MISSOURI
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
By Tony Messenger
In 1983, Father Daniel O’Connell served as a religious mentor to a young female student from Holy Cross College. The Jesuit priest was a chaplain at Loyola University of Chicago. The student, who in legal filings is known as Jane Doe MB, was studying abroad in Italy, where Loyola had a campus and Father O’Connell was assigned.
Over the course of two semesters, O’Connell sexually assaulted Jane Doe MB.
For a while, she kept her silence.
Two years later, I was a freshman at Loyola, living in a coed off-campus dorm called Gonzaga Hall that had its own resident priest.
Father Daniel O’Connell was that priest.
He was my religious mentor.
So it was with a considerable amount of shock and sadness that I opened an email from the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, last week describing two legal settlements with women who, like me, trusted Father O’Connell, but, unlike me, were horribly violated by him.
Jane Doe MB had actually settled with the Jesuits back in 2003, when the religious order found her allegation against Father O’Connell credible and paid her $181,000. Part of that agreement called for keeping the abusive priest away from other women in a ministerial setting, which didn’t happen, leading to a new settlement of $82,000.
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