Nihil Obstat

The Principal and the Priest

The principal at Cardinal Hayes High School, an all-boys school in the Bronx, was ousted last week after photos of nude men were discovered on his computer.

No criminal charges were filed against the principal, Christopher Keogan, because the photos were of adults.

Two ex-faculty members and a priest associated with sexual abuse lawsuits have accused Keogan in letters and affidavits of theft of petty cash, an affair with a male subsordinate, faking transcripts to help that man get into college, and misuse of funds. The priest alleged that Keogan took $10,000 from a charity set up to provide scholarships to purchase furniture for his new apartment.

In 2006 a staffer claimed to the Equal Opportunity Commission that she was fired after reporting that Keogan had an affair with a male subordinate. Keogan denied the affair and the unfair firing charge. He said the archiocese investigated it and the allegations were not substantiated.

His ouster stunned teachers and students at the school, where Mr. Keogan was largely seen as charismatic and fair. He joined the school in 1990, and served as dean of discipline for six years before becoming principal in 2003.

“He was a really nice guy, really down to earth, really cool,” said Kyle Brooks, 18, who graduated last year. “If you got into trouble, he would listen to both sides of the story. He was an honorable guy. Extremely fair.”

So, was Keogan set up by disgrunted and possibly homophobic staffers-or–did some instances of bad judgement do him in? The case gets more interesting with the addition of Fr. Bob Hoatson, a priest who wrote Keogan a scathing letter accusing him of a slew of misconduct at the school. He blasted the payment from the scholarship fund (which may have been legitimately authorized) to Keogan.

Fr. Hoatson comes with a little scandal of his own. Believing he had been fired from his job at Catholic Charities because of his advocacy for sex abuse survisors, in 2006 he filed a 44-page complaint in which he outed New York’s Cardinal Edward Egan.

Halfway through the 44-page complaint, the priest-turned-advocate drops a bomb on the cardinal–he alleges that Egan is “actively homosexual,” and that he has “personal knowlege of this.” His suit names two other top Catholic clerics in the region as actively gay–Albany bishop Howard Hubbard and Newark archbishop John Myers.

What Hoatson claims is that, as leaders of a church requiring celibacy and condemning homosexuality, actively gay bishops are too afraid of being exposed themselves to turn in pedophile priests. The bishops’ closeted homosexuality, as the lawsuit states, “has compromised defendants’ ability to supervise and control predators, and has served as a reason for retaliation.”

Before an incident last summer, my knee-jerk reaction would have been to applaud Fr. Hoatson. Now I give these crusaders a little more scrutiny for personal motives. Why is Hoatson involved in this case? No sex abuse of minors has surfaced.

In August 2007 it came to my attention that a homophobic group of persons (they were anonymous)-under the guise of being concerned about pedophile priests-attempted to use the “gay-friendly” college and parish listings on cclonline.org to justify their entries on wikipedia that Archbishop John Favalora protected pedophiles and gay priests. These individuals refused to dialog with the rest of us, or substantial their allegations on Archbishop Favalora and priests they named as gay. They were eventually banned from Wikipedia, and their entries largely removed.

As the student said, there are two sides to every story.

Unfortunately for Mr. Keogan, (or Brother Keogan, if he’s still with the Christian Brothers), his career as an educator is finished either way.