Why the Jesuits should not be let anywhere near children

They just can't be trusted

So, it has been revealed that Pedro Arrupe SJ, the former “black pope” (as the head of the Society of Jesus is known) allowed a known child abuser to go forward for ordination. Arrupe is a hero to the Jesuits and one of the most famous of their leaders. But even he, it is clear, suffered from the Jesuit blind spot: sexually molesting children is just a peccadillo, if even that. It’s unfortunate and undesirable, distasteful even to some of the more fastidious members, but what can you do?

Now, don’t run away with the idea that the man who coined the phrase “men for others” was named as a protector of an active paedophile by the Society he once led. The Jesuits have never admitted incidences of child sexual abuse without being dragged, kicking and screaming, to do so. It was a law court in New Orleans, according to a report in The Guardian, that found - through Jesuit documents - that Arrupe made no objection to the ordination of a known paedophile, Donald J Dickerson who died in 2016.

In 2018, the Jesuits finally confirmed that Dickerson was one of hundreds of child abusers within their ranks. The current court case is being taken against the Society of Jesus by a man who claims to have been raped by Dickerson as a seventeen-year old.

According to The Guardian, a letter from Thomas Stahel SJ, Arrupe’s fellow Jesuit and at the time the top official – or Provincial – in the region that includes New Orleans, recounts how Dickerson had gone on a retreat where he “made sexual advances on [a] 14-year-old boy”. The boy, a student at the Jesuit-run Brebeuf college preparatory school in Indianapolis, told his parents – who in turn reported Dickerson to Stahel.

Stahel’s letter made clear that he believed the boy because he was at least the third child on whom Dickerson had been accused of inflicting abuse. By then, Dickerson had amassed a history “of overt homosexual encounters with two high school boys whom he masturbated”, Stahel’s letter said.

Records produced in court show that Arrupe was aware of Dickerson’s sexual assaults on at least three young boys but made no objection to his eventual ordination after psychiatric treatment. Stahel was happy to let Dickerson be ordained because he “only” sexually abused children “when nervous”.

I know it’s a cliché but I find myself, when writing about the Jesuits and the sexual abuse of children, that you couldn’t make it up. Well, you couldn’t.

A person who was abused by Joseph Marmion SJ as a boy at Belvedere recalls that the Jesuits - after Marmion had been named for what he was - wondered if the case should have been referred to Arrupe. Well, the Society of Jesus, as far as the sexual abuse of children was concerned, was rotten from top to bottom. One wonders how much has really changed.

Arrupe is heading for canonisation, like Joseph Marmion’s great-uncle, Dom Columba Marmion OSB of Maredsous. Columba had a head start, having been put on the saintly conveyor belt in 1962, the year Joseph Marmion began his reign of terror at Clongowes as Prefect of Studies. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Columba would be a Jesuit-educated saint and having a living, breathing Marmion in the Jesuits was important. I believe it explains why he was protected from the time he was a wholly unsatisfactory seminarian in the 1940s. I have written a biography of Marmion DENY EVERYTHING: The Life and Crimes of Joseph Marmion SJ which you can read here on Substack.

One of my classmates has pointed out that it’s easy to confine our outrage to dead Jesuits. But there are living Jesuits who failed those whose lives were blighted by the monstrous Marmion, notably John Dardis SJ, who occupies one of the most senior posts in the Jesuit Curia, and whose brass neck permits him to lecture on the safeguarding of children.

I think it is time to acknowledge that I was taught by several Jesuits whom I know to be good men; they just happen to have belonged to a rotten organisation.