OXFORD (MS)
Daily Mississippian
March 28, 2019
By Makayla Steede
Accusations of sexual abuse have rocked the Catholic church since 2002. In August 2018, the scandal intensified following an investigation in Pennsylvania that found more than 300 priests accused of child sexual abuse — leaving at least 1,000 survivors.
This report led to further investigations in Illinois, West Virginia, Texas and Mississippi. On March 19, the Catholic Diocese of Jackson released a list of 37 Mississippi clergy members accused of child sexual abuse. Bernard Haddican, one of the 17 priests accused, was a pastor at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, which neighbors the University of Mississippi campus.
In 1998 and 2002, the two accusations against Haddican, who died in 1996, came to light. The period of abuse is suspected to have taken place from 1964 to 1984.
The current St. John’s pastor, Joe Tonos, was only an infant when Haddican’s term as pastor at St. John’s began.
Haddican served as pastor of St. John’s in Oxford from 1965 to 1968, but Tonos did not become personally acquainted with him until college. From the start, Tonos said, he did not like the pastor.
“I knew him when I was in college because I went to Delta State (University) in Cleveland, and he was the pastor there at the time,” Tonos said. “I did not like him at all.”
While attending Delta State, Tonos was the cartoonist for his school paper, and Haddican expressed disdain at the satirical cartoons Tonos drew.
“He found, for whatever reason, the need to tell his parish that I was anti-Catholic because he did not like some of my satire, which I thought was distasteful,” Tonos said. “I just really didn’t care for him.”
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