GALLUP (NM)
Gallup Independent
October 17, 2017
[Note: See also BishopAccountability.org’s database entry on Brother Mark Schornack OFM. The letter linked below was reproduced when this story ran in the Gallup Independent .]
Flagstaff, Ariz. — Usually it takes a judge’s order to pry the lid off a clergy sex abuser’s confidential personnel file.
But in the case of Brother Mark Schornack, OFM, it just took a mistake by a courthouse employee to publicly release restricted documents that were supposed to be filed under seal.
That mistake was made in Flagstaff’s Coconino County Courthouse with the case Jane L.S. Doe v. Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and St. Michael Indian School. The documents reveal that Schornack, who has been identified as a credibly accused child molester by the Diocese of Gallup, was accepted into the Franciscan religious order while he was a patient at Via Coeli, the notorious New Mexico treatment center known for treating and recycling Catholic clergy sex abusers.
“Your application for admission to the brotherhood has been approved,” the Rev. Herbert Klosterkemper OFM wrote to Schornack Feb. 14, 1952. “You may arrange to report at St. Michael Mission, St. Michaels, Arizona, around the end of this month.” The letter was marked “Restricted Material” and “Confidential SJB001548” by the Franciscan Province of St. John the Baptist in Cincinnati, Ohio.
And with this acceptance letter, the Franciscans sent Schornack straight to his first mission assignment on the Navajo Nation and the Diocese of Gallup. According to the diocese’s list of credibly accused abusers, Schornack worked in the diocese from 1952 to 1984. Known mostly for driving a school bus and throwing roller skating parties for children, Schornack also had at least one assignment in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe at Jemez Pueblo in 1985. He died in January 2012 after being a resident at the Little Sisters of the Poor facility in Gallup.
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