BALTIMORE — When the Rev. John Mike was an associate pastor at St. Louis Roman Catholic Church four decades ago, he left an impression with his seemingly boundless energy, his outgoing personality and his ability to connect with young people.
But as parishioners gathered Thursday at the Clarksville church for a prayer service, a day after the Maryland Attorney General’s Office released a report on sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, some struggled to fit what they once believed about the Catholic Church with the horrors the document revealed.
Mike is one of four men associated with St. Louis who the document named as abusers. The figure makes the Howard County parish one of a handful of Catholic institutions home to a large number of staff who abused minors over an 80-year span.
“You wouldn’t have known [about the abuse] from normal contact with Mike,” said Charles Roswell of Columbia, who has attended St. Louis for 50 years. “He seemed like a good priest ... but he had his faults. Serious faults, in his case.”
In the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s release, some preliminary conclusions could be drawn from a list of accused priests the archdiocese keeps on its website, and from talking to Catholics, about which institutions were hit hard by abuse.
Now that the report has been published, it makes clearer the severe toll of the abuse on schools and parishes like St. Mark in Catonsville. Instead of the previously known nine offenders, the report ties 11 abusers to the parish over 40 years.
The document names four parishes that had half a dozen offenders each, three more that had five and several that had four. It fills out the picture at heavily impacted schools such as Calvert Hall College High School in Towson and Mount St. Joseph in Southwest Baltimore. There are detailed, often disturbing accounts of the abuse.
At St. Louis, the report’s description of torment inflicted by Mike marks the parish as another hot spot in the abuse crisis.
“At least seven victims have reported being abused by Mike between approximately 1975 and 1987,” the report reads. “Nearly all of the boys were subjected to sadistic physical abuse.”
That abuse, the report says, included forcing boys to carry logs through Stations of the Cross, whipping boys with a bullwhip, and tying them to basketball backboards, all of which gave him a form of sexual satisfaction. One victim has scars from the encounters.
In 1987, Mike pleaded guilty to child abuse and was given five years’ probation. Charges of assault and battery were dismissed through a plea agreement.
“It was definitely abuse of young people, without question, but there was a mental dysfunction from which he suffered,” Richard D. Bennett, who was Mike’s attorney in the 1980s, said Wednesday in a phone interview. Bennett is now a senior district judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
Experts say researchers in the field are only beginning to explore a phenomenon of such “clusters” — locations where clergy abuse appears concentrated.
Church officials say larger parishes are statistically more likely to have more predators. Others suggest predator priests network to get assignments together. Others insist the church had a habit of “dumping” problem priests where they could be more closely watched, or at parishes too weak to push back.
Whatever the explanation, the report reveals that such places have long existed within the archdiocese’s nine counties and Baltimore City.
For each such place, it describes damage so horrific it can be hard for the average person to fathom. Charles LoPresto and Mark Adams recall such scenarios well.
LoPresto, a member of Calvert Hall’s 1965 class, and Adams, a member of the class of 1975, saw up close the manipulations of several of the six predators from the school named in the report.
Both have vivid memories of the Rev. Laurence Brett, an English and religion teacher at the Christian Brothers’ boys’ high school between 1969 and 1974. As the report relates, Brett was hired by the archdiocese even though it was known he had admitted to Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, officials in 1964 that he orally raped a student there.
Adams said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun that Brett was known for bizarre behavior, such as lavishing attention on a boy to whom he sang the song “On the Good Ship Lollipop” during class.
Adams, a retired trial attorney, says some who were suspicious chalked the behavior up to the experimental nature of the times.
LoPresto had no such difficulty. He had returned to Calvert Hall as a biology teacher in 1969, and according to the report, he kept seeing Brett behave suspiciously around boys.
One day, when a boy emerged from Brett’s office, flushed and disheveled, LoPresto pulled him aside, learned what had happened, took the boy to an administrator’s office and threatened to resign if Brett weren’t terminated. Brett disappeared from campus a day later, never to return, and the school announced there was an illness in his family.
LoPresto, now 76, found himself counseling other boys who came to him with stories about Brett, then decided to pursue a career in psychology. Years later, some of those victims saw him in his professional practice to unburden themselves about Brett and other Calvert Hall abusers.
According to the report, Brett abused more than 20 students at the school, often by inviting them to his apartment, showing them pornography and explaining that sex was one way he could show his godly love for them. Brett died in 2010.
Other Calvert Hall abusers in the report include Brother Geoffrey Xavier Langan, a teacher and coach between 1941 and 1952 and 1960 and 1985, who is described as fondling and kissing boys, earning the nickname “Brother Squeeze-ums.”
LoPresto says Calvert Hall long ago put effective protocols in place to promote safety, but the damage done was incalculable.
“It’s such a shame; there are so many wonderful priests and religious,” he said in an interview with The Sun. “These dudes really messed it up for so many. And the church was complicit.”
The sections that describe life at St. Mark’s don’t just name and describe the misdeeds of a succession of clergy members between 1964 and 2004; they suggest a form of mentorship between younger and older staff members.
The Rev. Richard Lentz was an associate pastor of the parish between 1964 and 1973. In October 2002, a man reported Lentz had given him alcohol and sexually abused him in 1967, when he was in his teens. Two months later, another man reported that Lentz had lured him to the rectory when he was a teenager, gotten him drunk, exposed himself, and spanked the boy.
After Lentz wrote the second man a letter apologizing, the archdiocese settled with that victim for $80,000, the report says. Lentz died in 2007.
The rectory was where the Rev. David G. Smith gave alcohol to a teenage altar boy, Brian Hannon, beginning abuse that included oral rape over three years in the 1970s. The report does not name Hannon, but the Florida man recounted his experiences in an interview with The Sun and gave permission for his name to be published.
He was struggling with family issues, he says, and went to Smith for counseling, only to realize “within 20 minutes” that “this man I trusted was trying to have sex with me.” He was needy enough for a strong male influence that he rationalized the situation, he says, only to carry around “horrendous” memories for decades.
He contacted authorities in 2002, and the Baltimore County state’s attorney charged Smith. Smith pleaded guilty to “perverted practice” and received probation. Hannon entered into a settlement with the church for $41,300.
In an interview before the attorney general’s report came out, Hannon said he suspected Smith had many more victims and that other priests were predators. “They saw every boy as fair game,” he says.
He hadn’t read the full report as of Thursday, but it verified his fears. The section on his experiences concludes by saying that “Smith served under Fred Duke and Thomas Bauernfeind at St. Mark’s, both child abusers described in this Report. He spoke of them both as mentors.”
Duke, a monsignor, was pastor of the parish between 1971 and 1978. He admitted in 1988 that he had abused 26 boys early in his career. More accusers came forward after Duke died in 1992.
Bauernfeind served as a parish administrator between 1978 and 1979. Two women accused him of abusing them when they were minors, including one who said he tied her up, ripped her clothes and tried to rape her years later as he was counseling her for her upcoming marriage. The archdiocese placed him on its credibly accused list in 2002. He died in 2003.
Duke and Bauernfeind were two of the 11 abusive clergy the report lists as having worked at St. Mark’s, eight of them in the 1970s and 1980s.
Dozens of worshippers attended 6:30 a.m. and 7:45 a.m. Thursday prayers at St. Mark to mark Holy Thursday, a solemn occasion that precedes Easter. One parishioner, Rob, who declined to give his last name, said he read the report and did not recognize the parish he had attended since 2010.
“All those abusers were from the 1960s and 70s,” he said.
Father Santhosh George, who became pastor in July 2021, published a statement late Wednesday and apologized to abuse victims. George said St. Mark would host services aimed at healing for survivors on April 10, April 16 and May 5.
Frank Dingle, a past president of the Baltimore chapter of SNAP and former longtime St. Mark’s parishioner, said the St. Louis’ priest, Mike, should also be on the St. Mark’s list. Dingle, 82, remembers him as a seminarian intern who visited the Catonsville church frequently in 1973.
One expert, Terry McKiernan of Bishop-Accountability.org, a nonprofit that tracks priest abusers, says “clusters” don’t occur only within parishes or schools; they also develop in geographical areas.
Mike’s assignments over the years placed him in a number of parishes in a 10-square-mile area that overlaps Southwest Baltimore and Baltimore County. The area’s other abusers include the Rev. Joseph Maskell, a serial rapist of children featured in the 2017 Netflix docuseries “The Keepers,” and several Maskell associates mentioned in the series.
Maskell was assigned to three institutions in the rectangle between 1966 and 1980: Our Lady of Victory Parish in Catonsville and St. Clement Catholic Church in Lansdowne, both cited extensively in the attorney general’s report, as well as Archbishop Keough High School in Southwest Baltimore. Maskell died in 2001.
The tie between St. Mark’s, Mike and Maskell may be even closer. Shortly after describing how Mike in the mid-1980s subjected teenage boys to torture and abuse “for his sexual gratification,” the attorney general’s report says that “at least one victim’s abuse [by Mike] was known to Father Joseph Maskell ... in 1980, but Maskell did not report such abuse, and instead Mike transferred to a new parish.”
McKiernan said it’s important to learn how to answer questions such as whether Maskell was a mentor or in any other way shares responsibility for Mike’s abuse.
“We’re still trying to figure out how clusters operate,” he says.
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(Baltimore Sun reporters Angela Roberts contributed to this article.)
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