News broke Saturday that the president of the Archdiocese of Newark’s Seton Hall University was previously found to have dealt inappropriately with accusations of sexual abuse while he was seminary rector on the same campus.
According to a Dec. 21 report from Politico, an internal investigation at the university, opened in the fallout of the 2018 Theodore McCarrick scandal, found that Msgr. Joseph Reilly had failed to follow proper procedures in two instances while rector of the Immaculate Conception Seminary — and that he was aware of a third.
The news has generated substantial criticism of Msgr. Reilly, and the decision to appoint him as president of Seton Hall earlier this year. And it re-raises questions of accountability and transparency in the Newark archdiocese, which was the epicenter of the scandal around former cardinal McCarrick, who led the archdiocese until moving to Washington in 2000.
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In the immediate wake of the McCarrick scandal breaking in 2018, reports surfaced of years of clerical misconduct in the Archdiocese of Newark, and in other dioceses formerly led by McCarrick.
Among the various institutional responses, Seton Hall University, which is a diocesan university and for which the archbishop serves ex officio as president of the board of regents, announced an independent investigation into various allegations concerning the university’s two affiliated seminaries, Immaculate Conception Seminary and St. Andrew’s Hall.
According to Politico, that independent report concluded that in 2012 — Reilly’s first year as rector of Immaculate Conception — there were two instances in which seminarians were dismissed from the institution over sexual abuse claims, but that university authorities were not informed.
Politico reported that Reilly later admitted knowledge of a third incident at St. Andrew’s Hall, in 2014.
The university committed to removing any employee or board member who had “knowledge of sexual misconduct claims involving [Immaculate Conception Seminary] seminarians” but did not properly report or take action.
But for his part, Reilly was given a year’s sabbatical in 2022 before making a scheduled return to Seton Hall in 2023 as vice-provost for academics and Catholic identity.
Less than a year later, in April 2024, he was announced as the new university president.
The apparent lack of transparency and accountability regarding Reilly’s previous inappropriate handling of abuse allegations at the campus seminary, and his seemingly smooth promotion through the Seton Hall’s ranks to the position of president, has generated fierce criticism of the university and the archdiocese.
At the time of his appointment as president, the chair of the university’s board of regents hailed him, saying there was “no one better suited to leading the university at this moment.”
During Reilly’s formal installation as president, Newark’s Cardinal Joseph Tobin told him that “I have no doubt that you’re the right person at the right time for Seton Hall.”
But those approving testimonies appear to many as inconsistent with the unpublished results of the 2018 independent review commissioned by the university.
According to the Politico report, in one instance in 2012, as rector of Immaculate Conception, Reilly oversaw the dismissal of a seminarian involved in a claim of sexual abuse, without following proper reporting procedures or informing university authorities — allowing the man to continue as a student at Seton Hall.
In a second instance in the same year, according to Politico, Reilly presided over a second seminarian’s dismissal — in this case the alleged victim of a sexual abuse claim — without investigating his claim or alerting university authorities.
Politico also reported that during the university’s implementation phase, following the independent review, Reilly “disclosed that he received information about a 2014 allegation of sexual harassment at St. Andrew’s Hall but did not report it and was instructed by the archdiocese not to answer questions about it.”
That third incident is believed to be one in which the rector of St. Andrew's Hall — the campus undergraduate seminary — was removed in 2014 and placed on a medical leave of absence following an incident in which he allegedly hid a camera in the bedroom of a young priest.
Reilly’s apparent failure to act in these cases would appear to be consistent with the university’s published summary update following the independent investigation in 2019, which concluded that “the University's Title IX policies are consistent with state and federal law,” but that “these policies, however, were not always followed at Immaculate Conception Seminary and St. Andrew's Seminary, which resulted in incidents of sexual harassment going unreported.”
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Despite that history, the university told Politico that “Monsignor Reilly prioritizes the safety and wellbeing of students and seminarians at Seton Hall,” and that “he shares the university’s unwavering commitment to fostering a safe and supportive environment for all members of our campus community.”
For many Catholics at Seton Hall and in the Archdiocese of New Jersey, the revelations about Reilly present an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu, a failure by institutional authorities to learn from past mistakes or abide by their own commitments to reform. As one put it succinctly to Politico: “These people have fucking memory loss.”
Those feelings are likely to be echoed by Catholics more broadly, especially as Church officials meant to be responsible for ensuring reform appear unwilling to engage with reasonable and obvious questions.
What seems clear in Reilly’s case is that as rector of a campus seminary he twice failed to properly handle accusations of sexual abuse, and was aware of another rector on campus having been directly implicated in a third instance.
Yet he was not, as Seton Hall’s own policies would seem to have demanded, removed and barred from university leadership.
Instead he was put on what to many appears to have been a glide path to promotion and the university has defended his prioritizing of “the safety and wellbeing of students and seminarians.”
How local Catholics — to say nothing of members of the university community — are expected to make sense of that chain of events is difficult to fathom. But there is little sign of an institutional willingness to help them do so.
In 2018, at the height of the McCarrick scandal and shortly before the Seton Hall investigation was announced, Tobin told the Newark Star-Ledger that “my default mode is for optimum transparency.” His office later said that while the impetus for the independent investigation had come from the university president’s office it had his full support.
Yet Politico reported that Cardinal Tobin’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their story regarding Reilly, over the course of several weeks leading up to publication of their report.
From 2018 until now, many Catholics will conclude that little seems to have changed. If anything at all.
