ST. THOMAS SEMINARY CLOSURE DENOUNCED
June 21, 2012 12:40 pm | Author: Jerry Berger
Over decades, hundreds of aspiring priests – from here and elsewhere – attended St. Thomas Seminary in Hannibal and later kept in touch with classmates through an alumni website. But while the seminary was closed years ago, that website has just been shut down by St. Louis native and Jeff City dioceses Bishop John Gaydos. Among other roles, it had helped connect ex-students who had been victimized by Bishop Anthony O’Connell, Fr. Manus Daly and several other predatory faculty members. The shut down has been denounced by former seminarian Mike Wegs who blogs at ThyChild’sFace.
Bishop O’Connell was a bad fellow who resigned as bishop of a diocese in Florida and spent the last years before his death in an abbey in South Carolina, presumably doing penance for more than one liaison with young seminarians. An affable man, he is remembered not too fondly by a former seminarian he did not abuse in the current issue of U.S. Catholic magazine, a publication “liberal” Catholics tend to favor.
Clerics like O’Connell” make SNAP necessary. And, sadly, clerics like him have led to the tendency today not to want to have gay men study for the priesthood. But there are gay men who can live a chaste life, I believe, as well as any straight man, and some gay men may be able to lead that life better than a straight man. There are many decent gay priests functioning in the Church today and life for them must be difficult for a variety of reasons. A priest is a priest marked for life by his ordination no matter his sexual orientation.
The sexual molestation of children is unrelated to sexual orientation. O’Connell admitted publically when he resigned that he was a child predator masquerading as a teacher, mentor, and religious authority figure. As for Bishop Gaydos, he is busy developing a new generation of clergy as practitioners of the art of deceit.
Also I would like to note that U.S. Catholic would not publish my comment about O’Connell, so I include it here: Come to the Stable/The Stephen Spalding Foundation has documented the cases of 14 victims of Anthony J. O’Connell. The non-profit organization continues to work on seven additional cases, as reported to our organization by family members and loved ones. Stephen Spalding is O’Connell’s first publicly identified victim. O’Connell molested Stephen Spalding in 1967. To learn more about this so-called spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, visit the Foundation’s website or Thy Child’s Face. William F. Buckley, a pillar of the Catholic Church in America, captured the essence of O’Connell in his National Review commentary (12 March 2002): “Bishop Anthony J. O’Connell . . . . Apologized for the effect of what he did to [his victims], the effect of what he did in deceiving his fellow priests and bishops and the papal nuncio. What he forgot to apologize for was what he did.”