OMAHA (NE)
Des Moines Register [Des Moines IA]
November 1, 2023
By Lee Rood
Some decades-old credible accusations of sexual abuse by priests who worked at Boys Town didn’t become public until two years ago.
Over the years, Boys Town programs have been associated with some high-profile suspected or documented cases of sexual abuse and rape. Here are some cases that have made headlines:
Rape by three youth shuts down New York program
In 2017, Boys Town shut down three large residential programs for youth in California, Texas and New York, announcing in a news release that regulatory and environmental issues made it too difficult for employees to adhere to its model of care.
Those closures came after leaders at the Omaha, Nebraska, headquarters invested millions trying to build up residential programs across the country. But they also came after one of the most alarming cases of rape and employee neglect in Boys Town’s history.
In June 2015, three teens in a Brooklyn, New York, residential program for delinquent youth run by Boys Town raped and robbed a woman in Manhattan after escaping from their group home in the middle of the night.
Not long after, the city of New York ended a $6.4 million contract with Boys Town, and at least four employees were arrested for allegedly lying about doing required overnight bed checks.
After the rape, authorities uncovered widespread management problems at other group homes operated by Boys Town, which was responsible for overseeing the experimental initiative known as Close to Home.
An investigation by the commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation found Boys Town workers falsified records indicating the boys were being accounted for and supervised. The investigation also identified oversight deficiencies by the City Administration for Children’s Services.
Statute of limitations prohibits civil lawsuits from proceeding
Twenty years ago, five former residents of Father Flanagan’s Boys Home sued the nonprofit in separate civil court cases, alleging they were sexually abused by former employees Michael Wolf and the Rev. James Kelly as well as the Rev. Richard Colbert.
Three of the cases were dismissed because the dates of the alleged abuse were beyond Nebraska’s statute of limitations.
Only one case against Boys Town went to trial and the plaintiff, John J. Sturzenegger, lost. Another alleged victim, Darren Boudreau, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, dropped his case after filing for bankruptcy.
One of the men who filed the cases in 2003, Lance Rivers of Phoenix, provided extensive hospital records at the time to an Omaha World-Herald reporter that showed Boys Town investigated sexual abuse allegations against Wolf, a counselor, who died in Indiana in 1990. Rivers claimed he had suffered nearly nightly abuse from Wolf in the early 1980s.
Another man, James Duffy of Arizona, sued Boys Town alleging Wolf and Kelly, a priest and former director of spiritual affairs, sexually abused him while he was at Boys Town in the 1970s.
Kelly and Wolf both left Boys Town in 1983, a year before then-Archbishop Daniel Sheehan appointed the Rev. Val Peter to succeed Monsignor Robert Hupp as executive director at Boys Town, according to the World-Herald.
Sheehan, who was archbishop from 1969 to 1993 and who died in 2000, was one of the numerous U.S. archbishops accused of moving priests accused of sexual abuse from church to church.
Five priests who were credibly accused of abuse worked at Boys Town
Since the death of Boys Town founder Msgr. Edward J. Flanagan in 1948, the Archdiocese of Omaha has had a hand in picking national directors at Boys Town, including the Rev. Stephen Boes, who retired this year.
Two years ago, the three archdioceses in Nebraska, including the one serving Omaha, were rocked by an exhaustive probe by the state’s attorney general that identified 258 documented clergy abuse victims and 57 credibly accused church officials.
The investigation used the help of media to find victims and pulled together information from subpoenaed church documents, settlement agreements from the archdiocese’s insurer and psychological records of priests.
Several priests accused of sexual abuse of children had worked at different times at Immaculate Conception at Dowd Chapel on the Boys Town campus, including the Revs. Joseph Finch, Aloysius McMahon and John Rizzo.
The report also identified credible reports of sexual abuse of children by the Rev. Patrick Henry, deceased, who served in the Omaha archdiocese from 1980 to 1984, and worked at Boys Town as a lay social worker and house parent in the late 1960s into the 1970s. The investigation identified one substantiated report of abuse allegedly committed by Henry at Boys Town. Henry was laicized by the Cleveland diocese in 2019.
One victim indicated he reached out to Boys Town in 2002 to discuss the abuse, but his attempts were unsuccessful, according to the attorney general’s report. The victim said the person who investigated the allegations regarding Boys Town took a “very defensive approach,” the report said.
Another priest investigated for multiple counts of abuse, Father Aloysius Piorkowski, was dismissed from Boys Town for inappropriate conduct in 1962. But one victim who said he was sexually abused by the priest from 1960 to 1962 at Boys Town, beginning at age 13, didn’t report that abuse until 2021.
Among the report’s findings: Church authorities often knew of the abusive behavior, did nothing to stop it and didn’t notify law enforcement.
“The most troubling finding… is the fact that on numerous occasions when there was an opportunity to bring justice to the victims, those in authority chose to place the reputation of the church above the protection of the children,” Attorney General Douglas J. Peterson wrote when the report was released.
Neither Boes, who retired this summer, nor the archdiocese responded to the Register’s questions about clergy abuse at Boys Town.
Of the abuse reported at Boys Town, the archdiocese at Boys Town issued a video of Archbishop George Lucas’ public apology to Catholics in Nebraska and the following to the Register: “Boys Town is not a Catholic organization as defined in canon law. The Archdiocese of Omaha partners with Boys Town specifically as it relates to appointing a pastor at Immaculate Conception (Dowd Chapel). The archdiocese has not yet assigned a priest to lead Immaculate Conception, and Father Boes’ assignment also remains pending.”
Expert on what’s needed: A culture of transparency
Julia Feder, an associate professor of theology at Creighton University in Omaha, has expertise regarding the issue of child sexual abuse and is among a team of academics and other experts studying clergy abuse for Fordham University in New York.
Notably, Feder examined a case study of abuse perpetrated by Daniel Kenney, perhaps the most beloved priest on a list released in 2018 of Omaha priests who were credibly accused of abusing minors.
Known in Omaha for carrying a monkey hand puppet named Buford, Kenney was the founder of a popular philanthropic event around the Thanksgiving holiday called Operation Others and established Camp Buford, an overnight wilderness camp in Wyoming for low-income Omaha youth.
Kenney later was credibly accused of sexually abusing boys who attended Creighton Preparatory School in Omaha between 1965 and 1989. He was removed from public ministry in 2003 and laicized in 2020. The Omaha Archdiocese and Midwest Jesuits both publicly named Kenney as a sexual abuser. However, he does not appear to have been charged in any criminal case.
In 2019, the Omaha World-Herald reached the 86-year-old by phone in Milwaukee. When told of the allegations against him, Kenney questioned whether there was proof that he did anything wrong. “Is this guilty until proven innocent?” he said.
Feder said in a setting like Boys Town, where youth may not trust the adults around them, it’s important to teach them to discern what behavior is merely annoying and what’s exploitive, and provide them with more than one way to report abuse. She and other researchers found fostering a culture of transparency among those who work at facilities like Boys Town is also critical.
“I don’t want to think children living in a residential facility means that sex abuse will be rampant and unchecked,” she said. “But the ideal circumstance is that it is addressed immediately, consequences are made clear and deterrents are in place to stop it from happening again.”
Boys Town says it has a compendium of policies and procedures that aim to ensure youth are protected and complaints are investigated. Youth are encouraged to report abuse or unwelcome behavior, it says, and can do so online, by phone or in person.
Part of a series supported by the Pulitzer Center.