EDINBURG (TX)
San Antonio Express-News
December 5, 2017
By Aaron Nelsen
[Note: See also http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news3/2004_11_21_Egerton_StexasDA_John_Feit_8.htm]
EDINBURG — The Hidalgo County sheriff told Catholic Church officials in 1960 they should hire a private investigator to undermine the murder investigation of Father John Feit and thereby avoid a scandal that threatened to rock the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, a witness testified Tuesday.
Feit, now 85 and no longer a priest, is on trial for the murder of Irene Garza, a 25-year-old elementary school teacher and former beauty queen killed during Holy Week that year. He was 27 at the time and serving as a fill-in priest in the Rio Grande Valley.
An official letter dated Oct. 1, 1960, written by Father Joseph Pawlicki, pastor of a church in Georgetown near Austin, to Father Lawrence J. Seidel, provincial of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Southern Province, urged church officials to avoid a public scandal.
“I believe I found some element in every paragraph that I found very unusual, that pointed to an attempt to cover this up, to minimize the circumstances … to make it go away,” testified Father Thomas Doyle, 73, a canon lawyer who has worked with survivors of priest sex abuse.
Doyle read the letter to the jury Tuesday.
Sheriff E.E. Vickers, a Catholic, suggested a private investigator might compel the district attorney to find a case against Feit weak, Pawlicki wrote.
Pawlicki also told Seidel that allowing the case to go before a jury would expose the church to its enemies, and threatened to become a political scandal possibly affecting Kennedy, who was running for president.
Kennedy would be the first Catholic elected to the nation’s highest office and was the target of anti-Catholic sentiment.
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