New lawsuit alleges Catholic clergy abuse drove Baltimore attorney, banker to his death

His uncle was a Catholic priest. His father ran a law firm whose most prominent clients were the Archdiocese of Baltimore and Cardinal Lawrence Shehan.

Francis “Frank” X. Gallagher Jr. was an investment banker and attorney who worked at Venable and Legg Mason, among other Baltimore institutions. He went to high school at Loyola Blakefield and was a parishioner at St. Ignatius on North Calvert Street. He served on the boards of St. Frances Academy, the Marion Burk Knott Scholarship Foundation and the Loyola Early Learning Center.

And when he was 14 years old, a seminarian at St. Mary’s Seminary molested him, according to his family.

“Some would presume that, given our family’s close relationship to the leaders of the Catholic Church, that we would be spared,” Flannery Gallagher, Frank Jr.’s daughter, said Tuesday. “But we were not.”

That abuse and the subsequent trauma would drive Gallagher Jr. to an early death, according to a wrongful death lawsuit his family filed Tuesday against the Archdiocese of Baltimore and two other defendants. He fatally overdosed last August, the result of a decadeslong battle with substance use and other behavior that Gallagher Jr. used to cope with what happened to him as a teenager.

Gallagher Jr. would engage in secret, “risky” sexual encounters with other men, something known as “repetition compulsion” that is common among abuse survivors, according to the lawsuit. Later in life, he directly attributed the behavior to the abuse he endured as a child.

Now, almost a year after their father’s death, Flannery Gallagher and her brother, Liam, are suing the Archdiocese of Baltimore, St. Mary’s Seminary and University and the Sulpician Order, which operates the school in part, for alleged negligence that led to their father becoming an abuse victim and his eventual death.

[ Read more: Baltimore Sun coverage of Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal ]

The lawsuit, filed in Baltimore Circuit Court, names Father Mark Haight as Frank Jr.’s abuser.

Haight is not a defendant in the lawsuit. He has been listed as credibly accused of abuse by both the Baltimore and Albany, New York, dioceses. Haight, who spent the majority of his career in upstate New York, was removed from ministry in 1996, although the reason why did not become public until years later. The Baltimore Sun was unable to reach Haight for comment Tuesday.

“By any measure, our father was a favorite son of the city of Baltimore,” Flannery Gallagher said at a news conference around the corner from the Baltimore Basilica. “He loved it. He gave to it and was loved broadly in return. But beneath the affect of this kind and loving man were untold levels of personal anguish and pain.”

Frank Jr. was the son of Francis X. Gallagher Sr., the prominent Irish Catholic Baltimore attorney who founded the white-shoe firm known today as Gallagher, Evelius and Jones LLP. Top Gallagher attorneys have advised cardinals and archbishops for going on six decades.

The lawsuit described the Gallagher name, shorthand for the law firm, as “synonymous” with the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

So intertwined are the law firm and the archdiocese that two Gallagher attorneys — longtime managing partner and Baltimore power broker Richard “Rick” Berndt and current partner David Kinkopf — have received papal honors for service to the Catholic Church. Cardinal Shehan, who served as archbishop from 1961 to 1974, presided over Gallagher Sr.’s funeral after his sudden death in 1972.

Members of the firm have given tens of thousands of dollars to the Catholic Church and its associated charities over the years, archdiocese fundraising publications show.

Neither Berndt nor Kinkopf responded to emails and phone messages seeking comment about the firm and litigation against the archdiocese and St. Mary’s, both of which Kinkopf represents. An attorney for the Sulpician Order did not return a request for comment.

Archdiocese spokesperson Christian Kendzierski said he could not comment on the litigation, as the church had just learned of it Tuesday morning, but offered condolences to the Gallaghers.

“We offer our deepest sympathies and prayers to the family,” Kendzierski said.

Claiming wrongful death and negligence, the Gallaghers are seeking a jury trial with unspecified damages.

Joann Suder, an attorney who has represented multiple survivors of abuse in the archdiocese and is not involved in the Gallagher family’s lawsuit, said people would be surprised at the number of victims, including those from prominent families.

“It is everywhere,” she said. “It’s breathtaking.”

After his father’s death in 1972, Frank Jr. suffered a burst appendix and spent four months in the hospital, according to the lawsuit. The hospital stay was expensive and the family’s finances had diminished considerably in the wake of Gallagher Sr.’s death.

The law firm paid the family “virtually nothing” upon Gallagher Sr.’s death and ended the health benefits for Frank Jr., his four siblings and their mother, according to the complaint. Flannery Gallagher said that was akin to betrayal, and that her grandfather’s firm essentially turned its back on the founder’s family.

Frank Jr.’s uncle, Father Joe Gallagher, got his nephew, then 14, a job as a nighttime receptionist at St. Mary’s Seminary in 1974 to help the family make ends meet. It was there that Frank Jr. encountered Haight.

“Haight took full advantage of his easy access to a physically, emotionally and financially vulnerable 14-year-old who was raised to be deferential to priests and Church leaders,” the lawsuit alleges.

The archdiocese also lists Joe Gallagher as credibly accused of child sexual abuse. He died in 2015.

At least 600 children and young adults were abused by Catholic priests, brothers, nuns and lay people over more than six decades, according to the Maryland Attorney General’s Office report on clergy sexual abuse within the archdiocese.

That report mentions Haight’s abuses in Baltimore. It says he took a 14-year-old boy, a night receptionist at St. Mary’s where Haight was a seminarian, on a camping trip to Assateague Island in the 1970s where he molested him in a tent in front of another seminarian, who said nothing during or afterward.

While the attorney general’s report does not name Frank Jr. as Haight’s victim (the report does not name any victims), his family said that story is his.

Gallagher Jr. reported the abuse to the archdiocese in 2002, according to the report. Flannery Gallagher said her father met with investigators in the attorney general’s office to share his story and provide documentation. The report says Haight’s victim met with investigators in 2018 for an interview about the priest.

Gallagher Jr. would not live to see the release of the report, the product of a four-year investigation, in April.

Haight was ordained in 1976 and spent the rest of his career in the Albany diocese. He was removed from the priesthood in 1996, according to the Maryland attorney general’s report.

The Baltimore archdiocese lists Haight as having been credibly accused of abuse in 2002. Flannery Gallagher said the disclosure was done at her father’s request, but did not come without a cost.

As the archdiocese prepared to publish its first list of credibly accused priests, then-Auxiliary Bishop William Newman called Gallagher Jr. to tell him that if he insisted on the inclusion of Haight, church officials would publish the name of his uncle, according to the lawsuit. Gallagher Jr. told them to publish both, and they did.

Beyond that interaction, the lawsuit describes a policy of either inaction or silence from the archdiocese when responding to Gallagher Jr.’s pleas for information. In one correspondence between Gallagher Jr. and church officials, Kinkopf, the archdiocese’s attorney, was copied in an email, according to the lawsuit.

It was the revelation of that apparent apathy after their father’s death — Flannery Gallagher said she and her brother did not know about the correspondence until then — that spurred them in part to take legal action in hopes that the archdiocese would be made to answer for how it put children in harm’s way and then turned its back on them as adult survivors.

“The church told us that the crimes outlined in the [attorney general’s] report were ancient history,” Flannery Gallagher said. “Not for our father and not for us.”

Originally published by The Baltimore Sun by Lee O. Sanderlin with contributions from Jean Marbella.