Accused priest later taught at high school
HAVERFORD, Pa. (AP) – A Philadelphia priest who was removed from the ministry in 1993 after being accused of abusing a teenage boy went on to teach at a prestigious private high school, where officials said they had been unaware of the allegations. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia disclosed Thursday that the priest, Martin J. Satchell, 39, had recently been defrocked. Until the defrocking, church officials said, he had been removed from active ministry but was still officially a priest.
Four years after being dismissed by the archdiocese, Satchell was hired to teach history to boys at the Haverford School in suburban Philadelphia.
He worked there from 1997 until 2000, school officials said Friday. No complaints of misconduct surfaced against him during his time there and he left voluntarily, school officials said.
Joseph Headley, headmaster of the Haverford School when it hired Satchell, said Satchell’s past had eluded school officials.
“I am absolutely 100 percent, 1,000 percent, sure that nobody at Haverford School had any idea that he had abused children at any point in his life,” Headley said. “We would never have hired him.”
When Satchell was hired at Haverford, Headley said, he told the school that he had been a seminarian at one time, not a priest.
John Harris, a current official at the school, said Friday that he could not immediately obtain Satchell’s resume or learn details of his hiring.
But he said Satchell, who has no criminal history in Pennsylvania, must have passed a records check under the state’s child-abuse clearance procedures.
The archdiocese says it now reports all allegations of sex abuse to the police. In the past, before the national priest-abuse scandal erupted, church officials nationwide often did not alert authorities.
Satchell’s defrocking was announced in Thursday’s edition of the Catholic Standard & Times, the weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Satchell was removed from active ministry in September 1993 when he was assistant pastor at St. Raymond of Penafort, in the city’s Germantown neighborhood, “in response to a credible allegation of misconduct involving a minor,” church officials said.
A listed telephone number for Satchell could not be found and he could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday.
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Information from: The Philadelphia Inquirer, http://www.philly.com