UNITED STATES
BishopAccountability.org
Summary of Case: Richard J. McCormick was a ordained for the Eastern Province of the Salesians of Don Bosco (Province of St. Philip the Apostle) in 1970. Referred to sometimes as “Fr. Dick” or “Fr. Mac,” McCormick served as teacher and director of Salesian high schools, taught at junior seminaries and was rector of one, held leadership positions at Salesian retreat houses and boys’ camps, served briefly as an assistant parish priest and was a Marian Shrine director. During 1985-1991 he was provincial of the Salesian’s Eastern Province. McCormick’s work took him from Boston and Ipswich MA to Cedar Lake IN, Goshen, West Haverstraw, New Rochelle and Stony Point NY, Harvey LA and St. Petersburg FL.
In 2002 McCormick was removed from his position at St. Petersburg Catholic High School after a female student complained that he kissed her when she encountered him in a hallway. Other students defended the priest, saying “Fr. Mac” often greeted them with a kiss on the cheek.
There is a gap of several years in McCormick’s assignments after 2002; there is another, 1975-1976. In August 2009 he was suspended from the Marian Shrine in Stony Point NY, where he had been since at least 2005, after the Salesians agreed to settle with three men who had accused McCormick of sexually abusing them as Junior Seminary students in Goshen NY in the 1970s.
At some point in the 2000s the Salesians settled with a man who said McCormick sexually abused him on a trip to Rome in 1975 when the man was a 14-year-old Salesian Prep student in Cedar Lake IN.
In August 2012 McCormick was arrested for the rape of a boy, ages 9 and 10, at the Salesian camp in Ipswich MA in 1981 and 1982. He was convicted in November 2014 and sentenced to 8 to 10 years in prison, followed by 10 years’ probation. McCormick had been arrested a second time in April 2013 on charges of raping a 6- to 8-year-old boy at the same camp during 1981-1983. He was convicted in that case in August 2015 and given another 8- to 10-year prison sentence, to run concurrently with the sentence he was already serving.
At least 16 people are known to have claimed they were sexually abused as children by McCormick, some as early as 1963.
Ordained: 1970
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