SEATTLE (WA)
The Seattle Times
November 13, 2018
By Lewis Kamb
Jim Hauer and the five other men each claim they were victimized as children decades ago by priests assigned to churches and schools throughout Western Washington. In addition to receiving settlements, several expressed a demand that the church reveal its infamous “secret files” that for years protected and enabled abusers.
He’d just finished the eighth grade and was pursuing a plan to devote his life to God when Jim Hauer met the priest who he says introduced him to evil.
Back then, in 1976, Hauer said he “didn’t understand” how Father Theodore Marmo — a supervisor of the Seattle Archdiocese’s seminary studies program at John F. Kennedy High School in Burien — allegedly groomed him for abuse.
“I was innocent of thought,” Hauer recalled this week.
But now, some four decades later, Hauer can plainly recognize the tactics his alleged rapist employed: How Marmo separated him from the other boys his age; how the priest took him skiing and to movies; how he hired Hauer for jobs that kept the boy at St. Edwards Hall, the live-in seminary, over weekends and otherwise “enabled him to take advantage of me.”
Decades later, memories of what Marmo did to him mostly remained buried deep in Hauer’s mind until two years ago. That’s when the then-53-year-old San Francisco-based technology sales executive and married father of two sons received an unexpected call. A legal investigator in Seattle was on the line, checking into another man’s abuse claims about the priest.
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