The hallways of Jesuit High School in New Orleans have been scrubbed clean of something far worse than teenage mischief. The school just agreed to a seven-figure settlement—a pay-off to a man who says two janitors molested him on the campus in the 1970s, when he was a preteen from the neighborhood. But the institution’s real cleaning product is a theological-legalist machine that washes the blood off the hands of predators and calls it sacramental. That machine has a name: the seal of the confessional, wielded as a get-out-of-jail-free card for child rape by the school’s current president, the Rev. John Brown. And it has been doing its grim work for decades while the bodies piled up.
As a Texas jury prepares to sentence a Catholic priest convicted of sexual assault, Jesuit’s ledger of suppressed abuse continues to bleed into the open. The janitor at the center of the New Orleans cases, Peter Modica, came to the school with a pre-existing résumé: he had pleaded guilty to molesting boys at a suburban playground in 1963. The school hired him anyway, set him loose among children, and then spent the next four decades writing checks to silence the wreckage. At least seven out-of-court settlements related to Modica have already been paid; the latest makes eight. Another lawsuit, brought by a man who says Modica began molesting him at age thirteen inside the school in 1978, is barreling toward a September trial. The arithmetic is obscene, and the moral arithmetic is worse.
The institution’s own depositions read like an indictment from the inside. The Rev. Anthony McGinn, a former president, testified under oath that nine of his colleagues—mostly clergymen—were credibly accused of child sexual assault while he worked alongside them. Nine. When asked how rare it is for one person to work with nine credibly accused child abusers in a single career, his answer was: “I have no—no speculation on that.” There’s a word for a man who looks at that pile of wreckage and offers a shrug, and it isn’t “Reverend.”
Meanwhile, the Rev. John Brown sat in a deposition and told a lawyer that if a Jesuit employee or clergyman confessed to him in the sacrament that he had “raped 100 kids in this school,” he would do nothing—would never reveal the content of a confession, would not call the police. He invoked the threat of automatic excommunication. The seal of the confessional, he made plain, protects rapists from the law. The institution has itself a theology that garrotes every child in its path, and Brown wears the collar proudly.
If that weren’t enough, the president who served between McGinn and Brown, the Rev. Christopher Fronk, evidently deleted nearly every email he ever sent—a habit he picked up as a Navy chaplain, Brown explained—and kept doing it after the school knew litigation was coming and was legally obligated to preserve those records. One president shrugs off nine credibly accused colleagues. Another deletes the paper trail. The third refuses, on principle, to report a confessed child rapist. That is not a leadership bench. That is a crime scene with a crucifix over the door.
The survivors, who came forward only after Richard Windmann spoke publicly in 2018 about being abused by Modica and a priest named Neil Carr, have been met with the institution’s full contempt. The school had paid Windmann $450,000 in 2012 and slapped a confidentiality clause on the deal—a clause Windmann says he never asked for. When the school’s lawyer deposed him this April, he accused him of just wanting a payout and said parts of his story “doesn’t even make sense” and that he believed “nothing happened” to him because of Modica—the same Modica the school had already paid seven times over. Windmann’s attorney interrupted: “Is that a question? Or are you just harassing him?” The mask doesn’t slip; it’s ripped off entirely.
The archdiocese has already filed for bankruptcy and arranged a $305 million payout to abuse survivors. This school, founded in 1847, now finds itself in the same familiar posture: cutting checks to make victims go away. The Louisiana legislature finally opened the courthouse doors in 2021 by letting survivors sue no matter how old their claims, and the state supreme court upheld that law in 2024 over the church’s howls. Last summer a federal jury awarded nearly $2.4 million to a man abused by a Holy Cross brother in the 1960s. The dam is breaking, and Jesuit’s seven-figure settlement is just the latest crack. But the money cannot buy back the four decades the institution spent hiding what it knew, and it cannot answer the theological question at the heart of this rot.
Mark 9:42 offers a counter-law, and it does not come from a state legislature or a canon lawyer. It comes from the mouth of Jesus, plain and unalloyed: “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” The plain-language reading of the red letters leaves no room for a confidentiality clause that shields a hundred rapes. It leaves no room for the deleted inboxes of a church president. It leaves no room for a seven-figure payout that buys silence. The text does not say, “Unless the perpetrator is an anointed clergyman bound by the seal.” It does not say, “Unless the church’s reputation would be damaged.” It names a specific, violent, irreversible punishment for harming a child.
We who spent thirty years inside the white Evangelical apparatus recognize the smell of this architectural cover-up instantly. It does not matter if the theological vocabulary is “confessional privilege” instead of “pastoral confidentiality,” or if the canonical lawyers are Jesuits instead of Southern Baptists. The shape of the legalist interpretation-machinery is identical. For twenty years, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee maintained a secret list of hundreds of accused abusers, intimidated survivors, and hid behind institutional liability until the 2022 Guidepost report forced the doors open. The SBC hid behind liability lawyers. The Jesuits hid behind a sacrament. The latter is the more theological perversion, but both shields fail the plain-language test of the red letters. The church’s credibility hinges on whether it sides with the institution’s legalisms or the least of these.
The theology of the seal of the confessional, when invoked to shield a predator, is not the theology of the Gospel. It is the theology of what Walter Brueggemann called the royal consciousness: a system so obsessed with its own image that it would rather numb itself to the death of a child than risk the exposure of its own machinery. The civil courts are finally doing the work the canon courts refused to do, and the money is being forced out of the dark. But the theological problem remains until we stop letting religious leaders define “confession” as a get-out-of-jail-free card for child rape.
The millstone was not a metaphor. The children who played in the yard in the 1970s were real. The millstone belongs around the neck of the priest who raped, the janitor who abused, the president who deleted the emails, the president who shrugged, and the president who told a lawyer he would protect a confessing rapist over a hundred children. It does not belong around the neck of the survivor who finally forced the truth into the open. The sea is deep, and the bill is due.