Numerous officials within the Roman Catholic religious order known as the Jesuits struggled in the 1970s and 1980s over how to deal with a man whom they knew molested children – but nonetheless was ordained a priest, according to a review of internal correspondence concerning his career.
The correspondence about the late Donald B Dickerson stems from a pending Louisiana state court lawsuit filed in June 2024 that alleges he raped a 17-year-old student at the order-run Loyola University New Orleans in 1984. It provides a rare, complex, behind-the-scenes look at how local leaders during a much earlier phase of the worldwide Catholic church’s ongoing clergy molestation scandal struggled to contain a predator priest’s repeated abuse of children while encouraging him to seek psychological help.
Born in 1936 in Jerseyville, Illinois, Dickerson entered the Society of Jesus in Louisiana in August 1971 and professed his first vows two years later, a day before he turned 37, court documents show.
Jesuits undergo a years-long formation period that begins with a two-year novitiate and concludes after ordination with the final vows, a process that can take 15 to 20 years. While Jesuits are not priests until ordination, they begin using the initials “SJ”, for the Society of Jesus, upon entering the order.
Early in his formation, Dickerson was assigned to the Jesuit high school in New Orleans, where letters say he abused two boys. In early December 1974, he molested a minor in a car en route to a high school awards ceremony, according to court documents.
In 1974, Jesuit priest Anthony McGinn – who would later serve as the New Orleans high school’s president – described Dickerson as lazy and manipulative.
“He does whatever he pleases,” McGinn wrote in a character appraisal that is now an exhibit in the court case, which seeks damages from Loyola and the Jesuit order. “This is a dangerous sign that the Society will have difficulties with him in future years.”
Dickerson should not be advanced to theology, the next level in formation, concluded McGinn, who did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite the negative appraisal, Dickerson went to theology instruction in Chicago.
In March 1975, during a six-hour meeting attended by multiple priests and a brother at the Jesuit provincials’ office to discuss several clergy, Jesuit priest Louis Lambert, the vice-provincial for formation and a top Jesuit in the region, held that Dickerson “was making great progress in working through his problems” – and that a recent psychological report on him was “positive”. At that meeting, four priests voted to send Dickerson to theology despite McGinn’s warnings.
By 1977, concerns from high-ranking Jesuit priest Thomas Stahel had reached a crisis point. The provincial of the Jesuits’ former New Orleans province, Stahel had learned of yet another accusation that Dickerson had harassed a minor. Five days before Christmas that year, the provincial, who would later serve as executive editor at America magazine, detailed specific misgivings about Dickerson in a lengthy letter to the Jesuits’ worldwide leader at the time, superior general Pedro Arrupe.
“I do not think we can in conscience present Dickerson to bishop as ready for ordination,” Stahel wrote to Arrupe, one week before Dickerson was to be made a priest. “I recommend that Dickerson’s ordination be postponed, at the very least, and that we raise with him a question about his staying in the Society.”
‘Under sufficient control’
According to the letter, Arrupe had already agreed that Dickerson’s ordination should be postponed.
It is unclear whether Arrupe responded to this letter. National Catholic Reporter has not obtained other documents detailing a back-and-forth conversation between the superior general and the New Orleans provincial.
Stahel wrote that he first contacted Arrupe to help resolve a debate with Lambert regarding how to handle Dickerson.
Αccording to a 1977 letter, Dickerson’s Jesuit superiors believed that his “psychosexual problem was under sufficient control”.
Yet Stahel, who details serious concerns regarding Dickerson’s “suitability” for the priesthood, found himself at an impasse with Lambert. “He thinks Dickerson is no more a risk than others who have been ordained, and he characterizes the recent incident as a regrettable slip. I am unpersuaded by his reasons,” Stahel wrote to the superior general.
“I have the distinct impression that Fr [Father] Lambert’s resistance in this matter had to do, not with the merits of his case, but with the jealous guard he maintains over his Vice-Provincial’s prerogatives,” Stahel wrote. “He was determined that I should have nothing to say about Dickerson’s ordination, and it was impossible to come to a meeting of the minds concerning evidence that seemed overwhelming to everyone but him.”
Describing the disagreement, Stahel alleged that Lambert considered Dickerson’s improper behavior to be the result of nerves – and rejected Arrupe’s move to postpone ordination as unjust “strong-arm tactics”.
Lambert, Stahel said, “argued that, once a man is approved for ordination by the Society (as Dickerson had been), the Society is committed to him. By this kind of reasoning, nothing a person could do between approval and ordination could disqualify him.”
In September 1978, Arrupe said in a letter to Lambert that he had received a psychological report on Dickerson, but the details of that report were not readily available. “I will await further information on the case from Father Stahel,” wrote the superior general.
Dickerson had received psychological treatment at least twice by then – in 1975 and 1978. He later noted that he had submitted to “extensive psychological therapy” at Foundation House, a former treatment facility for troubled priests run by the Servants of the Paraclete in Jemez Springs, New Mexico.
Dickerson had still not been ordained by the summer of 1979, when Stahel said Dickerson had told him that sexually harassing an underage boy was “a relatively insignificant incident”.
The provincial disagreed.
“I did not feel that I could ordain him until we had removed as much as possible any worries that such incidents would happen again,” Stahel wrote.
‘I thought he should be ordained’
But Stahel’s worries about Dickerson had apparently subsided by the end of that year, after Dickerson understood the “scandal” molesting children could cause. “I said that I thought he should be ordained,” Stahel wrote in a memorandum dated 30 December 1979. Six months later, on 7 June 1980, Dickerson was ordained by Birmingham, Alabama, bishop Joseph Vath.
Dickerson began teaching at the boys Jesuit preparatory school in Dallas that same year. But in 1981, he was removed from Jesuit Dallas following an allegation from a child’s parents. He was sent in September 1981 to St John Berchmans, then a co-cathedral in Shreveport, Louisiana.
A $12m lawsuit would later accuse Dickerson of raping a boy there in 1982.
That year, Stahel had written to Dickerson with the hope “nothing would happen in Shreveport”. The case was settled for an undisclosed sum.
Two years later, in an August 1984 letter to Dickerson, Jesuit priest Edmundo Rodriguez, the new provincial in New Orleans, noted that he had “a duty to protect the Society and the Church from unacceptable behavior of its members”.
A 1984 psychological profile of Dickerson written by the Servants of the Paraclete, the men’s order that treated troubled priests, described him as “very sick” and in need of intensive, long-term treatment. During Dickerson’s evaluation, he said that he had been molested by a man at age six, according to clinical notes included in the most recent New Orleans lawsuit.
In September 1984, a mother wrote a letter to the bishop of Alexandria-Shreveport that alleged that Dickerson had molested her son.
“Recently he was rejected by his natural father,” the woman said of her son. “Instead of help from Fr Dickerson, he has been mentally damaged even further.” She added that Dickerson should never work near children again.
Court documents show that Jesuit priest Thomas Barberito had spoken in August 1984 with the bishop about “the situation with Fr Dickerson”. According to Barberito, the bishop said he would refer concerns to the provincial if one of the parties involved contacted his office.
Dickerson’s Jesuit superiors assigned him to Loyola University New Orleans in 1985. There, the New Orleans lawsuit alleges, he abused another minor. Yet Dickerson maintained the support of his direct superior even while facing an investigation.
“Don has to be given the benefit of the doubt,” Rodriguez wrote in a communication dated 28 February 1986. “We owe Don the same careful due process which we would want to provide for anyone else.”
But in early March 1986, after Rodriguez received three separate allegations against Dickerson in one week, the provincial encouraged him to leave the priesthood “to save everyone from a very painful process”.
Dickerson complied, thanking the provincial for his “willingness to suspend judgment on the question of moral culpability and to acknowledge my genuine efforts to overcome my tendencies”. On 12 March 1986, Rodriguez wrote that he had contacted Jesuit priest Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, then the order’s superior general, requesting that Dickerson be dismissed from the society and priestly life.
Since his laicization, Dickerson has been at the center of multiple lawsuits beyond the recent New Orleans case. It is unclear whether he ever faced criminal charges for accusations of sexual abuse of minors.
In 2009, a case was settled after he was accused of molesting an eighth grade boy. Dickerson was accused in 2010, in the aforementioned $12m lawsuit, of raping an 11-year-old boy at St John Berchmans in 1982. And a former Jesuit Dallas student sued the school in 2019, alleging Dickerson gave him alcohol and raped him during a trip to Alabama decades prior.
During his 18 years as Jesuit superior general, Arrupe emerged as a widely respected leader, beloved by the men’s religious community at the time of his resignation in 1983, two years after a disabling stroke. He was known for having ministered to survivors of the US’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of the second world war.
Arrupe’s cause for canonization, which opened in Rome in 2019, remains active. Attorneys Richard Trahant, John Denenea and Soren Giselson, who represent the plaintiff in the New Orleans lawsuit centering on Dickerson, argue Arrupe should not be considered for sainthood.
While Arrupe, as superior general, could have stopped Dickerson’s ordination, biographies and statements from Arrupe show that he opposed an authoritarian style of leadership of the Jesuit order. If local Jesuit officials decided to ordain Dickerson, it is unclear whether Arrupe would have stepped in to stop it – or if he had all the facts supporting such a decision.
Dawn Eden Goldstein, an author and canon lawyer, said it is unclear whether there is sufficient evidence to say the way the Jesuits handled the Dickerson case was a coverup or willful negligence. “At this point, we don’t know whether this might rather be a case of superiors following the accepted procedures of that time,” she said. But, she added, that explanation does not justify their actions.
The Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and it’s unclear whether other records about Dickerson are in the Jesuits’ files in Rome. McGinn is the only Jesuit official in this story who is still alive.
The lawsuit was ongoing as of the weekend of 22 August.
