Late Jesuit global leader didn’t stop known child molester from becoming priest – court documents
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Pedro Arrupe, the late, former worldwide leader of the Jesuit religious order and a candidate for Catholic sainthood, acknowledged in records produced as part of a New Orleans court case that he was warned about how one of the group’s aspiring priests had been accused of sexually molesting two minors and acknowledged making sexual advances on a third.
The man was ultimately ordained, and there is no indication in records in the case in Louisiana state court that Arrupe – who coined the Jesuits’ slogan “men for others” – took steps to prevent him from becoming a priest. The man was later accused of molesting other minors he met through his ministry.
Arrupe’s involvement in the case of Donald Barkley Dickerson – who died in 2016 and two years later was confirmed by the Jesuits to be one of hundreds of their members faced with substantial claims of child molestation – began toward the end of the 1970s. But it has drawn new scrutiny in a lawsuit that accuses Dickerson of raping a 17-year-old student at a Jesuit-run university in New Orleans.
The case in New Orleans civil district court raises questions about whether Arrupe, a beloved figure whose name is on numerous prestigious awards and buildings at Jesuit institutions around the world, did as much as he could to protect those who trusted in his order.
Church officials in Rome in 2019 initiated the process to canonize Arrupe, who is known for having ministered to survivors of the US’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of the second world war. The first stage of that process has thrust Arrupe one step closer to becoming a saint, as the Jesuits themselves described it.
The new concerns about Arrupe come at a time when the broader global Catholic church has been sending mixed signals about the urgency of addressing the clergy abuse scandal that has roiled it for decades. Pope Leo XIV in June said the church must “not tolerate any … abuse”, sexual or otherwise, and earlier in July the pontiff appointed the French bishop Thibault Verny to lead the Vatican’s child protection advisory commission.
However, also in June but in another part of France, the archdiocese of Toulouse gave the high-ranking position of chancellor to a priest who had been imprisoned after being convicted of raping a 16-year-old boy in 1993. And a former Vatican diplomat who was convicted of possessing and distributing child abuse imagery reportedly has been allowed to continue working as one of several clerks at the Vatican’s secretariat of state.
At least one Jesuit official who testified under oath as part of the lawsuit accusing Dickerson of raping a minor on the campus of Loyola University New Orleans said he was horrified by the way the order admitted the suspected pederast into its clerical ranks.
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/24/pedro-arrupe-jesuit-leader-donald-dickerson-child-abuser.
