Aloysius Piorkowski
What does it mean when a priest is said to be suffering “some rather serious difficulties”? No one doubts this was an apt, if cryptic, description of Father Aloysius Piorkowski in the summer of 1962. He was born in the early twentieth century in Poland, where he was also ordained, and at some point made his way to the Archdiocese of Chicago, where he served as an assistant pastor at Saint Pancratius in the city’s Brighton Park neighborhood. He left Chicago in 1947 for the Diocese of Lincoln in Nebraska, and in 1959 he arrived at Boys Town, a church facility serving orphans and “troubled youths” located in the neighboring Archdiocese of Omaha. He remained there until the spring of 1962, when he was accused of sexually abusing a child and dismissed for “inappropriate conduct.” The Diocese of Lincoln refused to take him back.
There is a long history of church officials cloaking child sex abuse in euphemisms, which makes it difficult to determine—decades after the fact—exactly what happened next. Apparently, Piorkowski preferred to return to Chicago, so he asked a colleague to pitch the idea to the archdiocese’s vicar general. The colleague wrote a letter in May 1962 “vouch[ing]” for Piorkowski’s “integrity” and chalking up his departure from Boys Town to a “clash of personalities” with the executive director. Piorkowski’s only problem, his colleague concluded, “is he seems to be continually on the move.”
Meanwhile, Bishop James Casey of the Diocese of Lincoln was making his own pitch to get Piorkowski off his hands. A June 1962 letter to Bishop Loras Lane of the Diocese of Rockford references an earlier discussion about Piorkowski, whom Bishop Casey describes as a priest with “some rather serious difficulties.” Bishop Casey’s letter promises he’ll have more to say to Bishop Lane about Piorkowski when the two men gather later that month for a conference in Madison, Wisconsin.
What Bishop Casey said at that conference is lost to history. The surviving records contain only unsatisfactory clues. The archdiocese’s vicar general was in Madison too and had his own chance to talk to Bishop Casey; when he returned to Chicago, he penned a letter to Piorkowski’s colleague announcing that his conversation with the Lincoln bishop had turned him away from the idea of taking in the troubled priest. He didn’t explain why.
As for Bishop Lane in Rockford, the documents merely show he agreed to interview Piorkowski later that summer—and ultimately allowed him to take refuge in the diocese. That was a mistake. Piorkowski was assigned as a chaplain to Saint Joseph Hospital in Elgin but wasted little time before again abusing a boy—a prior victim from Omaha whose parents allowed him to visit Piorkowski in Illinois, encouraged no doubt by the church’s ongoing endorsement.
What did Bishop Lane know about Piorkowski when he made this fateful decision? No one can say with certainty. Bishop Casey’s reference to Piorkowski’s “serious difficulties” seems glaringly obvious in hindsight. So too the concession by Piorkowski’s colleague that he was “continually on the move.” Those phrases stand out to us today because we know church officials once viewed child sex abuse as literally unspeakable—communicating about it in code rather than referring to it by name. We also know Piorkowski was in fact forced out of Boys Town for sexually abusing a child—then sexually abused a child soon after fleeing to the Diocese of Rockford. And it is telling that, whatever Bishop Casey said to the archdiocese’s vicar general in Madison, it put him off Piorkowski altogether.
But euphemisms are intentionally evasive; they are by nature imprecise. “Serious difficulties” could also refer to alcoholism or mental illness or even a loss of faith—and any of these ailments might cause a priest to be “continually on the move.” What’s more, not everyone was in on the secret. Piorkowski’s colleague falsely told the archdiocese Piorkowski left Boys Town because of a personality clash; either the colleague didn’t know the truth or didn’t want the vicar general to find it out.
Sixty years since, we can only guess at what Bishop Casey wanted Bishop Lane to understand by the phrase “serious difficulties”—or what Bishop Lane actually understood it to mean. The men have died. The church’s records are silent. A mystery is all that remains.