THE PREDATOR PRIEST OF ST. PATRICK’S CHURCH
by
John J. Dunphy
This is a revised version of a column that appeared in the 10/5/2024 edition of The [Alton, IL] Telegraph. The details of O’Brien’s abuse of 12-year-old Christopher were much too graphic for a newspaper. I have included them here.
I recently learned that a monster once lived in my hometown of Alton, Illinois. Not a mythical monster like the Piasa Bird of local legend, but a human monster. And he was a Catholic priest. His name was Joseph Cullen O’Brien and he served as pastor of the long-defunct St. Patrick’s Church in the Hunterstown neighborhood from 1968 to 1970.
My Catholic childhood was spent at St. Mary’s, which is located near my family’s home, but I heard plenty about O’Brien from Joe Dromgoole, my great uncle, who worked for The Telegraph, our local newspaper. Uncle Joe was a proud Irish Catholic and St. Patrick’s was his lifelong parish. He believed O’Brien’s abrasiveness was destroying the church.
Uncle Joe told me that he had first met O’Brien when he stopped by The Telegraph office in 1942 — the year of his ordination — to make a specific request. The actor Errol Flynn had been accused of statutory rape by two teenage girls. O’Brien pleaded with Uncle Joe not to run this story in The Telegraph because it would surely scandalize this region’s young persons.
My uncle, who was also my godfather, told me that O’Brien at that time was polite and well-mannered. “Then he joined the military,” Uncle Joe said, “and when he came out his personality had completely changed.“ I checked and confirmed that O’Brien indeed served as a U.S. Navy chaplain from 1950 to 1955. Upon his discharge, he returned to the diocese of Springfield, Illinois and was eventually appointed pastor of St. Patrick’s Church in 1968. He simultaneously served at the Catholic Children’s Home in Alton.
O’Brien renovated the interior of the church, a move that alienated many long-time members. “He was the one who completely destroyed the interior of St. Pat’s and made it look like a barn!!” a woman wrote on an Alton Facebook page. “I refused to get married there.” Uncle Joe told me about O’Brien’s decision to remove the church’s stations of the cross. When a parishioner told O’Brien that his family had donated those stations of the cross to the church, the priest sarcastically replied, “You can have them back.”
Dubious taste in church renovation and verbal abrasiveness were the least of O’Brien’s faults, however. According to the Office of the Illinois Attorney General’s Report on Catholic Clergy Child Sex Abuse in Illinois, which can be accessed online, O’Brien was a pedophile.
Released in 2023, the report “represents the conclusion of my office’s multi-year investigation into child sex abuse by members of the Catholic clergy in the six dioceses across Illinois,” according to Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. The report includes testimony from Christopher, who was victimized by O’Brien while a student at St. Patrick’s School. O’Brien “curried favor among parish boys like Christopher by dropping in on their religion classes to offer some sex education.” The priest “talked about girls and lust and masturbation, among other ‘forbidden’ subjects.” Providing sex education to gullible Catholic boys wasn’t O’Brien’s goal, however. “Looking back, Christopher recognizes O’Brien was grooming him and his classmates.”
This predator even used the sacrament of Penance to recruit victims. “O’Brien told the parish boys he wanted to hear their confessions openly and face to face” and “would ask them probing questions to help identify and address any sins they may have committed.” When Christopher admitted that he had committed the sin of masturbation, O’Brien told him “to drop by the rectory sometime after school if he wanted to receive some ‘counseling,’ ” according to the report.
”O’Brien began the ‘counseling’ session by offering Christopher a drink and some snacks,” according to the report. He told Christopher that, as a boy, he had masturbated while thinking about girls. However, he had overcome the urge to masturbate “and he could teach Christopher how to do the same.” In order to accomplish this, O’Brien told Christopher, “he would need to see the boy’s penis.”
Christopher was confused and frightened. Like most Catholic children of his generation, however, he had been conditioned to obey priests. O’Brien had made a pretty strange demand of him but “Christopher had never seen a layperson confront a priest for any reason.” Priests “were on a pedestal. They could get away with anything,” he is quoted as saying in the report. So he pulled down his pants.
“O’Brien seized Christopher’s penis and fondled it for several minutes” but became agitated “when the boy failed to develop an erection. So the priest changed tack. He unzipped his pants and pulled out his own penis,” which was “large and erect.” The priest told Christopher “he too could have ‘a man’s penis’ if he could just get control over himself.” He ordered the boy to touch his penis “and when I just barely touched it, he had me stroke it much more aggressively like he had done to me.”
After a while, “O’Brien zipped up his pants and told Christopher they were done for the day. But, the priest continued, the boy should come back frequently so they could monitor his ‘progress.’ ” This predator assured the boy that he could tell “just by looking at Christopher’s penis, whether he had been ‘a bad boy’ who was touching himself again. Then the priest appeared to strike a bargain with the child. If he kept what had happened between them a secret from his parents and the nuns, he wouldn’t get in trouble for masturbating to impure thoughts of girls.”
Like many victims of abuse, Christopher wondered whether he was to blame for what had transpired in O’Brien’s rectory. “How could masturbating each other help me with my sinful problem?” he wondered. “Was this the right thing and had this respected priest really tried to help me? Had I caused this to happen?”
There was just one thing Christopher knew for certain. “There was no way I could tell anyone.” He worried his mother wouldn’t believe him — and he worried his father would believe him and then kill the priest.
O’Brien continued his efforts to lure Christopher back to the rectory for further “counseling.” When the boy refused to go, O’Brien shunned him. “I felt rejected,” Christopher recalls of the priest he had once so admired.
O’Brien served at four other parishes after leaving St. Patrick’s. According to the attorney general’s investigation, the “reported survivors” of this predator number fourteen. As someone commented on my Facebook post about O’Brien, “Victims were freed of his presence in 1978 when he died, but never from the crimes he purposefully committed.
I recall O’Brien being invited twice to Alton’s Marquette Catholic High School during my student years. He addressed our boys’ religion class freshman year and sophomore years. The freshman year talk was especially memorable because it graphically dealt with masturbation. Marquette even made an office available to O’Brien so that we boys could get individual counseling from him. In all fairness, it should be noted the administration had no idea that he preyed on the young.
O’Brien mixed and mingled with us after his talk. When he learned my last name was Dunphy and that I attended St. Mary’s, he asked why I wasn’t at St. Patrick’s since it was a traditionally Irish parish. I don’t recall my reply but now realize I dodged a bullet by not going to his office for “individual counseling.”
On the very day this column appeared in The Telegraph, I received a phone call from Christopher. He now lives elsewhere. He thanked me for writing the column and noted that it comprised the first time the attorney general’s report on predatory Illinois priests has received any media coverage. That shocked me. I can only speculate as to why this report has languished in obscurity.
I told Christopher that he was extraordinarily courageous to go public with his account of clerical abuse. We ended our conversation with the shared hope that my column will encourage others who were victimized by O’Brien to step forward.
John J. Dunphy is a writer and poet who owns a bookshop in Alton, Illinois. In his youth, he was a two-time winner of The North American Essay Contest sponsored by The Humanist magazine. He is the author of numerous books of prose and poetry. Dunphy is especially proud of his book Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials.