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	Old Memo Ties Bronx School to Church Sex Scandal By Andy Newman The New York Times [New York] November 3, 2005 All Hallows High School in the Bronx is a handsome brown-brick structure overlooking a park off the Grand Concourse, home to 530 students and to a reputation for academic success. Its link to a notoriously abusive orphanage in Canada, 1,500 miles away and long demolished, seems hard to fathom. For decades, though, the school and the orphanage were owned by the same Roman Catholic order, the Congregation of Christian Brothers. And as lawsuits against the brothers over the orphanage scandal grind on, an internal Christian Brothers memo written 15 years ago surfaced on Tuesday in a complaint filed at a Bronx courthouse. The internal memo, lawyers for orphanage victims charge, shows that the Christian Brothers' 1990 sale of All Hallows was a sham transaction designed to hide their ownership, part of a strategy to minimize the amount victims could recover in a suit. The Bronx complaint asks a judge to rule that the high school, which a commercial real estate broker recently valued at between $3 million and $10 million, really belongs to the Christian Brothers after all. The school is not the subject of any abuse complaints, but to the orphanage victims, it is fair game. As numerous sexual abuse suits against Catholic institutions proceed, the question of church assets is central, because the size of a defendant's holdings is crucial in determining how much money the victims get. Over and over, dioceses, and in some instances religious orders, are being accused of, in one lawyer's words, "shuffling and hiding assets the way they shuffled and hid molester priests." The law in New York and most states is that moving assets with the intent to hinder creditors constitutes fraud. Some church tactics have been blocked. In Spokane, Wash., a judge recently rejected the diocese's claim that the local parishes and not the diocese own the churches and schools. But the church has fought off most challenges to its property transfers, at least in part because intent to defraud is hard to prove. That is where the Christian Brothers memo comes in. The year was 1990. The orphanage, Mount Cashel, in St. John's, Newfoundland, was being exposed as the site of some of the most brutal and systemic sexual and physical abuse to come to light in any Catholic institution, before or since. Victims of rapes and beatings over the decades numbered in the hundreds. The scandal, thinly fictionalized, eventually became an acclaimed film, "The Boys of St. Vincent." Facing an inevitable rash of lawsuits - there is no statute of limitations in Canada for sexual assault - the Christian Brothers created a corporation called All Hallows Institute. This institute then "bought" All Hallows High School from the order, for $10. So while the brothers kept running the school, they did not, technically, own it anymore. A few months later, a Christian Brothers lawyer in New York wrote to a Canadian counterpart that the goal of creating new corporations and transferring schools to them, "e.g., to All Hallows Institute," was to make the order "less of a target in any suit for damages." The memo, lawyers for the orphanage victims say, is something of a smoking gun. "We've all kind of known behind the scenes that this is what these guys try to do," said Michael G. Dowd, one of the lawyers for the orphanage victims. "Seldom do you catch them in the act." The Christian Brothers' current lawyer, Anthony D. Dougherty, called the memo "fascinating" but would not immediately comment further. The complaint was filed jointly by 51 former residents of the Newfoundland orphanage and 38 former residents of what is alleged to have been a similarly vicious orphanage in Seattle. The Congregation of Christian Brothers is a lay order founded in Ireland in 1802 to build schools for the poor. (It is separate from the better-known Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, also known as De La Salle Christian Brothers or simply Christian Brothers.) There are about 1,850 brothers worldwide, including 180 in the Eastern United States province, based in New Rochelle, N.Y., which operates, but does not necessarily own, 22 high schools and elementary schools, as well as Iona College in New Rochelle. In Ireland, Australia, Canada and elsewhere, the order became noted for strictness that sometimes crossed the line into cruelty or worse, and the Mount Cashel orphanage was an extreme example. A government inquiry begun in 1989 found that orphans as young as 6 were routinely beaten with four-foot leather bridle straps, belts and fists - for losing a library card, for catching a Christian Brother having sex with another boy, or for no reason at all. Brothers in long black cassocks violated the boys in their beds at night and in the showers in the morning. More than 450 victims came forward. Eleven brothers were eventually convicted of sexual or physical assault. The lawsuits came. The Canadian province of the Christian Brothers has paid out more than $18 million to 120 former residents, much of which was raised by selling off schools and other property. A separate suit was filed in 1999 against the New Rochelle headquarters by men who lived at Mount Cashel before 1962, the year the Canadian province was carved out of the North American territory run from New Rochelle. Lawyers in this second suit turned up the 1990 memo from John J. Duffy, a lawyer for the Christian Brothers Institute, as the New Rochelle headquarters is formally known, to a lawyer for the brothers in Canada. "Within the last few years," Mr. Duffy wrote, "in order to make C.B.I. less of a target in any suit for damages, we have been incorporating each school as a separate corporate entity with its own board of trustees or directors and transferring title to the school from C.B.I., e.g. to All Hallows Institute." Mr. Duffy, who worked for Davidoff & Malito, one of New York's most politically powerful law firms, died several years ago. The firm referred questions to the order's current lawyer, Mr. Dougherty. A prominent lawyer for abuse victims, Jeffrey R. Anderson, predicted that the memo would be cited in many other cases against Catholic institutions as evidence of bad-faith accounting. A law professor at George Washington University who has served as an adviser to the Lutheran church, Robert Tuttle, said it was not clear that Mr. Duffy's memo could be relevant to any other case. In the Bronx, the president of the high school, Paul Krebbs, said that although he was not qualified to speak on disputes over corporate property, he could say the school is thriving. All Hallows, he said, regularly sends 100 percent of its graduates, most of them poor and black or Hispanic, to four-year colleges. It is ranked in the top 50 out of 1,300 Catholic high schools nationwide by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a policy group. For one 57-year-old Mount Cashel survivor who now lives in New York, though, the fact that the order runs any schools boggles the mind. The man, who under court order may be identified only by his initials, W.W., said, "I am of the mind to just dissolve the entire institution because of its sins against humanity." "That's the thing with the Catholic church," he added. "You never know, because it's such a powerful institution, how much they can still hide from the public."
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