Yesterday brought news of the resignation of Fr. Barry Stechschulte as pastor of St. Susanna’s Church in Mason, Ohio, in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. The priest resigned following mounting pressure after it was revealed that in 2012 — shortly after he became pastor of Holy Rosary Church in St. Mary’s, Ohio — he ordered Deacon Marty Brown to destroy a hard drive on an old desktop computer in the parish rectory.

A letter from Archbishop Dennis Schnurr to the parishioners of St. Susanna thanked Stechschulte for his service and announced that a retired priest, Fr Jeff Kemper, will serve as temporary administrator of the parish, effective immediately.

The frequency with which these types of scandals and crimes are revealed suggests that the truth is only shared with the faithful on a need-to-know basis, causing frustrated and disillusioned Catholics to wonder how much more Church leaders are hiding from us. If they only come clean about corruption when they have no other choice, what does it say about their moral integrity?

According to a Cincinnati Enquirer report, Stechschulte’s downfall began when Dinsmore & Shohl — a law firm that has represented the archdiocese in the past — sent a public records request to the Auglaize County Prosecutor’s office requesting records related to a November 2012 report about the incident. Attached to the request was a letter addressed to County Prosecutor Edwin A. Pierce and signed by Thomas Coz, the Archdiocesan Safe Environment Coordinator and a report written by Deacon Brown and dated November 12, 2012. Dinsmore & Shohl was cc’ed on the letter.

In his report, Brown described the incident, stating that he  came across a brown compact computer in a storage closet in the Holy Rosary rectory on October 24 of that year. He wrote that it “was used by Fr. Anthony Cutcher while he was the pastor.” Going through the computer’s files, Brown says he “found very disturbing videos that had been downloaded from a laptop” of “young male actors” undressing, “performing in sexually provocative positions,”  and engaging in sexual activity with themselves and each other. He added, “I’m not sure of the ages of these actors. They appeared to be mid to late teens judging from the physical appearance.”

In the report, Brown said he first notified the school principal because he “knew she was trained in the new VIRTUS program and I could review with her what my next action needed to be.” They decided he should next report what he found to Stechschulte.

Brown explained that  he showed two of the videos to Stechschulte and then they deleted all the videos in the folder. He then wrote, “We discussed how we thought some bad choices had been made by downloading these types of videos, but it was not our place to Judge since we didn’t know the age of the actors. We decided to destroy the computer. I took the computer to my workshop at home and disassembled it. I then took my blow torch and melted the electronic pieces and recycled the metal cabinet. The next day I reported to Fr. Barry that the computer had been destroyed.”

This week, however, Prosecutor Pierce said that he had not received any information from the archdiocese about Cutcher or the 2012 incident at Holy Rosary prior to Dinsmore & Shohl’s request in June 2024.

Pierce said, “We have no record, no recollection of receiving either of those documents.” He added that if he had received them, he would have turned them over to the police immediately.

In September 2018, St. Mary’s Detective Lucas Turpin did file a police report after the department received a call from Holy Rosary about the incident. The report does not disclose who initiated the call or what prompted it, but it is noteworthy that the timing of this report came in the immediate aftermath of the revelations about former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, and the “testimony” of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.

Turpin interviewed Deacon Brown and Fr. Stechschulte about the incident and received two different descriptions of the videos found on the hard drive.

First, Turpin interviewed Brown about the people in the videos, recounting, “I asked him if he would describe them as adults with him saying it was hard to judge between an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old. I asked him if there was anything that was obviously a child with him saying no and that they all appeared to be adults.” This differed from Brown’s 2012 account, in which he described them as appearing to be “mid to late teens.”

Stechschulte remembered the images much differently from Brown in his interview. Turpin reported, “Father Barry said that upon looking at the computer, he found two file folders, one containing male homosexual pornography and the other file contained pictures of boys. I asked him when he was talking about boys if he meant nude with him stating he did not look at it much because he was so taken aback by the situation. He said he can only recall boys with no shirts on. I asked him if the kids were obviously underage with him saying yes and that they were preteen, probably between 8-10 years of age. I asked him if he remembered if any privates were visible with him saying that he could not recall as he was taken aback by it.”

Turpin added that both men told him they had spoken to Cutcher about the material on the hard drive.

According to the report, Brown “said about 2-3 weeks after destroying the hard drive, Father Tony had come down to the church and apologized to him for having the images on the computer. He stated that Father Tony swore to him that the images on the computer were from an adult site and that they were not under the age of 18.”

Stechschulte, according to Turpin, “Father Barry said he did speak personally with Father Tony and Father Tony confiding in Father Barry, saying that it was a bad time in his life and that he has since resolved the issues. He said that he and Marty are the only ones that know about the computer.”

Detective Turpin also spoke with Cutcher, who repeatedly denied that he had downloaded any child abuse material. Turpin wrote, “I asked him if there was anything we needed to know about on the computers at his current location with him saying no. I asked him if he still looked at pornography and he stated that he did. He did say that he was going to talk to his counselor, as well as his confessor. At one point, he again said that he has no recollection and whether it happened or not, he cannot say. He continued to say that everything he got was from a legal site. This concluded our meeting.”

During his interview with Deacon Brown, Detective Turpin asked why they waited for six years to report it. He wrote, “I asked Marty why they were reporting this now with him stating that he thought Father Barry felt guilty for not reporting it when it happened, six years ago.”

Stechschulte also gave his explanation for destroying the hard drive. Turpin wrote, “Father Barry said at the time, he did not realize the repercussions of not revealing what they had found. Father Barry again said that he should not have destroyed the evidence.”

Due to insufficient evidence, Cutcher was not charged with a crime. According to Paula Christian’s story for Cincinnati’s WCPO 9 News, after the police investigation, Cutcher spent a week being evaluated at St. Luke’s Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland, but this was kept confidential. He was then returned to ministry. He said, “As far as the parish was concerned, I went on retreat.”

It was not until 2021, when an inappropriate relationship with a teenage boy was reported, that Cutcher was finally suspended from ministry — nearly a decade after the hard drive was discovered. Many questions are left unanswered: What happened to the 2012 letter? Why did Fr. Stechschulte wait for six years and what prompted him to act in 2018? Why did it remain a secret until 2024? What was the involvement of the archbishop? How many more scandals like this are being kept from the faithful of the parish and archdiocese? What else are they hiding?

I don’t know Archbishop Dennis Schnurr, but this has all happened on his watch. Fr. Stechschulte seemed content to destroy the evidence and this crime likely never would have been revealed had the press not exposed it. Once it was exposed, he didn’t step down until after the pressure from the public became too great. Deacon Brown just seemed to do as he was told.

This is why the Church is suffering from a crisis of credibility. Cutcher’s actions, the cover-up by Fr. Stechschulte and Deacon Brown, and the negligence and silence of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati over many years is evidence of a systemic problem in the Church.

It has only been a few years since Geoff Drew, a former priest in Cincinnati, was sentenced to seven years in prison for raping an altar boy between 1988 and 1991. Like Cutcher, signs were ignored. In Drew’s case, numerous complaints were ignored about his inappropriate conduct with boys dating back to his time as a music teacher in the 1980s. Archdiocesan officials failed to take decisive action, and Drew continued to work around children until his arrest in 2019. Ultimately, an auxiliary bishop took the fall for failing to act in that case, but rarely is the fall guy the only person responsible.

We, the faithful, have seen it too many times. We can no longer fully trust the people our Church teaches us are our pastors and shepherds. We all think about it, and many of us mentally prepare  ourselves for the possibility that one day the priest we love the most will be exposed to have been living a secret life. Many of us leave a little space just in case the bishop for whom we have the most respect has been hiding and concealing the most unimaginably evil sins of his clergy.

Do we have to say goodbye forever to the open, vulnerable, trusting, and childlike faith that we were taught to cherish and which many of us have sought? Sadly, the most vulnerable and trusting among us are easy prey to the wolves in our midst.

Two decades ago, an American bishop said, “If after all we’ve gone through, someone would still violate the kind of relationship we need with children, with young people, that person should be out of the ministry immediately.” That bishop, of course, was the former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. He was not taking his own advice.

Something similar happened in 2015 with Fr. Cutcher. Three years after leaving Holy Rosary, Cutcher was made pastor of St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Huber Heights. Shortly after his arrival there, the priest who preceded him was charged with stealing from the parish coffers. Ultimately, the 75-year-old Fr. Earl Simone pled guilty to stealing $1.92 million from St. Peter’s, where he served as pastor for 23 years. He was sentenced to five years in prison. A representative from the archdiocese read a statement noting that Simone had not only robbed his parishioners, but had also stolen “from special collections for the nuns’ retirement, earthquake relief and other special causes.”

At the time of Simone’s indictment, Cutcher said, “We move forward as the church has always moved forward. We look to the future rather than to the past. It’s unfortunate that this happened but it is in our past.”

We can’t trust the abusers and, frankly, we can’t trust the reformers either. It’s layers and layers of corruption. We can can only hope that the replacement for a disgraced priest or bishop is less corrupt than the man who came before him.

The Church is bleeding, and it will continue to bleed unless the hierarchy comes clean to the faithful and repents of its sins of silence and secrecy. The bleeding will not stop until the systemic culture of abuse cover-up is ended. If it happens, it will be painful.

Somehow, we Catholics still manage to believe this is the Church founded by Christ. It is described as a “perfect society,” yet sometimes the stench of its imperfections is overwhelming and can cause even the greatest among us to doubt.

How long, O Lord?

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Image: St Susanna Facebook