DALLAS (TX)
Morning News
Sept. 24, 2019
There is something far worse than seeing an important local institution face the exposure of a terrible past, and that is to keep that past in the dark.
Jesuit College Preparatory School has been a rock of Dallas that has helped many boys develop into great men.
But the allegation from former student Mike Pedevilla that a giant of Jesuit’s past, the Rev. Patrick Koch, abused Pedevilla when he was a teen must represent a moment of reckoning for Jesuit and for Dallas Catholics in general.
We applaud Pedevilla, 54, for the courage to come forward decades after an incident he has described as sexually abusive in Koch’s office on Jesuit’s campus.
Koch was Jesuit’s principal or president from 1972 to 1980 and is a towering figure in the school’s history. However, we know that Koch, who died in 2006, is also on a list of priests credibly accused of sexual abuse in not one but two cities, Dallas and Corpus Christi.
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