Seton Hall Silent on Allegations of Homosexual Subculture at Its Seminaries

DENVER (CO)
National Catholic Register

Oct. 23, 2019

By Lauretta Brown

More than a year after the explosive allegations of sexual abuse of minors and seminarians by ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of the important unanswered questions is exactly what kind of misconduct the disgraced former bishop committed at Seton Hall University’s two seminaries — and whether this misconduct was situated in the context of an alleged long-standing homosexual subculture that could still be in place today.

In August, Seton Hall released a statement regarding an outside review that the university commissioned last year in the immediate wake of the McCarrick revelations. But although that statement indicates the review has been completed and found that McCarrick had engaged in historical “sexual harassment” of Seton Hall seminarians, it conspicuously failed to discuss the issue of homosexuality directly and whether a homosexual subculture had been found to still exist at Immaculate Conception Seminary and St. Andrew’s Hall College Seminary.

And the statement does not disclose what changes, if any, are contemplated to screening procedures for seminary candidates or the formation of seminarians to address the alleged homosexual subculture.

But according to some of the individuals who provided testimonies to the review, one thing is clear: The response to date by local Church authorities has been very inadequate.

In August 2018, Seton Hall University’s board of regents announced that it had retained Gibbons P.C. as “special counsel to commission an independent review of McCarrick’s influence and actions at the [Immaculate Conception] Seminary. Gibbons retained the law firm of Latham & Watkins to conduct the independent, unrestricted review.”

This review was commissioned shortly after a Catholic News Agency report that featured allegations from seven priests that McCarrick made sexual advances on the seminarians at Seton Hall over a period of decades, initially during his time as an aide to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York and later as bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey, from 1982 to 1986 and as archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, from 1986 to 2000.

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