How Vermont Handled Abuse at Catholic St. Joseph’s Orphanage

by Leslie C. Griffin^*

Do You Know About the Orphanage?

St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont was open from 1854-1974. It closed a long time ago. Yet over the years since 1974, survivors of abuse by its Catholic nuns and priests came forward with their tales of orphanage horror. Today St. Joseph’s is a story of how Vermont moved to protect victims of abuse and to help identify their abusers, even if the abusers are long dead. Vermont has allowed victims to pursue justice against those who protected and hid the abusers.¹ I am grateful to Christine Kenneally, author of the book Ghosts of the Orphanage (2023), for calling full attention to the abuse that many lawyers and victims had fought without success.

Vermont faced terrible stories by victims of the abuse children suffered at the St. Joseph’s Orphanage. There is one Catholic diocese in Vermont, the Diocese of Burlington.² The Burlington diocese settled the Sisters of Providence St. Joseph’s Orphanage cases for $5,000 when they arose in the 1990s. About 100 victims accepted that offer. In 2003, the diocese settled a case for an unknown amount, possibly $20,000. Other survivors got $120,000 and $150,000. The cost of individual settlement claims rose to $1 million by 2006. The bishop then put 130 parishes into trusts that could be used for “pious, charitable or educational purposes” and hoped to shield the church from abuse liability.³ Then it was revealed the church had paid $700,000 to “squash” earlier lawsuits from the 1950s, and $2 million for orphanage-related compensation, counseling and legal fees.⁴ The Vermont diocese did not have insurance to settle those claims.⁵

The Abusers

Michael Madden was charged with sexual abuse at St. Joseph’s Orphanage and at five parishes. In the 1980s, the state tried to get his bishop, John Marshall, to testify, but Marshall said the constitution made him, as a bishop, immune from participation. Because the diocese did not agree with the charges against Madden, the state dropped many of them. Madden took a guilty plea on one count of lewd and lascivious conduct, with a deferred sentence. He violated his probation and spent two years in jail. ⁶ He was ordered to pay $175,000 at his first trial. ⁷

There were some early reports of and cases about sexual abuse at St. Joseph’s Orphanage. In the 1980s lawyer Philip White set up systems that made it easier to report abuse. After White filed Joseph R. Barquin v. Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, Vermont, 839 F.Supp. 275 (D. Vermont, Nov. 10, 1993), 40 victims contacted him. In November 1994, White got a victory for Barquin and all those abuse survivors.

Back then, the statute of limitations (SOL) was six years from when victims understood the injury they had suffered. SOLs determine how much time you have to bring your case to court. The charges of sexual abuse against the orphanage’s Sister Jane Doe could continue, but assault and battery claims could not.

The first ruling about the orphanage was with Barquin, the $5,000 offer mentioned above.⁸ Barquin was hard to work with, and White was sick and had young children to care for; they settled out of court in 1996. White sent letters memorializing what had happened, evidence the diocese had known of the abuse.⁹ Barquin, who had scars on his genitals from the abuse, went to attorney Robert Widman to continue pursuing his case.

Sally Dale’s case was filed on June 13, 1996, in the U.S. District Court of Vermont, also by Widman, who took 12 cases to federal court and 13 to state court. The three defendants were the Diocese of Burlington, Vermont Catholic Charities, and the Sisters of Providence.¹⁰ The church filed a motion to dismiss Dale’s case. The diocese paid $5,000 to 60 St. Joseph’s residents who agreed not to sue.¹¹

In August 1996, three years after Barquin’s suit was filed, the diocese went to mediation. In the end, Barquin and the others “settled for a significant amount of money” and a provision to keep the details of the agreement secret.¹²

Bishop Louis E. Gelineau was a seminarian accused in 1997 of pulling down a boy’s fly at the orphanage in 1951, and then trying to drown the boy. Gelineau denied any abuse.¹³ Robert Devoy is identified as an abuser in the orphanage case too.¹⁴ The plaintiff talks about the zipper and the attempted drowning. Widman filed suits for Donald Shuttle, Marilyn Noble, and Robert Cadorette.

By spring 1998, the judge said the church did not have to turn over letters and survivors could not have a joint trial. Some plaintiffs dropped their cases. A judge dismissed five cases. Marilyn Noble lost on the SOL because she had written a memoir in the 1980s. Sally Dale’s emotional and physical abuse case was also dismissed on the SOL because she had mentioned it earlier. She lost her sexual abuse claim because she could not prove anyone in power at the orphanage had known what was happening. All kinds of questions opened, and in 1999, the defense agreed to settle for small amounts of money, in the $10,000 neighborhood, with small checks with secret amounts.¹⁵

The state’s attorney general investigated the St. Joseph’s Orphanage in 2002, but the results were not released until further investigation by media company BuzzFeed in 2018. ¹⁶ Imagine “how many secrets the diocese kept, and how willing state authorities were to keep them hidden.” ¹⁷ In 2002, the Vermont attorney general kept the names secret even though they had probable cause to prosecute at least one priest. That investigation found evidence about Brian Mead, but as everyone sat on it, the statute of limitations (SOL) ran. The investigator wrote the diocese about its findings and that was that. Despite detailed findings on Mead, no one did anything. Mead got a new job post-settlement. In 1966 a man reported six years of sexual abuse by Brian Mead. ¹⁸ The man received a settlement with a confidentiality agreement. Mead was placed on leave in 2002, resigned in 2003 and had his faculties revoked in 2004. ¹⁹

Sister Claire was accused of abuse of a girl at the orphanage from 1958 to 1964. A lawsuit was dismissed in 1998 because the institution did not have knowledge of events. ²⁰ Donna Savard sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, Vermont Catholic Charities, and the Sisters of Providence for abuse at the orphanage. Judge Murtha ruled none of them were responsible for the abuse because there was no evidence they should have known about it. The judge also ruled that the SOL had run for non-sexual abuse. Savard’s case is one of 24 about the orphanage. ²¹

By 2006, now in debt, the church tried to remove the judge from future trials. At the same time, the church closed parishes into trusts, which allegedly protected the parishioners from the victims’ claims. The victims’ lawyer, however, asked if that violated the state’s fraudulent deeds law. Juries then awarded verdicts of $8.7 million in May 2008, $3.6 million in December 2008, and $2.2 million in 2009. The judge placed liens on the 32-acre Burlington headquarters and the site of the orphanage, and the church’s investment portfolio. Another judge recommended a mass trial for the next set of victims, in 2010. The church kept its parishes in trust and sold its Old North End offices and campus to Burlington College for $10 million in 2010. ²² Burlington College closed in 2016. Senator Bernie Sanders’ wife, Jane, the college’s president in 2010, arranged the purchase of the church’s property.²³ The church then sold its 26-acre Camp Holy Cross in Colchester for $4 million.

New Attention to Abuse Because of Reporters’ Efforts

In 2018, reporters provided news stories about past abuse in the St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Vermont. ²⁴ The state began a criminal investigation into all clergy abuse in the state, albeit much later than many other states, in response to Pennsylvania’s 2016-2018 thorough review of abuse throughout the Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses.²⁵ Vermont’s attorney general ordered the church to share priest misconduct files, which initiated the cases.²⁶

When Vermont investigated the St. Joseph’s Orphanage in 2018, there was always one legal rule in mind: there is no statute of limitations for murder.²⁷ You can always prosecute it. The state’s investigators did not find a murderer,²⁸ although Sally Dale, who lived at the orphanage, said she had witnessed two murders there.²⁹ Brian Mead could have been charged with lewd and lascivious acts but the SOL had expired.³⁰ The SOL ran on one charge against John Milanese. ³¹ In a case about the Orphanage, the judge also ruled that the SOL had run for non-sexual abuse. ³² Many Vermont abusers were not prosecuted because of the SOL. ³³

The diocese got new attention with BuzzFeed’s 2018 story about the orphanage, which led the state legislature to remove the SOL for survivors. Five new lawsuits were pending. Bishop Christopher Coyne released victims from past nondisclosure agreements and worked with the state. ³⁴ Lawyer Jerome O’Neill allowed the six-year SOL on the fraudulent deeds act case to pass, but he thought the trust’s parishes could be tapped if there were a new successful lawsuit. He said, if “the diocese is unable to pay, we will have no hesitancy to reach for those assets. The church may have transferred them, but who’s controlling the puppet strings?” ³⁵ Bishop Salvatore Matano left Vermont in 2013 for Rochester, New York, whose diocese later sought bankruptcy. ³⁶

A 2023 commentary from a former resident of the orphanage complained that Bishop Coyne was demolishing churches to make sure they would not be used to pay the victims. Numbers of abusers had been at those churches, but the church was focused on itself instead of reparations. One of the parishes was home to the orphanage. ³⁷ That author referenced a 2019 article by Kevin O’Connor that said the diocese had listed $16 million in assets, but had hidden $500 million in assets.

Abusers listed in the new orphanage book included Sister Jane of the Rosary, Sister Claire, Sister Pauline, Sister Dominick, Sister James Mary, Sister Albert, Sister Leontine, Sister Louis Hector, Father Robert Devoy, Father Edward Foster, and layman Fred Adams. Father Harold Preedom abused Sally Miller, and the nuns told the inhabitants not to say anything about the priests. ³⁸

Book author Christine Keneally got documents lawyer Widman never saw. In the early 2000s the judge ordered the diocese to hand over fuller, thicker files than Widman had gotten. Jerry O’Neill got the unredacted files of his own case, and the diocese settled with him for $900,000. That made all the difference, and confidentiality orders were lifted. As Kenneally said,

In all, I was stunned to discover that at least twelve and as many as seventeen male clergymembers [and five laypeople] who had lived or worked at St. Joseph’s or Don Bosco—the connected home for boys on the same grounds as St. Joseph’s—had been accused of, or were treated for, the sexual assault of minors.³⁹

Crucially, from 1935 until the orphanage closed in 1974, at least six of St. Joseph’s eight resident chaplains—the priests who oversaw the orphanage—had been accused of sexual abuse. Those six—Fathers Foster, Bresnehan, Devoy, Colleret, Savary, and LaRouche—presided over St. Joseph’s during most of its final forty years of existence, meaning that during all that time, there were only two years in which the priest in charge of the orphanage did not turn out to be a publicly accused abuser. ⁴⁰

The Restoration

The Voices of St. Joseph’s Orphanage founded a Restorative Inquiry, which detailed their plans to bring restoration to the whole situation surrounding St. Joseph’s.⁴¹ Remaining survivors of the orphanage participated in the project to engage restorative justice individuals in the process. They acknowledged there are “few documented restorative methodologies,” and listed their group’s three purposes to:

1. Memorialize the iterative development of the SJORI process, from inception to conclusion.

2. Offer cumulative learning and practice reflections to other communities and

interested-parties considering a restorative response to institutional harms.

3. Invite and share personal reflections from the core participants, facilitators,

and stakeholders to the process.⁴²

One Appendix by children who lived at the orphanage summarizes their terrible experiences:

Imagine what it must have been like to be a scared young child, removed from your only family, and sent into an institutional setting to live with other children from similarly difficult backgrounds. Shut off from contact with the outside world, you were put in the custody of intolerant strangers with little or no training in child care. Some of them were actually sadistic.

Life was unthinkable for thousands of children placed in that orphanage. We suffered physical, mental and, in some cases, sexual abuse. We were threatened and punishment was harsh, swift, and extreme. Oh the horrors! We were beaten with rods, locked in dark closets and trunks, and forced to eat our own vomited food. Some were sexually molested, this by the same people professing to be agents of God: Catholic nuns, priests, Edmundites, and other workers at the facility. Some children did not survive their time there; they simply “disappeared.”

The orphanage was closed in the late 1970s without anyone ever bringing to light what really went on inside its walls. Then, in the mid-1990s, when some of our truths began to emerge, some of us brought lawsuits against the diocese. Sadly, those cases were thrown out due to technicalities or legal grounds; some former orphans were even paid hush money (a pittance, really) to keep them quiet! The effect of these failed suits in the 1990s was profound; having the hope that justice would be served only to

have it dashed felt like being victimized all over again. We were suppressed and intimidated again by those in power and standing in the community.

Now, thanks to an extensive report produced in 2018 for Buzzfeed, written by Christine Kenneally, the State Attorney General’s Office has conducted an investigation into our claims about what happened at St. Joseph’s Orphanage. The truth deserves to be aired; cover up tactics should be widely exposed.⁴³

SJORI asked that the Burlington Catholic Diocese, Vermont Catholic Charities, the Sisters of Providence and the state’s child protection services agency be held accountable, and seek justice for what happened to the children. They ask for a reparation that allows: 1) face-to-face meetings with these groups, and a “sincere apology” from them; 2) creating a fund for healing and releasing all the defendants’ records without redactions; 3) state removal of SOL limits on lawsuits; 4) and encouragement of everyone to come forward with the truth about what happened at St. Joseph’s.⁴⁴

This group reminds us that restoration, reparation and justice are difficult goals to attain after a long history of abuse.

Conclusion

Vermont’s story of the orphanage gives new hopes to victims who were abused many years ago by the church’s representatives. The church’s constant opposition to their lawsuits kept the truth of the abuse from being revealed. Fortunately, survivors, their lawyers, and reporters kept insisting that the truth must be revealed and justice given to the survivors.

The surviving children from the orphanage have given their best work to restoration, seeking through their meetings with each other and with people committed to reparation to have a final positive word for those who have suffered so much.