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 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 with the Chicago Sun-Times and a recently released report commissioned by Notre Dame detailing accusations of sexual misconduct by the Rev. Thomas King, who is now retired, and the Rev. David Porterfield, who died in November.
As much as the report reveals, it also raises questions that Notre Dame, the Catholic religious order that helps oversee it and the lawyer hired by the school to investigate will answer — even though school officials made a public apology to victims and pledged greater accountability and transparency.
The report focused largely on the conduct of the priests while they were at Notre Dame and its sister school, Holy Cross College, both near South Bend, Indiana, and overseen by their order of priests and religious brothers, the Congregation of Holy Cross.
King had been the rector of Notre Dame’s Zahm Hall dormitory from 1980 to 1997, a period in which he was accused of subjecting 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 that “multiple individuals, some of whom were weighed, were sexually touched or assaulted by Fr. King, both at Notre Dame and after he left.”
King attended high school at what’s now called Notre Dame College Prep in Niles, where “he taught history, Latin and theology” 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 religious 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 initially was focused on King, then expanded to also include Porterfield as people familiar with his misconduct pressed forward.
The finished product does not detail Porterfield’s tenure at the high school.
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’s unclear how that conclusion was reached and whether the high school has asked alumni from that 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.
A graduate of the Niles school who was a student when King was a teacher there told the Sun-Times he hasn’t seen any 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 — did do some outreach, though. 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 by New York attorney Helen Cantwell of the firm Debevoise & Plimpton. “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 others besides Porterfield.
Officials wouldn’t discuss the names of any other priests, any information about allegations regarding them and what the university and the order plan to do with that information.
‘I can’t trust them’
Tom McLaughlin, who lives in a suburb of 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, whom McLaughlin identified as his high school abuser, was accused of having assaulted more than 50 children around the country, including the Chicago area, the Sun-Times previously has reported.
And a native of northern Illinois abused by King while a University of Notre Dame student also was 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 came 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 sex-offender registries, public listings of their members deemed to have been credibly accused of having molested children.
When the third wave of the scandal erupted in 2018, other religious orders and dioceses that had maintained secrecy also posted public lists. Among those was the Congregation of Holy Cross. Sixteen men are on its list — 14 priests, one religious brother and one seminarian, none 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 is in the order’s list.
In the Chicago area, religious orders generally operate Catholic high schools, and the groups traditionally have their own missions and hierarchy. They generally go beyond the geographic boundaries of the church and sometimes include priests as well as religious brothers — the latter having some priestly duties but who aren’t ordained and can’t officiate mass.
Dioceses and the larger archdioceses cover geographic areas and are led by bishops appointed by the pope, and they typically operate Catholic parishes and elementary schools. The Archdiocese of Chicago covers Cook and Lake counties and is led by Cardinal Blase Cupich.
Cupich doesn’t control the religious orders that operate in his territory. But they need his permission to minister there. Cupich has encouraged religious orders to come clean about their child sexual abusers, and he’s portrayed the archdiocese’s public list of credibly accused clergy 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 in the area and were deemed to have been credibly accused of abuse.
But the archdiocese’s list doesn’t mention the Congregation of Holy Cross, though six credibly accused members are known to have once served within Cupich’s boundaries, and a 2023 report by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul identified them as having been local.
Cupich’s office won’t discuss why they aren’t on the archdiocese’s list.
Incomplete accounting of abuse
But a series of reports by the Sun-Times over the past several years on public disclosures by Catholic religious orders and U.S. dioceses found wide variations on transparency regarding abusive clerics. Each order and each diocese decides whether to post a list and has its own criteria, which has resulted in what the Sun-Times found is an incomplete accounting of abuse.
People who were abused by clerics as children have long said such lists help in the healing process and help the church fulfill its mission of truth, rooted in Jesus’ teachings.
Some clergy offenders have abused minors as well as 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 who says her 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 website, it doesn’t matter if they weren’t a minor.”
Leaders of the Holy Cross congregation won’t say whether they would consider expanding their public list to include adult-on-adult abuse.
A 2018 letter from a leader of the order to the Burkes, seen by 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 told the Sun-Times at one point that he would provide information about those accused clerics but did not.
Some elements in the church opposed such public lists, saying they unfairly tarnish priests who have been accused but might not have been convicted of a crime. There’s been a recent effort to step back from such lists in the U.S. church, though there also have been recent attempts by bishops to crack down more on clergy member abusing vulnerable adults
Abuse also seen 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, the state of Georgia recently criminalized sexual contact between ministers and adult members of their flocks.
Illinois doesn’t have a similar statute.
Notre Dame’s report includes references to unnamed university and church officials who some victims and others said they told about incidents of misconduct by King and Porterfield over the years with nothing done as a result.
Critics say that’s evidence that abuse was enabled by others, with inaction and possible cover-ups leading to more people being preyed on.
“As early as 2003 and 2004, we’re doing studies on this because of the s— 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,” says 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 says. Referring to the university and the order, she says: “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,” a 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 reported having 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 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 says.
She and Moser reached out to Cantwell to say 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, according to the Notre Dame report, “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 listed new practices and protocols aimed at the prevention of abuse and better responses to it.
Some of the accusers interviewed by the Sun-Times say they weren’t interviewed for the report or invited to the healing mass.