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The Archdiocese of Baltimore on Friday added the names of 42 people to its online list of priests and brothers accused of child sexual abuse.
One of the accused, the Rev. Michael Miller, taught religion at Archbishop Curley High School in the 1990s and was later arrested in Connecticut for possessing child sex abuse materials, according to the archdiocese.
Most of the people, 39 in total, were identified last April in the Maryland attorney general’s 464-page report on the history of child sexual abuse within the church. None of the 39 had served in the archdiocese for years, and 33 of them are dead, according to the church.
Archdiocese officials also added three additional names to the list; these three had not been identified in the attorney general’s report. They are Miller and the Revs. Phillip Linden and Joseph O’Meara.
Catholic church investigation
The Baltimore Banner previously identified O’Meara as one of 10 people who had been accused of abuse, but whose names were redacted from the attorney general’s report for procedural reasons. O’Meara began as a deacon in the archdiocese and served for decades in Maryland before retiring in 2010. Multiple women reported O’Meara had touched them inappropriately over the years, according to the report.
Linden is accused of an act of abuse against a child while he served as a Josephite priest at St. Francis Xavier in East Baltimore during the early 1970s. The archdiocese said it was conducting an investigation into the allegation; it did not provide more details. Linden served at St. Francis Xavier from 1969 to 1973, resided near the St. Francis parish in the 1970s, and ministered at Stella Maris into the 1980s.
Miller served on the faculty of Archbishop Curley during the 1994 and 1995 school years, and again from 2003 to 2006. He celebrated Mass occasionally at St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church in Parkville and St. Margaret in Bel Air from 2003 to 2006. The archdiocese said church officials learned in 2011 that Miller was arrested in Connecticut for inappropriate conduct with a child. He pleaded guilty in Connecticut to possessing child pornography, publishing an obscenity and risking injury to a minor. He was sentenced in 2013 to serve five years in prison and 20 years’ probation, according to The Baltimore Sun.
The archdiocese also said a man accused Miller this year of having solicited and sent inappropriate photos to the man while he was a student at Curley.
The three names and 39 others were added to the archdiocese list upon the recommendation of Archbishop William Lori and after consideration by the church’s independent review board, which met Wednesday.
“The addition of these names to our public database builds on the Archdiocese’s long-standing commitment to transparency, healing and to ridding the Church of the scourge of child sexual abuse,” archdiocese spokesman Christian Kendzierski said in a statement.
Since 2000, the archdiocese has maintained a list on its website of clergy members who have been accused of child sexual abuse. The list previously only included clergy members who had an assignment in the archdiocese. The church also did not list individuals who faced a single uncorroborated accusation after their death.
The attorney general’s report had different standards, and that’s why the 39 names were included in the report but not previously on the list, Kendzierski said.
The archdiocese has updated its list as lawyers for the church, the accused, and the attorney general’s office prepare to return to Baltimore Circuit Court and argue whether a second version of the report should be published without redactions.
An initial, redacted version of the report was released in April and investigators wrote that 156 church figures had been accused of the sexual abuse and physical torture of more than 600 victims within the past 80 years.
tim.prudente@thebaltimorebanner.com
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Tim Prudente is an enterprise reporter for The Baltimore Banner.
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