At the end of August, the Catholic Herald of the Arlington Diocese published a notice saying that one of the former chaplains of Christendom College, Father James McLucas, has been accused of sexual abuse and therefore removed from his last position. Subsequently, a report came out about the fact that he made a settlement with a young woman whom he had counseled from the age of 14 on and finally led into a sexual relationship when she was a young adult.
In light of these terrible revelations about Father McLucas, Dr. Robert Hickson – a founding faculty member of Christendom College who was dismissed in 1988 and whose family subsequently broke apart – gives testimony about the fact that Father McLucas, as the chaplain of Christendom College from at least 1992 until the summer of 1995, had a subversively destructive role in the further break-up of his marriage. He gives specific details about his claim, among other things that Fr. McLucas once told him that he would have married a woman like Dr. Hickson’s wife and that he then, during the break-up, took off to the beach with her and her eight children.
Father McLucas refused to hear Dr. Hickson’s confessions after 1992 and clearly then took sides with the wife in a marital struggle.
At the time, Father John Hardon, S.J., when he heard about what Father McLucas had told Dr. Hickson about his wife and his subsequent acts, decided to intervene with Cardinal John O’Connor, McLucas’ own bishop in New York, which he unfortunately then never accomplished.
But more importantly, Dr. Timothy O’Donnell, as of 1992 the President of Christendom College, knew most of the claims against his chaplain but did not take any action against him. On the contrary, Dr. O’Donnell supported Dr. Hickson’s wife at the time (a later annulment showed the nullity of that marriage), welcomed her and the eight children of that family on campus and even later hired her as a professor on campus, in spite of the fact that she had broken her marriage and left her husband.
The result of this exclusion of a husband and father and, at the same time, of the covering-up for a priest so subversive of a marriage by Dr. O’Donnell, later had grave effects for the life of a young woman. Had he himself acted immediately, that sexual abuse might not ever have happened.
See Dr. Robert Hickson’s full account here.
The combination of clerical abuse and cover-up is a dangerous binary weapon.