Two priests long affiliated with the University of Notre Dame groomed and sexually abused young men at the storied Catholic college, and elsewhere, over many years dating back to the 1980s.
And the clerics — both with ties to the Chicago area — were allowed to stay in ministry long after church and school officials were said to have been aware of some of the potential misconduct.
Those are the central takeaways from interviews conducted by the Chicago Sun-Times and a recently released report commissioned by Notre Dame detailing alleged sexual misconduct by Rev. Thomas King, who is now retired, and Rev. David Porterfield, who died in November.
But as much as the report reveals, it raises numerous questions that neither Notre Dame, the Catholic religious order that helps oversee it nor the attorney hired by the school to investigate the misconduct would answer — despite school officials issuing a public apology to victims, and pledging greater accountability and transparency.
The report focused largely on the conduct of the priests while at Notre Dame and its sister school, Holy Cross College, both located near South Bend, Indiana, and overseen by their order of priests and religious brothers, the Congregation of Holy Cross.
King, for instance, had been the rector of Notre Dame’s Zahm Hall dormitory from 1980 to 1997, during which time he was accused of subjecting at least 15 Notre Dame university and Holy Cross College students to a “scheme” in which he had them strip naked, or nearly so, under the guise of needing to weigh them out of concern for their health, the report says.
The report also found “multiple individuals, some of whom were weighed, were sexually touched or assaulted by Fr. King, both at Notre Dame and after he left.”
However, questions also persist about his earlier days in the Chicago area.
King not only attended high school at what’s now called Notre Dame College Prep in north suburban Niles, “he taught history, Latin, and theology” there after he was ordained a priest in 1969 and “also served as the school’s Athletic Director until his departure in 1979,” according to the report.
King’s order oversaw the high school at the time, and the report says: “We know of no complaints made during his time there.”
The lawyer who completed the report was hired by the university in September as the college faced mounting activism from some alumni. The investigation was initially focused on King, and then expanded into Porterfield as people familiar with his misconduct pressed forward.
The finished product does not detail Porterfield’s tenure at the high school.
The Notre Dame report
He taught and coached at the Niles school from 1965 through 1975 “before returning to seminary studies” and becoming a priest and working at the university, according to his death notice.
A spokesman for the high school says: “Notre Dame College Prep takes allegations of this nature very seriously and . . . we have hired independent counsel who will be available to receive and review any complaints of improprieties by these two individuals.”
“Notre Dame College Prep fully cooperated with that investigation,” and “there is no evidence nor are there any allegations of abuse by Fr. King and Mr. Porterfield during their time at Notre Dame High School 40 to 50 years ago.”
It remains unclear how that conclusion was reached — or whether the high school has put out word to alumni from that time period to come forward with any relevant information, a relatively common practice nowadays when church officials want to learn the extent of abuse by a cleric in the name of truth and healing.
A graduate of the Niles school who was a student when King was a teacher there told the Sun-Times he hasn’t received outreach about King or Porterfield from Notre Dame College Prep.
The university — known for its football program, tight-knit alumni base and standing as perhaps the nation’s best-known Catholic college — conducted some outreach, even if critics say it was not expansive enough.
The university’s investigation “was publicly announced to the Notre Dame community by the President of Notre Dame and the Board Chair,” according to the report, completed by New York attorney Helen Cantwell of the firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP.
“A letter was posted on Notre Dame’s website and distributed to each resident who lived in Zahm between 1980 and 1997 according to University records. The letter encouraged anyone with information related to Fr. King or any related concerns that would assist the investigation to contact” the firm.
“While many people provided information about Fr. King, some witnesses also called to discuss other clergy who had previously worked at Notre Dame,” apparently even beyond Porterfield.
The names of any other priests, what they may have done and to whom, and what the university and the order plan to do now with that information aren’t clear, as officials wouldn’t comment.
‘I can’t trust them’
Tom McLaughlin, of suburban Portland, Oregon, was among those who accused Porterfield of making sexual advances on him as a young adult student — after he confided in Porterfield that he’d been sexually abused by a member of the Irish Christian Brothers religious order as a high schooler in Seattle.
“I loved Notre Dame, my years there were transformative, it opened the world to me, I owe a lot to the whole experience,” says McLaughlin. “So it really breaks my heart and it makes me f–ing angry that I can’t trust them.”
Brother Edward Courtney, who McLaughlin identified as his high school abuser, is believed to have assaulted more than 50 children over the years around the country — including the Chicago area.
Meantime, a native of northern Illinois abused by King while a University of Notre Dame student was also previously sexually abused as a minor, by a Benedictine priest at a Catholic high school, according to records and interviews.
The church’s ongoing child sexual abuse crisis in the United States first seeped into public view in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but gained worldwide notoriety in 2002 after the Boston Globe began detailing the horror.
Shortly thereafter, some church organizations, in the name of transparency and accountability, created what are essentially individualized sex offender registries, public lists of their credibly accused members said to have molested children.
When the third wave of the scandal erupted in 2018, numerous other religious orders and dioceses that had maintained secrecy buckled and created public lists, including the Congregation of Holy Cross.
There are 16 men on its list — 14 priests, one religious brother and one seminarian, none of whom are said to be in public ministry today with the Catholic church, and most if not all dead.
Three of the 16 served at the university at some point, and five served at the north suburban high school long ago. Another priest once ministered at a Chicago parish.
Neither King nor Porterfield are included.
In the Chicago area, religious orders generally operate Catholic high schools, and the groups traditionally have their own unique missions and hierarchy. They also generally span geographic boundaries of the church and sometimes include priests as well as religious brothers — the latter of whom have some priestly duties except aren’t ordained and can’t officiate mass.
Dioceses — or the larger archdioceses — cover geographic areas and are led by bishops appointed by the pope, and they’re more inclined to operate Catholic parishes and elementary schools. The Archdiocese of Chicago covers Cook and Lake counties and is led by Cardinal Blase Cupich, the top bishop.
While he doesn’t control the religious orders operating in his domain, they need his permission to minister there. Cupich has encouraged religious orders to come clean about their child sexual abusers, and he’s portrayed his own public list of credibly accused as complete, with the names of “diocesan” priests that reported to him or his predecessors included, along with members of religious orders that once served locally and are credibly accused.
However, a review of the archdiocese list shows no mention of the Congregation of Holy Cross, even though at least six credibly accused members once served within Cupich’s boundaries, and a 2023 Illinois general report identifies them as local.
Neither he nor his aides will explain — but the apparent omission fits into the same patterns outlined in a series of Sun-Times stories focusing on the public disclosure by religious orders and U.S. dioceses in recent years.
An incomplete accounting of the abuse crisis
The stories uncovered great variations on such transparency — with every order and diocese handling their lists, if they exist at all, differently. The end result: a chaotic and incomplete accounting of an abuse and cover-up crisis still present in parts of the U.S. and globally.
That remains the case even though victims abused as kids have long said such lists help in the healing process, and they help the church fulfill its stated mission of truth, rooted in Jesus’ teachings.
Some clergy offenders are known to cross over between minors and adults, with ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick a notorious example.
Some church organizations with public lists of alleged child abusers also include the names of clerics accused of preying on vulnerable adults — whether disabled or involved in a different “power dynamic” where a clergyman holds sway over adult victims because of, say, an educational, counseling or spiritual setting.
“When there’s a power dynamic, the other person is a vulnerable individual,” says Maggie Burke, a Downers Grove resident whose young-adult son, Cormac Burke, was subjected to “predatory grooming” by Porterfield through Alcoholics Anonymous when he was trying to “support his sobriety” in 2018.
“They don’t need to be a minor, they should be putting King and Porterfield on the credible list on their damn web site, it doesn’t matter if they weren’t a minor.”
Leaders of the Holy Cross congregation wouldn’t say whether they’d ever expand their public list to cover adult-on-adult abuse.
A 2018 letter from a leader of the order to the Burkes, and provided to the Sun-Times, acknowledges Porterfield’s misconduct, saying that “on behalf of the Province and Holy Cross, I apologize to you for Fr. Porterfield’s actions. I do believe his comments to you, and his behavior, were very inappropriate — not only as a priest and as a person involved in AA, but just as a responsible adult.”
Cupich’s list of accused child-molesting priests doesn’t appear to cover clergy accused of misconduct with vulnerable adults. He once pledged to provide information about those accused clerics to the Sun-Times, then reneged.
Some elements within the church dislike any such public lists, saying they unfairly tarnish priests who have been accused but not necessarily convicted of a crime. There’s been a recent effort to step back from such lists in the U.S. church, though there’s also been recent attempts by bishops to crack down more on clergy abusing vulnerable adults and better acknowledge the predation.
Abuse a problem in other denominations
Such abuse has been a significant problem in other denominations, including the evangelical Christian world.
Prompted by horror stories of preachers preying on young adults, Georgia’s government recently criminalized sexual contact between ministers and adult members of their flocks.
Illinois doesn’t have a similar statute.
Notre Dame’s report is littered with references to unnamed university and church officials who some victims and others insisted they told about incidents of misconduct by King and Porterfield over the years — to no avail.
Critics say this shows the abuse wasn’t isolated, but rather enabled by others, with that inaction and alleged cover-up leading to more people being preyed on.
“As early as 2003 and 2004 we’re doing studies on this because of the sh-t coming out of Boston and New York and what we’re seeing is a pattern — of moving priests from one position to another after identifying they are offenders,” said Heidi Moser, a Pennsylvania resident who says her ex-husband was sexually abused by Porterfield in the 1980s at the university when he was a student.
It was made clear two decades ago “you can’t do this any more,” yet the Holy Cross congregation, until recently, was still “doing it,” Moser said. Referring to the university and the order, she added: “They shouldn’t be policing themselves, they clearly cannot.”
The report says: “In the early 1980s, Notre Dame became aware of at least one complaint of sexual abuse of a student by Fr. Porterfield when he was rector of Sorin Hall,” another dorm at the university.
“Fr. Porterfield resigned from the University shortly after Notre Dame learned of the allegation,” and less that year later, in 1984, “Porterfield was rehired by Notre Dame as an assistant rector at Grace Hall and in 1985 served as an Assistant Director of Admissions at the University.”
“In early 1986, Notre Dame received a report of Fr. Porterfield abusing a student at Grace Hall. Fr. Porterfield invited the student into his room and asked intimate details about his personal life and sexuality. Fr. Porterfield then embraced the student and made explicit comments,” prompting his departure.
By 1988, “Porterfield returned to the South Bend area and served in various parishes in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend,” according to the report.
His “ministry was limited” and “he was prohibited from performing ministry at Notre Dame or with minors” following a 2011 university investigation spurred by the now-former wife of a man who’d been sexually abused by Porterfield years earlier as a Notre Dame university student.
But Porterfield “continued to have access to young men, at least through Alcoholics Anonymous (‘AA’) retreats,” the report found.
Cormac Burke died at age 22 in Lombard in 2020 in what was ruled an accidental drug overdose. “It’s hard to say he overdosed because of the Porterfield thing, but it certainly didn’t help” with “his emotional well being, which was fragile, as was his sobriety,” his mother said.
She and Moser reached out to Cantwell to let her know that the misconduct wasn’t limited to King.
King, who couldn’t be reached for comment, also continued in ministry well after his order knew of likely misconduct, and allegedly committed more abuse.
Amid concerns about “deteriorating health and erratic behavior,” King “ceased any formal ministry” in 2020 “and moved into Holy Cross House, where retired, elderly, or ill members of the Order reside.”
As the university released the report, the Rev. Robert Dowd, the university’s president, spoke at an on-campus mass for “reconciliation and healing.”
“I am so sorry for the abuse you experienced and I am so sorry it has taken this long for the truth to come to light,” he said, according to a transcript.
A statement released by the school revealed new practices and protocols aimed at the prevention of abuse and better responses to it.
Some of the accusers interviewed by the Sun-Times said they weren’t interviewed for the report or invited to the healing mass.