BURLINGTON (VT)
Seven Days [Burlington VT]
May 21, 2025
By Derek Brouwer
As part of the church’s bankruptcy case, survivors — and now creditors — were allowed the opportunity to detail in open court how they were violated by priests.
The bishop waited inside the courthouse foyer for his turn through the metal detector. On a clipboard ledger, he jotted his name — “John McDermott,” omitting his honorifics — along with the time he was signing in, 9:32 a.m. on May 14, a Wednesday.
He had arrived alone.
McDermott, 62, wore a black shirt and a pectoral cross around his neck. A signifier of his status, the bulky, silver crucifix dangled near his abdomen from a chain.
When he was next to be screened, McDermott placed the cross into one of the gray plastic bins that ferry visitors’ belongings through an X-ray machine for inspection by a court security officer. He walked through the detector without setting off the machine, draped the chain around his pale, thin neck and tucked its pendant of Christ into a breast pocket. He looked up and studied a wall monitor that displayed the room in which each of the day’s court hearings would take place.
A young man in a Harvard University sweater walked past the bishop, heading for an elevator. On this morning, most of the public attention at the Federal Building in Burlington was directed to a fifth-floor courtroom where Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist and Harvard researcher, was fighting the Trump administration’s attempt to deport her. To enter the building, McDermott had walked over pastel messages that Petrova’s supporters had written in chalk on the sidewalk along Elmwood Avenue.
McDermott headed toward a first-floor courtroom, where the latest hearing in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington’s Chapter 11 case was scheduled for 10 a.m. Last year, the diocese, facing a mountain of civil claims from survivors of sex abuse at the hands of Vermont priests, declared bankruptcy. McDermott filed the petition just a few months after the late Pope Francis installed him as bishop. In doing so, McDermott, a longtime Vermont priest, joined bishops of dozens of American dioceses who have sought relief from the financial and public-relations strain brought on by a decades-long scandal.
The diocese and its insurers paid out more than $30 million to more than 60 survivors and their attorneys; another 25 claims were pending before the bankruptcy halted those proceedings. In a videotaped statement at the time, McDermott said bankruptcy was the only way the diocese could distribute its diminishing assets equitably among the remaining survivors who submit a claim. The maneuver, he told church adherents, was also designed to keep Vermont’s Catholic diocese intact while shielding parishes, whose assets were placed in separate trusts many years ago, from financial ruin.
The bankruptcy represents an arcane and likely final chapter in Vermont survivors’ quests for justice and accountability. It has also had the more immediate effect of turning sex-abuse survivors into creditors in a complex financial proceeding. As part of the bankruptcy, nearly 120 people have come forward with new accusations. But unlike the survivors who were heard in previous civil lawsuits, these claimants will not have an opportunity to establish the facts of their case through discovery or have the merits weighed by a jury.
Instead, the parties agreed to hold a pair of unconventional hearings before Chief Bankruptcy Judge Heather Cooper. Survivor-creditors would be given the opportunity to describe their abuse and its impact on their lives to an open courtroom. But the hearings would not be transcribed for the record nor considered legal evidence. As in other federal court matters, no photography, television cameras or recorders would be allowed. And the bishop would be required to attend.
This two-hour “survivor statements” hearing was the first; the second is slated for the fall.
McDermott shuffled wordlessly past the few attorneys and reporters who were standing outside the courtroom, toward a side room where he could wait with the diocese’s counsel, Minnesota attorney Steven Kinsella.
Inside the long, windowless courtroom, the survivors, seven men, sat apart from one another on benches in the gallery. A few were accompanied by spouses or siblings. Some had traveled from other states. Others still lived locally and chatted with court security officers about mutual acquaintances. One man in a baggy T-shirt sat in silence, eyes closed.
Five minutes before 10 a.m., the bishop and the diocese’s lawyer walked through the doors; everyone who had been chatting fell silent. McDermott kept his eyes fixed toward the front of the room as he took a seat at one of two counsel’s tables, next to Kinsella.
Judge Cooper entered in her black robe. “All rise,” the courtroom deputy announced; the bishop and survivors stood.
“Thank you all for being here today,” Cooper said. “You may proceed.”
One of the creditors’ attorneys, Brittany Michael, called forward the first speaker, a man who gave permission to be identified by his name, Kevin McLaughlin.
McLaughlin, who is not the former Chittenden County sheriff of the same name, had traveled to Burlington from Massachusetts. He stepped to a lectern facing the judge, wearing a blue blazer, his back to the bishop. He thanked Cooper for holding the hearing. “For me, shining a light on the darkness is a big part of what justice is about,” he said.
Addressing the judge, McLaughlin recounted how he was sexually assaulted by Father Michael Madden in a small Vermont town in the 1980s. A smart kid who’d skipped a grade in elementary school, McLaughlin was a fervent believer who aspired to enter the priesthood. His family was “extremely poor,” and he grew up without a father.
“In many ways, I was the typical target,” McLaughlin said.
Madden invited the boy to spend a summer night at his personal residence, then assaulted him. McLaughlin was 12 years old.
Madden, who admitted to molesting dozens of boys, died while vacationing in Austria in 2000. He was one of a few priests in Vermont who faced criminal charges for some of his conduct, though he only went to prison after violating his probation.
McLaughlin told the judge that he has struggled with intimacy for much of his life. He cited two failed marriages, a decade of painful therapy and “damage to my sense of who I am as a person.”
“These things leave scars,” he said. “Now, 40 years later, those scars are finally starting to heal.”
He walked back to the gallery, not giving the bishop a glance. At his seat, McLaughlin placed his hands over folded legs. He allowed himself a deep, audible exhale.
“Speaker two,” Michael announced.
A man and his wife stepped forward. The man had once been an altar boy for Father Edward Paquette. The priest kept the holy Eucharist in an upper cupboard in the sacristy of a Rutland church, Christ the King, the man remembered. Paquette would hoist the 11-year-old boy up to reach the Eucharist, then fondle him.
The man would go on to fail seventh grade, twice. He abused alcohol. He struggled with porn addiction and sexual dysfunction. He grappled with disturbing thoughts and only began to open up about his childhood experiences last year.
His voice cracked as he recounted the details in open court. His wife, standing to his left, held her hand on the small of his back.
“I’m utterly disgusted at all the diocese did to cover this up,” the man said. “My only regret is not having the courage to come forward sooner.”
He quoted a cautionary passage from the Epistle of James, which warns that those who teach will be judged most strictly.
McDermott listened quietly. His hair was buzzed, military-tight, with a bald circle in the center. Speaker two’s wife glared at him as the couple walked back to their seats.
The next survivor, the man in the baggy T-shirt, hunched over a wheeled walker and inched to the front of the room. He apologized to the judge, explaining that he was in poor health.
In a gravelly voice, the man told his story in the third person, about a precocious, introverted little boy who was raped at church camp at age 6. The priest, Raymond Provost, had invited the child to eat lunch with him in the rectory. In a matter of days, the abuse escalated to rape. He “detached” himself from his body during that betrayal.
“I watched that little boy die,” the man said.
He later struggled with his own sexuality. Admitting to himself that he was gay, he said, “made me feel like I was responsible for something.”
Decades later, after Vermont lifted the statute of limitations on sex-abuse claims in 2019, he brought a civil lawsuit. The church’s bankruptcy supplanted it.
“Here we are: We are creditors in a bankruptcy case,” he said.
The fourth speaker told Judge Cooper that he had been molested decades ago during the school day, after being tapped by a priest to assist with a funeral service.
“My innocence was forever lost in the hands of that man,” he said.
The speaker said he resolved to deal with the resulting emotional baggage several years ago, while reading The Giving Tree to his first-born child. He realized that, as a father, he needed to be as strong as the apple tree that gives everything to the boy in the book, even as the tree is reduced to a stump. Today, the speaker said, he has three children.
He returned to the gallery. The judge decided to take a break. Nearly an hour had passed, and three men were still waiting their turn to speak.
“All rise,” the courtroom deputy said.
The bishop and survivors stood.
Postscript
Shortly after the hearing, the diocese emailed a statement from Bishop John McDermott to news outlets:
“Knowing it was difficult for those in court today, it is my sincere hope and fervent prayer that today’s hearing will be a source of continued healing for the survivors who shared their stories and for all who have filed a claim against the diocese.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Courtroom Confessional | Amid a tangled bankruptcy case, sex abuse survivors tell a judge — and the bishop of Burlington — how Catholic priests betrayed them”