UNITED STATES
dotCommonweal
Grant Gallicho
September 9, 2014
Read part one here, part two here, and part three here.
“At the beginning of the Gospel of St. John,” Fr. Carlos Urrutigoity wrote in a September 2001 fundraising letter, “we see the calling of the first apostles.” Upon meeting Jesus, they ask where he lives. “Come and see,” Jesus replies. “The Evangelist then simply states, ‘They went and saw where he lived and stayed with him that day,’” Urrutigoity continued. He was seeking financial support for the clerical-formation program of the Society of St. John, a traditionalist Catholic group he had founded in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1998—months after he was expelled from the schismatic Society of St. Pius X. But he wanted more than a seminary. Urrutigoity planned to build a liberal-arts college and a village for traditionalist-minded Catholics. His profligate spending, along with a string of sexual-misconduct allegations stretching from Argentina to Pennsylvania, ensured none of that would ever come to fruition.
Like the first followers of Jesus, Urrutigoity wrote in his September 2001 letter, the young men who joined the SSJ would be required to leave their families and friends. Novices would have to “detach themselves from all worldly affairs in order to give themselves entirely to the Lord.” That would mean “minimal contact with the outside world,” Urrutigoity explained—“no newspapers, no internet.” Those strictures would prove especially important to the Society in the weeks and months that followed. The day after Urrutigoity composed the letter, Dr. Jeffrey Bond—hired by Urrutigoity in April 2000 to establish his hoped-for college—circulated the first of a series of e-mails and open letters denouncing Urrutigoity for alleged sexual misconduct and Bishop James Timlin for allowing him to remain in ministry.
Indeed, Timlin—who invited Urrutigoity and the Society of St. John into the Diocese of Scranton, brokered the schismatics’ return to full communion with Rome, and proved unable to stop them from running up millions in debt—took every opportunity to defend them, even well after the diocese had settled the sexual-abuse lawsuit that would eventually lead to the group’s canonical suppression.
No one could say Timlin hadn’t been warned.
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