KANSAS CITY ( MO)
National Catholic Reporter
May 2, 2019
By Michael Leach
Art Contreras who grew up at Maryville Academy, once one of the largest child care facilities in the U.S., is as tough a 70-year-old man as you’re likely to meet. He cried as we spoke on the phone. “I lost my father,” he told me. “I lost my father.”
Fr. John Smyth, 84, had died the night before on April 16 at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois, after aneurysm surgery and pneumonia. John would never return to Maryville, his only home as a priest for 57 years, where he gave his life to thousands of kids and their families every day without exception. These “Maryville kids” — now in their 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s and 30s — were not only grieving for their father but hurting over headlines that focused not on his unparalleled life but on an accusation made three months previous that they all knew could never be true.
“Rev. John Smyth, former head of Maryville Academy accused of abuse, has died,” announced WGN. The newspaper stories turned on allegations made by two “convicted felons” who had been teenagers at Maryville’s Scott Nolan Center, a lockdown facility two miles from the grounds where Fr. Smyth, then in his late 60s, lived. Smyth, who walked with a cane after two hip replacements, had never, not once, been accused of anything like this in all his years as a priest in a world of children.
Regina Butler Dziewior was 12 when Fr. Smyth came to Maryville in 1962. “He was a father to me ever since,” she says. “He would never harm a child. No one who knew him believes these allegations, and I will go to my death defending his reputation. Sadly, his legacy, regardless of when he is exonerated, will always end with that part of the story. He is the kind of man, like Cardinal Bernardin or Pope John Paul II, who would have forgiven his accusers. If life was fair that would have been ‘the rest of the story.’ ”
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