Jesuit High School’s president gathered his employees Thursday to decry what he called a “disgusting time” in the school’s history after an article in The New Orleans Advocate revealed that the school paid a man $450,000 after he was sexually abused on the campus in the 1970s.
“I am as disgusted and horrified as anyone can be because of the accusations and what has happened,” said the Rev. Christopher Fronk. “It makes me sick to my stomach. I had no sleep last night.”
Those accusations were leveled by Richard Windmann who as a boy living near the Mid-City school said he befriended a janitor who later sexually abused him on campus, at least once in concert with a Jesuit priest, during the course of several years.
Windmann and Jesuit reached the settlement in 2012, decades after the abuse, when he said he hoped to close out a dark chapter in his past.
Fronk, who joined the school as president in 2017, said he first heard of the accusations Wednesday. His address to the staff was recorded and obtained by The Advocate.
Fronk said that in the decades since, the school has developed a more sophisticated system of performing background checks on employees and ongoing training to prevent the type of sexual abuse which has rocked the Catholic Church.
“We’re doing what we can, and I think it’s making a difference,” Fronk told the employees.
He urged employees to say something if they believe something inappropriate is happening. “Remember, we are all mandatory reporters.”
But that attitude was an apparent far cry from the era in which Windmann was abused at the school.
He told The Advocate that the janitor, Peter Modica, once raped him on campus. When the Rev. Cornelius Carr entered the room, Windmann said, he believed the act would stop.
Instead, Windmann said, Carr told him to relax and then began to masturbate as the rape continued.
Modica and Carr have both since died.
In a 2012 recording of a meeting between Windmann and the Rev. Raymond Fitzgerald, Jesuit's former president, Fitzgerald acknowledged that Modica would bring boys to the campus at times.
Fitzgerald was not on the school's staff at the time of the abuse. He died from ALS in 2016.
Court records indicate the school entered into at least two other settlements in recent years after claims of sexual abuse at the school.
“This is a great place, and don’t lose sight of that,” Fronk said. “Please don’t let this get you down too much.”
He added that “what happened then is very different from what happens now. The Jesuit High School of the ’70s and ’80s is not the Jesuit High School of today.”
Danny Monteverde can be reached at danny@wwltv.com.