SALT LAKE CITY (UT)
Salt Lake Tribune [Salt Lake City UT]
July 28, 2025
By Peggy Fletcher Stack
Former principal of The Madeleine Choir School says he was abused by a priest as a teenager and now he wants Salt Lake City’s diocese to make things right.
Bill Hambleton kept a secret for 30 years.
The would-be priest — who left the vocation but not his Catholic faith in 2001 — never shared it with fellow seminarians or reported it to his superiors. He didn’t tell his family or the people in his Ogden area parish. He didn’t divulge it to either of his first two wives nor his only child.
Hambleton carried it with him through decades of service to his church. He buried it during the years he taught in two of Utah’s Catholic schools. It ate away at him when he was the principal of The Madeleine Choir School, and it followed him to other Catholic classrooms and administrative assignments on the East and West coasts.
Two years ago, the secret broke out of him like a burst water pipe raining sludge down on the serenity of a seemingly sanguine home.
That was when Hambleton learned about his only brother’s death by suicide and something snapped in him. The devastating loss propelled the successful educator to confront his own trauma.
The report
On Dec. 12, 2024, Hambleton, now 51, wrote a letter to Bishop Oscar Solis, leader of the Diocese of Salt Lake City, officially reporting for the first time his allegations that he was molested when he was a 16-year-old by the Rev. Heriberto Castrellion Mejia, a Colombian priest who had served in Utah — at Ogden’s St. Joseph Parish from March 1990 to August 1991 and then at Payson’s St. Andres Church until Oct. 28, 1992.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Bishop Oscar Solis speaks about the election of Pope Leo XIV at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City in May. Hambleton wrote to Solis in December 2024 to report his abuse allegations against a former priest in the Utah diocese.
An allegation of sexual abuse against Mejia was reported to the diocese on Aug. 23, 1991, according to the diocese’s independent review board. A little more than a year later, Mejia had his priestly “faculties” removed, meaning he could no longer perform functions such as celebrate Mass, hear confessions or witness marriages.
Hambleton now believes if diocesan leaders back then had been more open and less dismissive about abuse allegations in general, it would have spared him years of loneliness, self-doubt, even failed marriages.
“I felt isolated, unsafe, and that I could not trust people to care for me,” he told Solis in that first letter. “ … I did not feel emotionally safe in relationships for many years.”
Having listened to some diocesan officials speak about abuse cases when he was a priest candidate, Hambleton came to believe that “bringing forth this information to the diocese would only result in ridicule, ostracization, condescension,” the letter said, “and a refusal to take accountability.”
Now he is testing those presumptions.
While Solis, who took the helm of the 300,000-strong diocese in 2017, and other church officials tasked with the protection of youths have declined to be interviewed about Hambleton’s abuse allegations and their aftermath, they have launched an investigation of his case.
In 2018, the diocese released the names of 19 clerics facing “credible allegations” of sexual misconduct with minors. Meija, who had lost his priestly faculties in fall 1992, was not on that tally.
The diocese did not comment on why his name was omitted.
A year later, though, the diocese published an independent review that included Mejia on a list of 23 clergymen facing allegations of abuse within its parishes.
In August 2019, the diocese filed a report with Payson police, saying that the priest had “confessed to sexually exploiting two juveniles in 1991” and had since “been deported to Colombia.”
The diocese declined to comment on what caused the delay from 1991 to 2019.
Officers, the report said, did not investigate further.
In January of this year, the diocese gave a second report to Payson police. This time it included Hambleton’s allegations about Mejia. That was, the police said, “forwarded to investigations.”
Payson police did not respond to requests for comment on the status of the case.
The diocese’s investigation
After that, the diocese engaged two former FBI agents to conduct an independent investigation of Hambleton’s case, according to the Rev. John Evans, the diocese’s vicar general. The results were given on July 15 to its independent review board, which includes professionals — lawyers, mental health practitioners, educators and others — who are employees of the diocese as well as outside experts.
That group has made its recommendations to the bishop, who then will “determine what needs to be done,” Evans wrote in an email.
“Our only interest is to get to the truth,” Evans said, and “to justice and full healing.”
He declined to comment further on the case or the findings.
At this point, the diocese said, it is unaware of Mejia’s exact whereabouts. No evidence can be found that he has ever been charged with any crimes in the United States.
Hambleton has not asked for money or threatened a lawsuit. He wants instead, he said, acknowledgment of what he alleges is the diocese’s failure to protect him, for those involved to face consequences, and for church leaders to apologize publicly.
(William Hambleton) William Hambleton meets with Pope John Paul II in his office in Vatican City in 1998.
It has been seven months since Hambleton, who now lives in Valencia, California, shared his allegations with Solis, and after exchanging a handful of letters with diocesan officials, he said, he has grown frustrated with the response.
The Catholic system, he said in an interview, is still not good at “listening to victims.”
The story
Hambleton said he met Mejia in spring 1991, when he was 16 years old and attending Holy Family Parish in South Ogden. Mejia was in residence at nearby St. Joseph Parish.
“After we met, he began inviting me to the rectory of St. Joseph’s for dinner. He often complimented me, suggesting that I was a ‘holy’ teenager,” Hambleton wrote in his account to the bishop. “My faith and my spiritual life were very important to me as a teenager, so his apparent validation was something I took seriously.”
When the teen visited the priest at his parish, the Colombian cleric “often invited the boy upstairs to his room after dinner,” Hambleton explained in the letter. “When we were in his room, he would steer the conversations to sexual topics. He did so subtly at first, and then more directly later. He routinely grabbed me and pulled me into very firm hugs and kissed my head and neck. He would rub his hands all over my body when he held me in the hugs. I would try to pull away and he would eventually let go.”
Mejia told the young man that “in his Colombian culture, people were more physically affectionate with each other,” Hambleton wrote.
When Hambleton told Mejia he was leaning toward the priesthood, he told the bishop in the letter, the priest “used this information to manipulate me and coerce me to spend time with him. He said that I needed his spiritual direction.”
Mejia was transferred to Payson in summer 1991 and asked Hambleton to help him move, he wrote. “Over the course of the day, he grabbed me and pulled me into hugs that I was unable to get out of and he kissed me multiple times on the head and neck.”
On other occasions in Payson, the priest pressured Hambleton to “nap” with him, Hambleton wrote. “I kept pulling away and making excuses, but I was too insecure to directly call him out for his predatory behavior.”
Instead, Hambleton told the bishop, he hoped “desperately that someone would walk in and witness the situation.”
The ‘betrayal’
In spring 1992, Hambleton graduated from high school and was sent that fall by the Salt Lake City diocese to the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, for seminary training. It was on Oct. 28, 1992, that the diocese had stripped Mejia of his priestly faculties, according to the review board.
Hambleton heard the news from a friend, he wrote to the bishop, that Mejia “was forced out of the Diocese of Salt Lake for [allegations of] sexual abuse of minors.”
“I was incredibly grateful to hear the news,” Hambleton wrote to Solis. “It felt like a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders. I had enormous anxiety about the possibility of seeing him.”
A few days after Halloween in 1992, the seminarian heard from Mejia, who he said had landed in Detroit as a chaplain at a Catholic hospital and wanted to visit Hambleton.
“I was terrified,” Hambleton said in his letter to the bishop, so he called Monsignor Robert Bussen, who was then vicar general in the Salt Lake City diocese. “I knew Msgr. Bussen removed him from the diocese. I thought that if I told Msgr. Bussen that Father Mejia was coming, he would intervene and stop the visit.”
Instead, according to Hambleton’s letter, Bussen simply told the young priest-to-be: “Enjoy your time with him.”
Those words are burned into Hambleton’s memory, he said in an interview, and became a turning point in his life — the beginning of the end of his priestly pursuit and his distrust of church officials.
(Erik Daenitz | Special to The Tribune) Father Bob Bussen celebrates Mass in Park City in 2010. He was the diocese’s vicar general when Hambleton said the Rev. Heriberto Mejia sought another meeting with Hambleton.
When asked why he met with Mejia again, Hambleton said in an interview he “didn’t feel empowered to tell him not to come. I was too intimidated to face the issue head-on and stop it.”
So Mejia came for the visit in Ohio, and, the former seminarian wrote in a follow-up letter to the bishop, “he again molested me.”
Hambleton said he feels especially betrayed by Bussen.
“Bussen failed to take any action to prevent Mejia (whom he had just expelled for [alleged] sexual abuse of children) from visiting me,” wrote Hambleton in the second letter, “despite the fact that I was a teenage seminarian under his care as vocation director.”
The diocese declined to make Bussen available for an interview.
The interview
In 2002, after leaving the seminary but staying on as an employee of the diocese, Hambleton met with Monsignor J. Terrence Fitzgerald, who had taken over as vicar general.
During their conversation, Fitzgerald began talking about the “sexual abuse claims that were being leveled against the diocese at that time,” Hambleton wrote to Solis in his initial letter. “I was further surprised when he began speaking dismissively about the victims, and he boasted that he would never offer any financial settlement.”
Hambleton, who then was teaching at Juan Diego Catholic High School in Draper, said he felt profoundly uncomfortable but added that this conversation quashed any impulse to describe his own experience.
“I believed that informing diocesan leadership,” he wrote to Solis, “would jeopardize my relationships in the diocese as well as my emotional health and my job security.”
From that day forward, Hambleton kept quiet.
Now he wants Bussen and Fitzgerald — both retired and living in Utah — to have their priestly faculties removed and to write a public apology.
As with Bussen, the diocese declined to make Fitzgerald available for an interview.
The response
Solis wrote back to Hambleton in January 2025, about three weeks after that first letter, saying he “admire[d] the courage that it must have taken to draft such an extensive recitation of a painful part of your life.”
The bishop was “deeply saddened that your involvement in the Catholic community in Utah during the 1990s left you hurt and spiritually unfulfilled,” he wrote. “Our community should welcome and lift up its members, and it should be a source of hope and peace for everyone involved. I am sorry if it failed you while you were in the formative stages of your life.”
After that exchange, according to the diocese, the bishop offered to meet with Hambleton, but the California-based educator said in an interview he “preferred to do that after the investigation was complete.” The diocese said it then turned over the case to Crystal Painter, who directs its Office of Safe Environment and Victim Assistance.
In his last letter to Hambleton in February, Solis said the diocese had contracted with an independent investigator who would, he wrote, “have full access to diocesan files, correspondence and pertinent information [about the case].”
The diocese, the bishop wrote, was taking the allegations “seriously and acting prudently.”
Hambleton said he did meet with the first investigator and, when that man fell ill, a second one. As the investigation went on for months, though, he became increasingly frustrated that he had no further correspondence or in-person meeting with the bishop.
That changed this month.
The meeting
On July 4, Hambleton sat down with Solis, accompanied by Evans, the diocese’s vicar general, to tell his story in person and to express his assertions about how the church had mishandled his case.
“Everybody was polite and cordial,” Hambleton recalled in an interview. The bishop told him that he was “here to listen…in humility.”
So the would-be priest recounted all that happened to him growing up in the church, deciding to be a priest, meeting Mejia and what he alleges followed.
“I walked through all the progression of the physicality of it,” Hambleton said in an interview. “Then I just went through the rest of the story and how difficult this past seven months have been.”
Hambleton said he was appalled that, while investigators did talk to him, he was not allowed to speak to the independent review board in person. He begged the bishop to give the board his letters and, after much pressure, Hambleton said, the bishop agreed.
It was, he said, the first time he thought that his voice might be heard.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Bishop Oscar Solis offers a dedication Mass and blessing of a new chapel at Holy Cross Hospital in West Valley City in June. He met withe Hambleton on July 4.
The system
After stories of clergy abuse simmered in private conversations for years, the problem catapulted into the public eye in 2002 with an explosive Pulitzer Prize-winning report in The Boston Globe, which detailed ways in which influential American Catholic bishops had moved these priests from place to place without warning victims.
Even before that, leaders in the Salt Lake City diocese had come forward to name priests suspected of abuse in its history. It was hailed as a model for the nation and then-Bishop George Niederauer became the leader of the U.S. bishops’ committee on clergy sex abuse.
They created a review system made up of many diocesan clergy and lay leaders that would, they believed, prevent any further abuse of minors.
Even so, it was this claim of being better than other dioceses that seemed the most unsettling and hypocritical to Hambleton.
And it also troubles other abuse advocates.
“My heart aches for every person who was betrayed by Mejia and those who were in charge of him and gave him access to innocent kids and unsuspecting families,” David Clohessy, former national director of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), said in an email.
Clohessy “strongly suspects” that members of the church hierarchy quietly collaborated to move Mejia, he wrote. “At a minimum, anyone who ignored or hid Mejia’s wrongdoing should apologize and resign their posts. Even better, officials in every diocese should expose and punish them to deter similarly inexcusable, irresponsible and hurtful behavior in the future.”
(Chris Park | AP) Shown in 2010, David Clohessy, former head of SNAP, says “many bishops continue to break their promises and still do as little as possible to protect the vulnerable, heal the wounded, reveal the truth about predator priests.”
In 2002, in a formal national policy, U.S. bishops promised to be “open and transparent” about clergy sexual abuse, Clohessy pointed out. The current handling of the Hambleton case “is further proof,” he added, “that, to this day, many bishops continue to break their promises and still do as little as possible to protect the vulnerable, heal the wounded, reveal the truth about predator priests.”
The aftermath
As he awaits the results of the board, Hambleton worries about any other potential victims who aren’t as familiar with the system or as dogged in the pursuit of accountability.
“I’m sure there are a lot of victims like me who are still devout Catholics with a complicated relationship to the church because of this,” he said, “who didn’t lose their faith over it and want to still stay connected.”
The former seminarian and Catholic principal reared his daughter in the only church he has ever known.
“It was important for me to give her a sense of faith,” he said, adding, “but I would never let her be alone with a priest.”
Finally, Hambleton has been able to tell her his secret.