BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
May 30, 2025
By Kevin Cullen
Victims of the abusive priest James Talbot want it known far and wide what the Jesuits did not tell them: he’s dead.
When Jim Scanlan heard that the priest who raped him and so many others had died, he was surprised at his own reaction.
It wasn’t relief or anger or a fist-shaking “Yes!”
It was indifference.
James Talbot, who as a priest raped Scanlan and other boys when he taught at Boston College High School, then raped more boys after he was quietly shipped from Boston to Maine, was not worthy of an emotion so intense, so draining, so overwhelming, as hate; that Talbot simply is not deserving of Jim Scanlan’s deepest feelings.
“There’s an old saying, and I didn’t know what it meant until now. ‘The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference,’ ” Scanlan said.
Nonetheless that anger, that sense of enduring grievance, did eventually well up, and it was and is directed at Talbot’s superiors, the Jesuit order and priests who knew, who covered up, who quietly moved Talbot out of BC High in Dorchester so he could rape more boys at a Jesuit high school in Portland, Maine, so he could sexually assault a 9-year-old boy in St. Jude Church in Freeport, Maine, in the late 1990s.
“They were not just complicit,” Scanlan said. “They facilitated it.”
Scanlan’s anger was not assuaged by the fact the Jesuit order that produced Talbot didn’t have the decency to inform the survivors of Talbot’s horrific sexual abuse that he was dead. This from the superiors who for so long ignored the groundswell of evidence and even after Talbot pleaded guilty in two cases still took him and provided comfort at the Campion Center in Weston.
Scanlan heard it this week from a friend, who heard it from an old Jesuit, who heard it from someone else.
There was no formal announcement, however, no formal obituary, from the Society of Jesus, as the Jesuits are known.
When I called the Jesuits, looking for answers, they didn’t offer much. Mike Gabriele, director of communications for the USA East Province of the Society of Jesus, kept it brief.
“All I can release about the death of James Talbot is that he died at the age of 87 on February 28, 2025. He had been residing at the Vianney Renewal Center in Dittmer, MO, for some years and died in hospice care in St. Louis,” Gabriele said.
The Vianney Center is a behavioral health and addiction treatment facility for Catholic clergy and religious.
Asked where Talbot was buried and whether the Jesuits should let Talbot’s victims know he was dead, Gabriele added, “The policy of the USA East Province is not to release a statement or obituary (including place of burial) for any Jesuit credibly accused of sexual abuse.”
So, three months after Talbot died, armed with only hearsay because the Jesuits didn’t tell anyone who deserved to know, Jim Scanlan took it upon himself to get the word out to as many of Talbot’s victims as possible, through a network of survivors whose numbers are stored on his phone and computer. But as he texted and left messages, Scanlan realized he would only reach a fraction of those raped and wounded and hurt so grievously by Talbot.
He remembers Talbot’s hearing before the Massachusetts Parole Board, seeking release after serving six years for raping Scanlan and two other boys at BC High. The parole board members were questioning Talbot about the sex offender program he was enrolled in at prison, that Talbot was at a stage in the program where he admits to the number of victims he abused. And Talbot, in his own words, acknowledged it was 89.
“I can’t get to all of the 88 others,” Scanlan said, “but they deserve to know. Maybe it will bring closure for some of them. Maybe it won’t. But they deserve to know.”
One victim Scanlan reached is Mike Doherty, who in 1998 was the first to publicly accuse Talbot of sexual abuse while a teacher and coach at Cheverus High School, which is to Portland what BC High is to Boston, an elite Jesuit college preparatory school.
Doherty effectively blew the whistle on the complicity of the Jesuits who by protecting Talbot allowed him to go on and ruin so many other lives.
The civil lawsuit Doherty filed exposed Rev. Stephen Dawber, a former BC High teacher who became principal of Cheverus. Dawber wrote a letter of recommendation for Talbot, clearing the way for the priest to move to Portland. It was little surprise when Dawber himself was later exposed and suspended by BC High for sexually assaulting students at the Dorchester campus. Birds of a feather.
Given the malevolence of Dawber and others vouching for Talbot when they knew he was a rampant sex offender, it is ironic they inadvertently exposed him to criminal charges when they cleared his transfer to Portland. Of the thousands of priests who raped and molested minors, Talbot was among the few to face justice in a courtroom and years in a cell.
When Talbot moved from Massachusetts to Maine in 1980, the clock on the statute of limitations froze. That allowed then-Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley to file criminal charges against Talbot in 2002 based on testimony provided by Scanlan and other BC High students that Talbot raped.
Using the premise that it would toughen them up, Talbot, a soccer and hockey coach at BC High, would wrestle his charges, sometimes when they were clad only in jockstraps, sometimes after plying them with beer. In that compromised position, he sexually assaulted the boys.
Doherty was the victim of another ploy; Talbot ingratiated himself to Doherty’s family to the point where he had his own room in the Doherty home in Freeport. Talbot used that trust and access to molest Doherty.
He did the same to another family in Freeport, sexually assaulting the 9-year-old son of a couple whose marriage he had presided over. After Talbot offered to hear the boy’s first confession, the grateful mother waited outside as Talbot assaulted the boy inside a church.
Jim Scanlan and Mike Doherty were in the courtroom in Maine in 2018, showing support for that boy, now a man, and seeing off Talbot to prison for three years.
Doherty told me he has a different take on the Jesuits taking Talbot at the Weston center and the treatment facility in Missouri.
“If they hadn’t taken care of him, he would have been out there in the wind, with no one keeping an eye on him,” Doherty said.
But, like Scanlan, Doherty feels the Jesuits had an obligation to inform Talbot’s victims of his death.
“I stopped wanting 10 minutes with a baseball bat in a room with Talbot a long time ago,” Doherty said. “I pitied him more than anything. A man of such talent and intellect, squandered all that to further his proclivity. He ended up being a sad individual.”
Doherty has been working on a book about Talbot and the lies, the coverup and life-altering harm done to him, Jim Scanlan and at least 87 other boys.
He already has a workingtitle, a play on words from the Jesuit motto of “Men for Others.” Doherty’s book will be called, “Men for Others, Boys for Us.”
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.