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A view of Baltimore’s Basilica nestled amid the city’s famed row houses. / Public domain

CNA Staff, Oct 16, 2023 / 17:40 pm (CNA).

The Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Benedictine order have removed a decadeslong pastor from public ministry and suspended his priestly faculties after he confirmed to a local media outlet that years ago he entered a confidential $200,000 settlement to quiet allegations of male adult sexual assault and financial fraud.

“I just wanted to keep him quiet, to be rid of him, because he was just stirring up trouble,” Father Paschal Morlino, OSB, told The Baltimore Banner in its October report. “My conscience is clear; it’s all stuff that he made up.”

The archdiocese said in a statement Sunday that after being made aware of the report, it immediately began an investigation and decided within 24 hours, along with the Benedictine order, to remove Morlino as pastor and suspend his priestly faculties.

Morlino, who was the pastor for more than 30 years at St. Benedict Church in Baltimore, has since returned to his religious community, Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. 

A lawyer for the archabbey declined to comment on Monday. CNA reached out to the American-Cassinese Congregation, which oversees the archabbey, for comment but did not hear back by time of publication.

CNA also reached out to the Diocese of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where the archabbey is located, but a spokesman said that Morlino is not a diocesan priest and therefore does not have any faculties in the diocese.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore said in its statement that both the archdiocese and the Benedictines “intend to conduct further investigation.”

The allegations

Kathy Durm-St. Amant, a former parishioner from Morlino’s Baltimore church, told The Baltimore Banner that a friend once confided in her that many years prior he had taken a cruise with Morlino in which the priest sexually assaulted him.

”He said he went on that cruise, he was in bed. He woke up with Paschal on top of him,” Durm-St. Amant said.

That man worked for Morlino, now 85, carrying out different duties for the pastor’s church such as fundraising, cooking, and cleaning, the outlet reported.

She encouraged her friend, whom the outlet did not name, to contact a lawyer. 

That friend died in 2020, but after his death, Durm-St. Amant discovered negotiation letters between attorneys relating to the incident, the outlet reported. The letters were provided to the outlet.

One of the letters, dated Jan. 24, 2018, was from the man’s attorney Joanne Suder. 

That letter demanded $375,000 in exchange for forgoing a lawsuit, but it also accused Morlino of forging the man’s signature on bank records, the outlet reported.

“You stole all of his cash from checks telling him his expenses exceeded the balances of his checks,” Suder wrote.

In that letter, the man’s attorney also accused the priest of raping the man on the cruise in September 2000. Additionally, the letter accuses Morlino of “multiple rapes” in the years following the cruise, according to the outlet.

“His physician has opined that your sexual, physical, emotional, and fraudulent behavior has caused him such injuries that he may never recover,” Suder wrote, referring to her client.

Suder declined to comment to CNA on Monday.

A letter from Morlino’s attorney, Salvatore Anello III, responded to Suder’s demands saying, “Although Father Paschal is indeed not a rich person, in conjunction with his family and friends, he has managed to raise $25,000 to try and settle this matter.” 

“There would have to be a release and total confidentiality agreement. As you can see whatever we do here, we are in an untenable position since the mere accusation, whether it be true or not, and it is not true, can end his ministry at St. Benedict’s,” the letter said.

Both parties settled for $200,000 in February 2018, documents show. The pastor confirmed the deal to the outlet.

Anello could not be reached by CNA for comment by time of publication.

Durm-St. Amant, the man’s friend, told the outlet that she notified the Archdiocese of Baltimore of the sexual assault allegations in August 2018 and added that she then met with Monsignor James Hannon, then-director of the division of clergy personnel, and Jerri Burkhardt, director of the office of child and youth protection.

But she said she felt ignored. 

“What did he say? They’re going to meet with [Morlino] and counsel him?” the woman told the outlet about Hannon. “Not, ‘We’re going to shut him down.’ Not, ‘We’re going to take him out of service.’ That he needs counseling.”

In that August 2018 complaint to the archdiocese, Durm-St. Amant also alleged that Morlino had sexually assaulted a different man on a separate cruise. That man had died prior to the complaint being brought. 

The archdiocese told the outlet that Morlino denied the assault and the church could not corroborate the allegation because the man had died.

In the archdiocese’s statement Sunday, it said that in 2018 an individual brought a complaint against Morlino but that it related to sexual harassment — not sexual assault — of an adult man who had died by the time of the complaint, and therefore could not be corroborated.

CNA reached out to the archdiocese for comment on Monday but did not receive a response. 

Denying the allegations

Morlino denies all the allegations made against him. 

He told The Baltimore Banner that he did in fact go on a cruise with the man, Durm-St. Amant’s friend, along with three other friends, but had no sexual contact with him or in the following years.

Morlino also denies the fraud allegations. He told the outlet that there was an agreement that the man’s paychecks would be deposited into a church account that would cover his health care costs.

“I took care of his medical insurance; that was the deal,” the priest said. “He didn’t have any money; he played on my sympathy.”

The outlet also reported that Morlino paid the tax debt on the man’s home. But eventually, their relationship ended when the priest dismissed the man from his duties at the church. 

Morlino said he was stunned when the accusations came. 

A new administrator is being chosen to run St. Benedict Church in Baltimore, according to the archdiocese.

Anyone with information about sexual misconduct by any representative of the Church is encouraged to to contact the Baltimore Archdiocese by calling the Ethics line at 1-888-572-8026 or by visiting the archdiocese’s website.

[…]

Washington D.C., Dec 4, 2019 / 06:18 pm (CNA).- Open windows for reporting incidents of child sexual abuse regardless of when they occurred could lead to a wave of thousands of new abuse cases against Catholic clergy and billions of dollars in lawsuits, a recent report from the Associated Press estimated.

“A trickle becomes a stream becomes a flood,” James Marsh, a New York lawyer who represents abuse victims, told the AP. “We’re sort of at the flood stage right now.”

In total, eight states have opened “look back” windows, which allow adult victims of sex abuse to come forward with allegations from their childhoods, even if they have passed the statute of limitations. Seven more states have significantly relaxed their statutes of limitations, allowing victims to come forward much later in life than previous laws had allowed.

In August of this year, New York opened up such a window for one year, as part of the Child Victims Act. Prior to this, victims had until the age of 23 to come forward with cases of childhood sexual abuse. After the open look back window closes, victims will now have until the age of 55 to come forward.

New Jersey opened a two-year window for victims Dec. 1. After that window closes, a new law extended the statute of limitations on reporting childhood abuse from 20 years of age to 55.

California’s three-year “look back” window will open Jan. 1, 2020, and victims will be awarded triple in damages if they can prove there was an attempt on the part of the Church to cover up the abuse. Once the window has closed, victims will be able to come forward with childhood abuse cases up until the age of 40, instead of the previous limit of 26 years of age.

According to AP interviews with lawyers and clergy abuse watchdog groups, the number of cases that will come from just those three states could lead to at least 5,000 additional cases of abuse, with lawsuit payouts that “could surpass the $4 billion paid out since the clergy sex abuse first came to light in the 1980s.”

The other states that have opened up look back windows are Arizona, Montana, Hawaii, Vermont, and North Carolina, along with the District of Columbia. Most states have temporary look back windows, though Vermont’s window will never expire, allowing anyone to come forward with an allegation of childhood sexual abuse at any time.

Seven other states have increased the age at which adults may come forward with cases of childhood abuse; in many cases, the increase was by more than a decade.

The relaxed or temporarily eliminated statutes of limitations have victims cheering, lawyers competing for sex abuse clients, and the Church preparing for another onslaught of cases.

“I was sitting in my living room and someone came on TV, ‘If you’ve been molested, act now,’” 57-year-old Ramon Mercado told the AP. “After so many years, I said, ‘Why not?’”

Mercado told the AP that he had been quiet about the abuse he had suffered as a child in the 1970s so as not to upset his mother, who recently died.

Many of the cases being brought forward include priests already on the public “credibly accused” lists that many dioceses have.

But some cases, like Mercado’s, name priests who are dead, and are not already on such lists, complicating the possibility of defense on the part of a diocese.

“Dead people can’t defend themselves,” Mark Chopko, former general counsel to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the AP.

“There is also no one there to be interviewed. If a diocese gets a claim that Father Smith abused somebody in 1947, and there is nothing in Father Smith’s file and there is no one to ask whether there is merit or not, the diocese is stuck,” he added.

Steven Alter, a lawyer who has represented multiple sex abuse victims and is collecting more clients, insisted to the AP that “it’s not a cash grab.”

“They (victims) want to have a voice. They want to help other people and make sure it doesn’t happen again. I haven’t had one person ask me about the money yet,” he said.

The new wave of abuse cases comes after several years of sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Church in the United States, including the allegations against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the grand jury report from Pennsylvania detailing decades of abuse cases, which triggered an avalanche of victims to come forward and investigations of clergy sex abuse in dioceses across the country.

The newly relaxed or eliminated statutes of limitations in these 15 states will further strain diocesan finances, with dioceses looking to victim compensation funds or selling valuable real estate as ways to pay victims.

Victim compensation funds are currently being used in several dioceses, including the Archdiocese of New York, every diocese in the states of New Jersey and Colorado, and several dioceses in Pennsylvania and California.

These funds offer to settle with victims outside of court, which means that victims are compensated more quickly, but at a lower amount than what they might have won in court, according to the AP. Compensation funds are formed by donations taken up specifically for that purpose, and are not funded by donations made to Catholic schools, seminaries, or other ministries.

Since setting up its fund in 2016, the Archdiocese of New York has paid “more than $67 million to 338 alleged victims, an average $200,000 each,” the AP reported.

In a 2018 op-ed for the New York Daily News, Dolan said that the use of victim compensation funds “surpasses endless and costly litigation — which can further hurt the victim-survivors; it insures fair and reasonable compensation; and prevents the real possibility — as has happened elsewhere — of bankrupting both public and private organizations, including churches, that provide essential services in education, charity and health care.”

Still, bankruptcy may be in the future for some already financially strained dioceses, which also leads to less compensation for victims than if they were to win at a trial. A Penn State study cited by the AP of 16 dioceses and other religious organizations that had recently filed for bankruptcy were able to settle with sex abuse victims for an average of $288,168 per case.

Paul Mones, a Los Angeles lawyer who has successfully prosecuted millions of dollars worth of sex abuse cases against the Catholic Church, told the AP that if these newly-revealed cases are taken to trial, the amount that the Church will owe in victim compensation could be “astronomical.”

[…]

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Washington D.C., Jun 4, 2021 / 14:00 pm (CNA).
The Archdiocese of Boston is planning on opening its first new Catholic school in more than 50 years, featuring a “blended learning” experience of online and in-person ins… […]