BALTIMORE (MD)
Baltimore Sun [Baltimore MD]
May 18, 2023
By Steve English
The Sun recently ran an article about child sexual abuse in the Baltimore archdiocese that quoted Charles LoPresto (”Report on sexual abuse by priests details horrors of life in hardest-hit Catholic parishes, schools,” April 7). While teaching at Calvert Hall College High School in the 1970s, he learned that a student had been abused by a priest at the school. He could have lied, covered up or looked the other way as so many of his contemporaries and superiors did. Instead, he went to the administration and threatened to quit if the priest wasn’t removed. The priest was gone the next day.
That was an oasis of heroism in the midst of a moral desert, made all the more remarkable by the fact that we were in a recession (aren’t we always?) and I happen to know he couldn’t afford to lose his job.
So I’d like to personally thank you, Mr. LoPresto (now Professor LoPresto as he is a professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University Maryland), for standing up when others wouldn’t. He couldn’t prevent what happened that day. But where this particular predator was concerned, he saved the next boy, and the one after that.
I was a student in Mr. LoPresto’s biology class at Calvert Hall in 1973.
The next boy could have been me.
— Steve English, Clarksville