BURLINGTON (VT)
VT Digger
October 14, 2018
By Kevin O’Connor
Unlike most Vermonters, Jerry O’Neill wasn’t shocked by recent headlines reporting the horrific extent of past child abuse by Catholic Church personnel. From the first talk in the 1990s of nuns abusing orphans decades earlier to the final settlement in 2013 of a string of lawsuits involving priests molesting altar boys a half-century ago, the Burlington lawyer has litigated the most such cases in the state.
“Any time you have news,” O’Neill says in the present MeToo moment, “it stirs memories in survivors and they come forward to people like me.”
The attorney has the stories — and some 500 photocopied pages of nearly every clergy misconduct record in the files of the statewide Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington — to prove it.
“We had to fight, but ultimately we got them,” O’Neill says. “All of a sudden, we had the inside facts.”
Local and state authorities, responding to public questions sparked by a recent BuzzFeed story titled “We Saw Nuns Kill Children: The Ghosts of St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage” are working together to receive and review allegations involving the now-closed Burlington facility, which operated from 1854 to 1974.
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