NEW YORK
Democrat and Chronicle
Steve Orr and Sean Lahman, @seanlahman December 3, 2015
Spoiler alert: This article contains information about the ending of the film Spotlight
Roman Catholics in the Rochester region were stunned when the Rev. Eugene Emo, a priest who had served in a dozen area churches and hospitals over the course of 35 years, was placed under arrest in February 1996.
Father Emo, then 60 years old, a beloved figure to some parishioners but already a subject of scorn to others, was charged with sexual abuse. He was hauled out of a rectory on Oxford Street in the city in handcuffs.
What followed was a chain of events that mirrored, in more ways than one, the story told in the hit film Spotlight. That film, which is getting a good deal of Best Picture Oscar buzz, depicts a year-long investigation by the Boston Globe newspaper of sexual abuse by priests and attempts by church officials in that city to cover up that activity.
As the film relates, the newspaper had written before about abusive priests in Boston. Some of that coverage had been quite extensive. But until the Spotlight team began its work, reporters had never connected the dots by examining the scope of the problem and the Boston archdiocese’s handling of it.
Spotlight culminates with the January 2002 publication of the investigative team’s first story, which exposes the presence of dozens of abusive priests in the archdiocese who had been reassigned, placed on leave or allowed to retirement rather than being punished by the church and the law for their misconduct. As the film ends, scrolling text describes the reaction to the Globe’s Puliter Prize-winning reportage and lists the many American cities in which priest-abuse scandals ensued.
Rochester, New York is on that list. A review of the Democrat and Chronicle’s clip files reveals that what happened here is exactly parallel to events in Boston.
Before Father Emo’s arrest, the Democrat and Chronicle and its now-closed sister paper, the Times-Union, had covered the cases of at least four priests accused of sexual abuse.
The Rev. Gerard Guli of Holy Rosary Church in Rochester and the Rev. Thomas Corbett of St. Theodore’s Church in Gates were arrested by police on sex-abuse charges in 1989 and 1991, respectively. Neither was convicted. Both left their churches and Guli left the priesthood. Corbett remained a priest and worked in the diocesan offices until at least 2002.
In the summer of 1993, a woman filed a sex-abuse civil suit against Brother John Heathwood, a popular teacher at Bishop Kearney High School in Irondequoit. A few months later, the Rev. Robert Winterkorn resigned his pastoral post at St. John the Evangelist Church in Spencerport after acknowledging a sexual relationship with an adult woman.
Winterkorn’s privileges were removed, according to Bishop Matthew Clark, and he died in 2005. The lawsuit against Heathwood was eventually dismissed, and he retired from teaching in 1993. Heathwood was a member of the Christian Brothers, so he was not subject to oversight by the Rochester Diocese.
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