June 7, 2002
Dear Friends,
This letter is addressed especially to the parents of boys who either now attend, have attended, or may in the future attend St. Gregory's Academy. St. Gregory's, which is owned and operated by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, is a private Catholic high school for boys located in Moscow, Pennsylvania.
It should be said at the outset that St. Gregory's Academy represents, in principle, a great good to the Church and to Catholic families concerned to find an orthodox education for their sons. However, the gross negligence of a headmaster can ruin all. And unless that negligence is addressed and efforts made to replace the one responsible for such negligence, the institution will suffer by remaining an unsafe and unhealthy place for Catholic families to send their sons.
If you have read my March 10, 2002 letter entitled "The SSJ at St. Gregory's Academy," you have already been warned of the dangers posed by the priests of the Society of St. John. What that letter did not state, which must be stated now, is that the SSJ priests had the opportunity to harm boys at St. Gregory's because of a pre-existing environment suited to their perverse purposes. I say this because parents, graduates, and other concerned parties who have read the above-mentioned letter have contacted me to share their experiences with me, and their stories indicate that the environment at St. Gregory's is not a healthy one for boys. That environment was largely the creation of Mr. Alan Hicks, the Headmaster of St. Gregory's Academy. In short, the bright promise of St. Gregory's has been betrayed by the very one whose task it has been to fulfill that promise.
In this letter, I will briefly describe some of the many incidents shared with me that illustrate clearly the lack of proper oversight, discipline, and safety at St. Gregory's. Although in each case I know the names of the boys involved and the dates of the events, I have withheld this information lest these boys or their parents be unnecessarily exposed.
(1) The mother of a boy at St. Gregory's informed Mr. Hicks that she had discovered that her husband was an active homosexual. She knew this because, when she confronted her husband with the evidence, he admitted to having sexual relations with other men. She subsequently discovered that her husband had sexually abused others, including one of his own brothers.
This woman shared this information with Mr. Hicks because her husband was spending an unusual amount of time traveling to St. Gregory's Academy to spend weekends there with his son and his son's friends. She was concerned that these visits were linked to her husband's homosexual activities. Moreover, her husband had had a strange relationship with a boy at St. Gregory's. He had taken this boy to sporting events where he would pass him off as his own son.
When this woman told Mr. Hicks about her husband, she had a witness present. This witness has confirmed in a written statement that Mr. Hicks was warned about this man's active homosexuality.
This woman was also concerned because, during vacations from St. Gregory's, her son would bring St. Gregory's boys home with him. And she knew that the parents of these boys did not know that their sons were spending nights in the home of a man who was an active homosexual.
Although this woman warned Mr. Hicks about the danger that her own husband posed to the boys at St. Gregory's, Mr. Hicks did nothing to prevent these boys from going off with this man.
(2) Another mother of a St. Gregory's boy discovered that Mr. Hicks was ridiculing her son for taking medicine prescribed by a doctor for attention deficient disorder. Mr. Hicks even subjected her son to ridicule in front of his classmates. Although this mother was convinced that the prescribed medicine was helping her son, Mr. Hicks told her son that he should "be a man" and forgo the medicine. As a result, the boy had to hide the medicine in order to escape ridicule.
(3) Another St. Gregory's boy, who had been regularly hazed by upper classman, became so frustrated and upset that he punched his fist through a window and severely cut his arm. He was taken to the hospital where he received 17 stitches. This boy's mother was never notified when this occurred. She only discovered what had happened when she visited her son a few weeks later and noticed the ugly scars on his arm.
(4) One St. Gregory's graduate, when he was a minor and not yet enrolled at St. Gregory's, was given drinks at a post-graduation party in the immediate presence of Mr. Howard Clark, the Assistant Headmaster, and Mr. Paul McCleary, a teacher, who were themselves drinking with the graduating seniors.
(5) A sophomore boy after graduation one year was discovered to have repeatedly vomited in his own bed from excessive drinking. This is just one of numerous accounts of boys drinking to excess while at St. Gregory's.
(6) There is an ongoing problem at St. Gregory's Academy of some boys purchasing and bringing marijuana to the school and smoking with their schoolmates.
(7) There are pictures of St. Gregory's boys with beers and cigars in hand, and also pictures of boys using aerosol cans to create large fires in their dorm rooms.
(8) A mother has reported that her son, while at St. Gregory's, saw a priest from his home diocese roaming the halls of St. Gregory's. This priest recognized her son and approached him to ask about his family. The boy later called home and told his mother that he had seen this priest at St. Gregory's. The mother became alarmed because this priest had been convicted and had served time in jail for homosexual molestation of boys.
(9) One of the senior prefects at St. Gregory's was in the habit of climbing into the beds of younger boys at lights out when he was completely naked. To his delight, this "game" of his used to "freak out" the younger boys who were not comfortable having a naked young man in bed next to them.
(10) In addition to the homosexual behavior that Br. Alexis Bugnolo witnessed at St. Gregory's and described in his letter to Roman Catholic Faithful and in his subsequent response to Mr. Hicks, another source has told me of two incidents of St. Gregory's boys pretending to be engaged in oral sex with each other. One of the incidents took place between a senior prefect and a freshman beneath the prefect's bed. This area had been screened off with a sheet to create a space known as the "Pleasure Palace," so-called because this prefect had posted pictures of female celebrities on the bottom of his bed. The second incident of feigned mutual oral sex took place between two boys on a dormitory bed.
(11) Two St. Gregory's boys, after a rugby practice, went into the same shower and made a spectacle of the fact that they were showering together.
(12) A group of St. Gregory's boys engaged in ritual whipping with belts in order to discipline themselves by "take a beating for Christ" during Lent.
(13) One of the upper classmen hazed a younger boy by pinning him to the wall and licking his face. Mr. Anthony Myers, a teacher and SSJ member, witnessed this event but took no disciplinary action against the upper classman.
(14) This year Mr. Hicks notified all the parents of boys at St. Gregory's that members of the Society of St. John were not allowed to have any interaction with St. Gregory's boys. Mr. Hicks informed me that his enforcement of this rule was so absolute that he had told Mr. Bret Mansur, an SSJ member and a St. Gregory's alumnus, that he was not permitted to be on the property at St. Gregory's even though he was an alumnus. Nonetheless, at the most recent graduation at St. Gregory's, four members of the Society were present: Mr. Paul McCleary, Mr. Anthony Myers, Mr. John Blonski, and Mr. Bret Mansur.
(15) When I informed Mr. Hicks about the young seminarian from Winona who had been under Fr. Urrutigoity's spiritual direction for two years before Fr. Urrutigoity molested him, Mr. Hicks' response was: "Why didn't the guy just punch him?"
(16) When Fr. Richard Munkelt and I met with Mr. Hicks and Mr. Clark on December 11, 2001 in order to inform them that a graduate of St. Gregory's was claiming to have been homosexually molested while he was a student there, neither Mr. Hicks nor Mr. Clark expressed a single word of concern for the welfare of this young man. They did express concern for their own jobs, however, by joking about how they would soon be "eating out of garbage cans." They also denied responsibility by stating that it was unrealistic for them to have to patrol the hallways of St. Gregory's at night.
While it may seem very odd for the headmaster of a boys' school to show such indifference to a graduate of his school claiming to have been sexually abused, Mr. Hicks himself has made his thinking on this issue better known in a statement he recently circulated as part of his "personal response" to this scandal. There Mr. Hicks states that it is "extremely irresponsible to throw around the expressions 'sexual predator' and 'homosexual molestation' in the context of the current revelations from Boston and other dioceses, especially since none of the allegations in the present circumstances, as far as we have heard, comprise a completed sexual act."
Even if it were true that none of the allegations involved "a completed sexual act," Mr. Hicks' attitude reveals a remarkable ignorance concerning the ways in which homosexual predators "groom" their victims by degrees. Are parents to be reassured by Mr. Hicks' legalistic distinction, as if perversion and degeneracy are of little concern until the threshold of a "completed sexual act" is crossed?
Moreover, one wonders why Mr. Hicks is so sure there has been no "completed sexual act." In the federal lawsuit filed against, among other Defendants, St. Gregory's Academy, it states on page 10 of the complaint: "On several occasions during the Plaintiff's matriculation at Saint Gregory's, Defendant, Father Eric Ensey, without any encouragement or inducement by the Plaintiff, a minor at the time, coerced the Plaintiff, John Doe, into engaging in various homosexual acts with Father Ensey."
Whether these acts were "completed" or not—a legalistic threshold at best—it is irresponsible in the extreme for Mr. Hicks' to downplay the seriousness of these allegations simply because he has not heard whether these acts were "completed." After all, the moral threshold was crossed long before by the creation and tolerance of a poorly supervised and unsafe environment for boys.
Clearly Mr. Hicks should not be in charge of a Catholic boarding school for boys. I therefore encourage all parents to insist that the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter take responsible action by removing Mr. Hicks in order to ensure that St. Gregory's Academy be the educational womb of Catholic gentlemen that it purports to and ought to be.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jeffrey M. Bond
President
College of St. Justin Martyr
142 Market Road
Greeley, PA 18425
(570) 685-5945
jmb3@ltis.net
www.SaintJustinMartyr.org
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