Two Suits Allege Sexual Abuse by Three Priests

By Olivier Uyttebrouck
Albuquerque Journal
November 13, 2015

http://www.abqjournal.com/675088/news/two-suits-allege-sex-abuse-by-priests.html

Two lawsuits filed this week against the Archdiocese of Santa Fe allege that three priests sexually abused boys at a church in Mountainair and a Catholic elementary school in Albuquerque.

The lawsuits, filed in 2nd Judicial District Court in Albuquerque on behalf of two unidentified men, bring to 49 the total number of clerical abuse suits filed by Albuquerque attorney Brad Hall, most naming the archdiocese. Both suits allege negligence in hiring the priests and seek unspecified damages.

A Bernalillo County man alleged that he was sexually abused as a first-grade student at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic School by the Rev. Edward Rutowski, who was a teacher and administrator at the school, according to one lawsuit.

Rutowski was named pastor of Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in 1954, according to his obituary. He died in 2004 in Albuquerque.

He was accused in two 1994 civil lawsuits of molesting two minor boys in 1967 and 1971.

Rutowski was ordained in 1945 in Massachusetts where he pastored several churches before coming to New Mexico in 1951 “for reasons of health,” the obituary said. He served in pastoral posts in Hobbs, Santa Rosa, Vaughn and Albuquerque and held several administrative posts in the archdiocese.

In a second lawsuit filed this week, a New Mexico native alleged that when he was an altar boy at St. Alice Church in Mountainair in the late 1960s, he was raped by two priests, Bernard Bissonnette and James Porter.

Both Bissonnette and Porter were sent to New Mexico for treatment by the Servants of the Paraclete, a religious order that ran a facility in Jemez Springs. Both priests later were transferred to Mountainair, according to the lawsuit. The suit also names the religious order as a defendant.

Porter was sent to New Mexico in 1967 by his diocese in Massachusetts, according to news reports. In 1993, he pleaded guilty of sexually assaulting 28 children in parishes in Massachusetts and was sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. He died in prison in 2005.

Bissonnette was ordained as a priest in 1958 in the Diocese of Norwich, which sent him to Jemez Springs in 1963. He died in 2009 in Belen.