ARTICLES

The Walls Came Down

JESUITS ENTANGLED IN SEX HARRASSMENT SUIT

By George Neumayr

"I'm not suprised by it," says a California Jesuit about John Bollard's sexual harrassment suit against the Jesuit order. "It is a terrible thing. It is embarrassing. It has to come out in order for things to get better. Things are so bad."

In a suit filed in San Francisco federal court on August 14, Bollard, a former Jesuit novice and scholastic, alleges that three Jesuit supervisors -- Father Andrew Sotelo, Father Anton Harris and Father Thomas Gleeson -- subjected him to "unwanted verbal and physical conduct of a sexual nature," creating such a "hostile, intimidating and offensive work environment" that he had to leave the order in December 1996. "This unwanted conduct," reads Bollard's suit, "included, but was not limited to, the delivery of sexually explicit pornographic materials through the mail, unwanted sexual comments and gestures, unwanted solicitations, invitations for and discussions of sexual acts by plaintiff's direct supervisors, the defendants named herein."

In an August 14 interview with San Francisco KGO-TV reporter Dan Noyes, Bollard leveled more specific charges. (Bollard declined to be interviewed for this story without his lawyer's permission.) According to Bollard, the harrassment began in 1990-91 at St. Ignatius High Schoolin San Francisco, when two fellow faculty members, Father Harris and Father Sotelo, sent him greeting cards depicting sexually aroused men. Bollard showed Noyes a pornographic Christmas card he received from Harris (see photo, page 4), in which Harris wrote, "Thought this might stir up some theological thought. Hope all goes well. Love, T." Sotelo, according to Bollard, not only sent him pornographic cards, but also invited him out to "gay bars."

In 1993, Bollard left teaching at St. Ignatius High School to study at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. There, Bollard told Noyes, Gleeson, then president of the school, sexually propositioned him: "He said to me that if I wanted to be friends with him, I shouldn't be suprised if it became sexual and that he himself was most interested in mutual masturbation." (Noyes reported that Gleeson denies this story.)

Father John Privett, the chief administrator for the Jesuit California Province, is also named in Bollard's suit for "failure to investigate plantiff's complaints of sexual harrassment made in mid-1995 and again in December of 1996 and to take prompt and immediate action to prevent further acts of the same nature." Privett's indifference to the misconduct, Bollard said to Noyes, forced him to bring the suit: "He gave me a very insincere apology for it, suggested that we try to keep attorneys out of it, and he suggested that I throw away the evidence that I had."

Meanwhile, the named defendants are saying little to nothing about the case. Privett declined comment, but his aide sent me -- 12 days after the case was filed -- a statement saying in part: "Neither the California Provice nor its attorneys have had an opportunity to review the Complaint." Sotelo, reached at Aquinas High School in San Bernardino where he is principal and given an opportunity to defend his innocence, used the same rationale to decline comment. Harris, rector at Jesuit High School in Portland, did not return phone calls, but has issued a quizzical statement through the Jesuit Oregon Province office: "I am embarrassed to learn that personal correspondence between two Jesuits has been made public. I did communicate with this man when he was a Jesuit, and some of the cards I sent to him were meant to be humorous." Efforts to reach Gleeson, now the acting Secretary of Formation for Jesuits nationwide, were also unsuccessful.

But several well-placed observers of the Jesuit order are talking about issues raised by the case, saying that the order's slide into secularism created the moral climate for scandals of this sort.

"Our novitiaties were extremely monastic. The social impediments for something like this [sexual harrassment] were so strong," says a Jesuit familiar with the history of the California Province. But now, he says, noting the frankness of homosexuals in the order and the looseness of Jesuit life, "People identify themselves by their orientation. Once that happens, things fall apart."

"There are some Jesuits who are so distressed by this that they could never recommend the order to a young person interested in religious life," the Jesuit adds. "My theory is that once you get dissidents in dogmatic matters, you then get dissidents in liturgical matters. Then the next generation is dissidents in moral matters....And the cycle is self-perpetuating, since young people interested in papal teaching are no longer attracted to the order." (The Jesuit pointed out that in 1965-66 80 novices entered the California Jesuit province. This year, only three entered.)

Historian James Hitchock, the author of The Pope and the Jesuits, agrees that the Jesuits have squandered their moral tradition, saying in an August 31 interview, "The Jesuits moved from being a hard culture to being a soft culture....There was a severe weakening of discipline.... Basically the walls came down and people started misbehaving."

A student at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley asks simply: "What happened to this order?" This student, who studied at Berkeley during Gleeson's tenure, describes the Jesuit school as a culture of dissent and decadence in which homosexuality is accepted.

"The attitude of the Jesuits here is: 'We need to affirm the gay life and lead them in a spirituality congruent with it,'" says the student, noting that he could receive credits from the Jesuits for "gay spirituality courses" at the Graduate Theological Union, of which the Berkeley school is a member.

The school's opposition to the Church's teachings on human sexuality dates to 1968, when members of its faculty published a manifesto in America magazine condemning Humanae Vitae. Such unapologetic dissent, according to the student, continues at Berkeley. "The Jesuits here just hate Pope John Paul II's teachings and vilify Ratzinger. When the Pope's catechism came out, people said, 'That's a pre-Vatican II document.' They said, 'It is just not relevent to me.' They are all dissenters.'" (In place of an orthodox Catholic curriculum, the school now offers such courses as "Massage: The Art of Anointing," "Christ in Light of Hindu Theology," "An Hispanic Feminist Theology," and "Spirtuality and Liberation" to a diminishing number of Jesuit scholastics. Last year, the California province only had two fourth-year scholastics at Berkeley.)

And the dissent, according to the theology student, is not without its poisonous personal consequences. Desperate to appear sufficiently worldly, the Berkeley Jesuits seem to largely ignore traditional Ignatian moral and spiritual codes and pursue fads: "There is laughter when you bring up the catechism, when you bring up the rosary. That's all passé to them. The Jesuits have a real intensity in showing that they are not like those bead-carrying Catholics. The message they want to send is: 'We are not holy. We are hip. We are wearing our Izod shirts and penny loafers. We are going to be cool, California-educated Jesuits.'

"They are really heading for crisis," concludes the student. "It is beyond just intellectual dissent. It is spiritual rebellion."

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