GALLUP (NM)
Gallup Independent
By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
December 9, 2013
[See also the first article in this series: Disastrous Legacy of Abuse: Gallup Priest’s Personnel File Released, by Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola, Gallup Independent, December 7, 2013.]
GALLUP — When James M. Burns was studying for the priesthood at Immaculate Conception Seminary in Missouri in 1959, his rector raised a concern in a letter to the Diocese of Gallup.
“Whereas there is nothing precisely to which I can refer as a character defect … something in his character does not ring true,” the rector wrote Bishop Bernard T. Espelage (Burns file, page 552).
Had Espelage paid attention to the rector’s concern, perhaps Burns wouldn’t have been ordained, sparing an untold number of Catholic children and teens from sexual abuse by their parish priest.
But the Diocese of Gallup was then — as it is today — a sprawling, rural diocese in need of priests and its officials were willing to give some men a chance that wouldn’t have made the grade in other dioceses. With a lackluster seminary record — checkered with a number of red flags — Burns was an available warm body, ready for assignment.
Ordained in 1962 and removed from ministry in 1993, Burns spent most of that time in Arizona. Based on his priest personnel file, which was publicly released in October, and interviews with abuse survivors, it is believed Burns molested a series of adolescent boys throughout his 31 years as a parish priest and correctional facility chaplain.
“He said the sexual involvement with the adolescent males started about four years after ordination,” stated a psychiatric report on Burns, written at the Servants of the Paraclete’s Jemez Springs facility in March 1990. “He remembered in his first parish that two kids told him that they had been sexually involved with the last priest. He became sexually involved with them. He talked about getting in trouble in a reform school with another boy and described the boy as fifteen or sixteen years old.” (Burns file, pages 234-235)
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