Priest staying under watch

By Luis Cabrera

Associated Press

SEATTLE — The Rev. John Cornelius has been convicted of no crime, but he must meet several times each month with a Washington state parole officer hired by the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle.

The priest, accused of molestation by at least three men and currently on administrative leave, has been observed by the officer since 1997 in his limited contacts with parishioners.

Cornelius, beginning in 1997, served under the supervision of the Rev. Dennis Robb, a priest at Everett’s Our Lady of Perpetual Help and Immaculate Conception parishes.

Cornelius was put on administrative leave in mid-April after a 43-year-old former national television news reporter filed a complaint of sexual abuse against him.

Archdiocese officials defend the monitoring — the only such arrangement publicly disclosed in the United States — as a way to ensure children’s safety while retaining a valued servant. But even some of the most vocal critics in the Catholic Church’s current sex-abuse crisis say putting a priest "on parole" sets an unsettling precedent.

"Protecting the children has got to be number one, but you also want to maintain the dignity of the people involved," said Svea Fraser of Voice of the Faithful, a lay group pressuring the Boston Archdiocese to change the way it handles abuse allegations.

The Seattle Archdiocese hired George Uhlman, a parole officer who routinely supervises sex offenders, to monitor Cornelius, 56, after an Idaho man accused the priest in 1996 of abusing him as an adolescent in Boise in the early 1970s.

Church and police investigations were inconclusive. But Cornelius, a former city police chaplain and the adoptive father of 13 children, was reassigned from his inner-city Seattle ministry. He was barred from contact with children and required to meet regularly with Uhlman and a sex-abuse counselor.

The parole officer arrangement appears to be unique, said Mike Hurley, spokesman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C.

"I’m sure it will not miss the attention of the bishops at the annual meeting in Dallas," he said.

The June meeting will focus on ways to strengthen national guidelines for handling sex-abuse cases. Since January, the U.S. church has been shaken by allegations that some bishops protected priests suspected of molesting children.

Dan Satterberg, chief deputy criminal prosecutor in King County and a member of a lay panel that advises Seattle Archbishop Alexander Brunett on sex-abuse policy, said hiring an outside monitor "is an appropriate option."

"It’s more than most employers would do, but they’re a unique employer," he said.

Satterberg said monitoring a priest may be the best choice in cases where the statute of limitations has run out, or when the evidence does not support full removal but officials want to err on the side of caution.

However, David O’Brien, professor of Roman Catholic Studies at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., said the arrangement sounded too much like punishment.

"You’d want to think in a circumstance like that, where accusations have never been substantiated, that you could find some more pastoral rather than legal structure," he said.

Regina Brannan, an academic researcher on the U.S. church and president of the Southeast Pennsylvania Women’s Ordination Conference, said she worried about the message it sends.

"One of the things we have to be careful of is due process," she said. "Parole implies the process of a person who has been convicted of a crime and is now back in society."

Brunett was unavailable for comment, but Seattle Archdiocese spokesman Bill Gallant defended the arrangement, begun under a previous archbishop and continued by Brunett.

"On the surface, someone might hear something about this and say it’s too harsh, but one who gives that kind of opinion may not know the extenuating circumstances," he said.

He noted that a "special cases" committee of lay experts, separate from Satterberg’s policy panel, advised hiring a monitor.

Gallant said he did not know how much the archdiocese paid Uhlman for his moonlighting work, and he could not quickly find out. Nor, he said, did he know whether the Seattle Archdiocese had any other similar arrangements.

Cornelius has denied all the allegations against him through the archdiocese. Uhlman, who observes Cornelius’ interactions with parishioners besides meeting with him several times monthly, says he has seen no red flags.

However, Cornelius was placed on leave in April, following new molestation complaints dating to the 1970s. Two men have alleged that the priest improperly touched them when they were students at a Catholic school in suburban Burien.

Terrie Light, head of the Oakland, Calif.-based Northwest regional office of the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, said her experience as a social worker tells her that even a supervised priest could easily hide current abuse from a monitor.

"I like the idea in theory, but unless he’s connected to the person by a chain, how’s he really going to know?" she asked.

Some archbishops have placed suspected abusers into "group home" settings, said Monsignor James Margason, who serves as vicar general under U.S. bishops conference President Wilton Gregory in the archdiocese of Belleville, Ill.

He said hiring a parole officer might work in some areas, but in Belleville, "almost all of our ministry involves contact with children, so in our cases, we have not allowed those men to continue working in the church."

In the Archdiocese of Newark, N.J., which has an abuse advisory panel similar to Seattle’s, suspected abusers have been assigned other priests as monitors, rather than outsiders, spokesman Jim Goodness said.

"This is a system that works for us. We’re comfortable with it," Goodness said.

Copyright ©2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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