has a mixed response to this direction, and the confusion it causes will ultimately hurt the effectiveness of the Society.”

In the same vein a thirty-year-old student of theology is quoted as saying, very perceptively: “If the stance of the Society is widely perceived as anti-institutional hierarchy, anti-Vatican, anti-pope, and if political and politically correct norms are used to select candidates for the Society, most of those who wish to serve Christ’s Church will go elsewhere.” On reflection it should be evident that it makes little sense to take vows and seek ordination in a religious order unless one is committed to support and serve the hierarchical Church.

Besides the cancer of opposition to hierarchical authority, another disease that needs to be cured is the ambivalence about priesthood. A thirty-one-year-old Jesuit complains: “In the two theologates that I attended . . . I didn’t find anyone providing a cogent explanation of ordained ministry and its relation to lay ministry.” Still another, aged thirty-five and already ordained, writes:

I find much of our energy is spent in fighting the battles of the immediate fallout of Vatican II (battles which have left deep scars on many professors but which are not the pressing issues for Jesuits of my generation) or preparing for life in an idealized, politically correct church that does not exist now and is not likely to exist in my lifetime.

Tellingly, the word “priesthood” is rarely mentioned in our classes. In fact, this year when the third-year theologians . . . gathered in Boston, most men from all three centers reported that they had spent the last two years either ignoring or apologizing for the fact that they were preparing for ordination. Such is life in the ideologically insulated and trendy city-states on the self-proclaimed cutting edge of theology.

The authors of Passionate Uncertainty themselves recognize that “the gravest problem is almost certainly disarray over the role of the priesthood as it pertains to ministry. This is particularly worrisome for an activist, apostolic order.” Worry as they may, McDonough and Bianchi do not help to solve the problem.

In addition to the difficulties of some Jesuits with hierarchy and priesthood, a third problem is prominent. Jesuits are conscious of a displacement of religion by psychology and of a move from the apostolic to the therapeutic understanding of the religious life. At least some of the younger Jesuits seem to be more interested in personal fulfillment than in service to the Society and its mission. “Therapists,” one young Jesuit reports, “are accorded the kind of authority and deference that was once reserved for spiritual directors and superiors.” The recent turn toward human affectivity and personal fulfillment may be connected with the alleged increase of homosexual tendencies among younger members in the Society of Jesus as well as in other religious orders and diocesan seminaries.

You may wish to read the remainder of the essay, and Dulles’ rather optimistic conclusion.

Clearly, Dulles’ observations about the “baby-boom” generation of Jesuits explains a lot about Jesuit higher education today. A generation of largely-liberal priests, regardless of their rhetoric, is fundamentally more comfortable with secular norms about things like sexuality than with traditional Christian norms.

Marquette Statement on SNAP Protest/Wild Sex Abuse Scandal

We broke the story locally (it was first published in the New York Times), and it has taken some time for it to get some traction.

But the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests had a press conference yesterday, and called for an apology from Fr. Wild.

Here is their press release:

Marquette University President Fr. Robert Wild left nation’s most prominent priest pedophile in ministry

As Jesuit provincial between 1985 to 1991, Wild concealed Fr. Donald McGuire’s criminal history, left him unsupervised

McGuire, prosecuted in Wisconsin and now in Federal prison, went on to molest children for another decade

Group again urging Jesuits officials to “come clean” about their child molesting clerics

WHAT

At a sidewalk news conference survivors of childhood sexual abuse by clergy will release and discuss new secret church documents that show that Fr. Robert Wild, President of Marquette University, concealed the crimes of Fr. Donald McGuire during his tenure as Provincial of the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). After remarks survivors will attempt to hand deliver a letter to Fr. Robert Wild urging him to:

--publically apologize to victims of pedophile priest Fr. Donald McGuire and their families for his failure to remove McGuire from the priesthood, report McGuire to the police, and alert the public of McGuire’s criminal history against children,

--provide to the Marquette community, to Catholics and the public, a detailed account of his involvement, and those of his colleagues in the Chicago Province, in the decades long cover up of Fr. Donald McGuire’s sexually abusive history and the withholding of key documents to law enforcement officials during McGuire’s 2006 Wisconsin prosecution,

--Join victim/survivors and insist that Jesuit officials immediately create a public registry of all Jesuits in the Wisconsin, Chicago and other provinces who have substantiated reports of sexual abuse of children.

WHO

3-4 members of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims, including the group’s longtime Midwest Director.

WHERE

Outside the entrance of Zilber Hall, Marquette University, 1250 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee

WHEN

Wednesday, March 30, 11:30 a.m.

DOCUMENTS

The complete Jesuit and court documents, along with victim testimony, will be posted on the Boston based online research archive, BishopAccoutability.org at this link: Jesuits and Donald McGuire SJ A Management History

WHY

A new child sex abuse lawsuit filed in Chicago yesterday containing hundreds of never before seen church documents and depositions of top Jesuit officials, including current Marquette University President Fr. Robert Wild, show a pattern and practice of four decades of cover up by the Jesuit order concerning one of the nation’s most infamous pedophile priests.

The Jesuits are the largest Catholic religious order in the world, their high schools and universities some of the most elite educational institutions in the United States.

The priest whose child sex crimes Wild is shown to have concealed in the new documents is Fr. Donald McGuire, one of the most infamous priest sex offenders in US history. According to the documents, McGuire, now age 80, was known by Jesuit officials to have sexually assaulted children or been engaged in sexual misconduct for almost four decades. During this time, McGuire skyrocketed to fame as a spiritual advisor to Mother Theresa and the nuns of her international religious order.

In 2006, McGuire was found guilty of multiple counts of child sex assault in Walworth County, Wisconsin. In 2009 he was convicted on federal charges in Illinois for taking children across state and international boundaries to sexually assault them. Today McGuire is serving a 25 year sentence.

Wild, currently the President of Marquette University, served as the head of the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits from 1985 to 1991, during which time he assumed responsibility for McGuire and other Jesuit sex offenders.

When Wild assumed responsibility for McGuire in 1985, the Jesuits had already documented numerous reports of sexually assaulting children and sexual misconduct by McGuire spanning nearly 20 years. Not only had McGuire been secretly fired from two posts, including Loyola Preparatory Academy in Chicago, when Wild became his direct supervisor, McGuire had just been banned permanently from working or living in the archdiocese of Los Angeles and returned to Chicago.

While under Wild’s supervision, McGuire continued his prolific criminal assaults of children, unabated, recruiting victims from devout Catholic families from Illinois and around the United States. McGuire, a leading Jesuit retreat master, frequently used the Catholic confessional practice to commit his crimes, and his connection with Mother Theresa to gain the trust and confidence of scores of devout and unsuspecting parents and youngsters.

Wild assigned McGuire to Canisius House, a Jesuit community in Evanston Illinois in 1987, despite his sexual abuse history, where McGuire launched his worldwide retreat ministry, traveling the world unsupervised, often accompanied by children.

In 1991 Wild received a report from Brother Ricardo Palacio, a retreat director in California, who was alarmed that McGuire was conducting a youth retreat at his center and concerned about inappropriate behavior with a youngster. Wild, according to the testimony under oath by Palacio, informed Palacio by phone that the Jesuits had previous reports on McGuire’s sexual misconduct with children.

Despite Palacio’s testimony, Wild said in a 2009 deposition that there were no documents concerning McGuire in his Jesuit file and that he created his own “confidential” file for McGuire in 1991. Court documents support Palacio’s and not Wild’s claim.

This is not the first time Jesuit officials may have mislead the courts about abuse documents in McGuire’s file. During McGuire’s Wisconsin prosecution in 2006, Jesuit attorneys wrote Walworth County District Attorney Phil Koss that “we have very little with respect to Father McGuire, failing to mention any of the thousands of pages of documents that the Jesuits possessed directly related to allegations reported against McGuire over a period of 40 years.

Although Wild suggested to McGuire he stop traveling with children for “his prudent protection,” a suggestion McGuire obviously ignored, at no time did Wild report McGuire to police, warn parents or families of McGuire’s history, conduct or order a Jesuit investigation into McGuire’s behavior. As a result, McGuire went on to sexually assault more children for at least another decade.

SNAP official last week in Milwaukee released documents showing that another Jesuit priest with a prior history of sexual misconduct, Fr. Perry Robinson, had only last month been secretly removed from ministry. The group, which charge the Jesuits with an “appalling lack of transparency and accountability” concerning sex offenders like Robinson and McGuire, will be calling on Wild directly to join them in urging a “new era” of openness and public safety” by immediately publishing a registry of all known Jesuit sex offenders. The Jesuits have released no information concerning the number, identities, or current and past assignment histories of clerics who have assaulted children.

Wild will be retiring as Marquette’s President later this year.

Marquette has responded with this statement:

Statement re: SNAP news conference

Today’s news conference by SNAP is the subject of ongoing litigation involving the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus. These events took place prior to Father Wild’s 15-year tenure as Marquette University’s president. Any inquiries regarding this litigation should be directed to Jeremy Langford, Communications Director for the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus, at 773-975-6363.

As a Catholic and Jesuit university, Marquette University fully supports the protection of any victims of sexual abuse. Next week, the Marquette University Law School’s Restorative Justice Institute annual conference is on the topic of “International Dialogue on the Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal,” which will include discussions with both church officials and victims. For more information on the conference, please visit go.mu.edu/RJIconference.

Marquette’s Fr. Robert Wild in Scandal

A story we broke in the local market Monday night is getting some traction.

First on WISN-TV, and then in the Journal-Sentinel.

Here is the Wild deposition in the child abuse case involving a Jesuit priest whom Wild supervised in Chicago in 1991.

Marquette President Fr. Robert Wild Dealt Ineffectively With Chicago Sex Abuse Scandal

From today’s New York Times . . . .

Suit Says Jesuits Ignored Warnings About Priest

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Jesuit leaders in Chicago largely ignored or kept secret numerous reports, spanning four decades, that a prominent priest was sexually abusing teenage boys, lawyers for victims charged on Monday in a motion for punitive damages in a Chicago court. Included in the motion were more than 65 recently obtained church documents and depositions that, the lawyers said, demonstrated “a reckless disregard for the safety of others in the face of repeated reports of sexual misconduct” on the part of Chicago Jesuit leaders. The former priest, Donald J. McGuire, now 80, was convicted on several counts of sex abuse in state and federal courts in 2006 and 2008, and is serving a 25-year federal sentence.

Skipping down in the article:

On his return from Europe in the 1960s, Father McGuire was assigned to live and teach at Loyola Academy, a high school in Wilmette, Ill. Two boys stayed with him in his room for about two years each, where he constantly abused them, according to the 2006 trial. In 1969 the second of those boys, then 15, ran away and described the abuse to his parish priest, who contacted the Jesuit president of the academy. The school responded by removing Father McGuire, but, according to a letter released on Monday, publicly described his departure as a “sabbatical.” In 1991, in another of the many warnings revealed on Monday, the director of a retreat house in California reported to the Chicago Province’s leader that Father McGuire was traveling with a teenage boy from Alaska and sharing a bed with him, and that the boy’s mother had called to express her concern that “her son has in some way changed.” That year, the Chicago Province’s leader, the Rev. Robert A. Wild, imposed the first set of “guidelines” on Father McGuire. In written instructions he said: “I ask that you not travel on any overnight trip with any boy or girl under the age of 18 and preferably even under the age of 21.” But Father McGuire was left to police himself, and Father Wild said in a 2009 deposition that he had regarded the case as “a serious matter” but also “ambiguous.”

Note that Fr. Wild left the post of provincial superior in 1991, so what follows concerns other province officials.

The province sent Father McGuire in 1993 for a psychiatric examination and six months at a treatment center in Maryland — but in the week before he was to report to there, he was allowed to conduct a retreat in Phoenix, where he molested another boy, the documents indicate. As late as 1998, the new documents show, the Chicago provincial wrote a letter of “good standing” for Father McGuire to allow him to minister in a diocese, stating that “there is nothing to our knowledge in his background which would restrict any ministry with minors.” As the reports of abuse accumulated, the Chicago leaders issued one set of restrictions after another on Father McGuire, finally, in 2002, saying he could minister only to nuns in the Chicago region. But none of these directives were enforced, the court motion asserts. Father McGuire was formally removed from the priesthood in February 2008 after a conviction in Wisconsin and after a federal indictment had been issued in Illinois.

Wild’s biography on the Marquette website confirms that he was indeed the Jesuit Provincial discussed in the article. The motion filed with the court contains additional information.

It seems that Wild, when McGuire’s behavior was reported to him, merely questioned McGuire, and failed to consult his personnel file -- which would have shown previous instances of questionable behavior (p. 15).

Further, in the 2009 deposition, Wild denied having heard other reports of sexual misconduct regarding McGuire, but the testimony of other witnesses seems to indicate that he had (p. 16).

The motion asserts that “It is simply impossible to reconcile Fr. Wild’s denial of any knowledge regarding McGuire’s history of abuse with the testimony of Brother [Ricardo] Palacio.”

Nothing in the record suggests that Wild had any evil intent. Rather, he comes across as bumbling and ineffective. But of course, that’s the way he has been at Marquette.

Where this scandal is concerned, he looks no worse than many other Catholic clerics. But neither does he look any better, and if he had acted more responsibly many young boys would have avoided being molested.