UNITED STATES
U.S. Catholic
Monday, June 11, 2012
Bryan Cones
Am I to judge a mentor and friend only by his greatest sin?
A death in the family is often an occasion of mixed emotions—sadness and gratitude, maybe even a little regret. I felt all that and more when I heard of the death of my former bishop, Anthony J. O’Connell, the first bishop of the Diocese of Knoxville, Tennessee, who welcomed me as a seminarian in 1993 and was a fixture in my life for many years after. He moved to the Diocese of West Palm Beach, Florida in 1998, where his past caught up with him. When news of his abuse of a high school seminarian in the 1970s came to light in 2002, he resigned and spent the rest of his life in a monastery in South Carolina.
When I got the news of my bishop’s resignation, I remember feeling both disbelief and shock. How could the man we called “OC”—my mentor—have been an abuser who admitted to lying naked with and fondling a teenage student multiple times over several years as rector of St. Thomas Seminary, a now-closed high school seminary in Hannibal, Missouri?
On my way to college seminary I had actually met O’Connell’s victim, then a priest of the Diocese of Jefferson City, Missouri, who was then a teacher at St. Thomas. I also encountered O’Connell’s successor as rector, who later was also accused of abuse. And I met Jefferson City’s vocation director, who, it turned out, was in an abusive relationship with the 21-year-old president of our seminary college student body. That “relationship” had been going on for at least six years and would continue for three more before the whole thing finally blew up.
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