No. 2 Jesuit at Seattle U resigning

SEATTLE – Facing new heat over accusations that he sexually harassed a trainee priest in the 1990s in San Francisco, the Rev. Anton T. “Tony” Harris has resigned as vice president for ministry and mission at Seattle University.

Harris quit Thursday as the school’s second highest ranking Jesuit priest and will be gone altogether after working on special projects through the end of the academic year, said the Rev. Stephen V. Sundborg, university president.

Harris had a spotless record and faced no accusations during his six years at Seattle U, Sundborg said.

“He’s been an excellent vice president for ministry and mission, and I know him very, very well and admire him,” Sundborg said. “He came to this decision in light of the overall atmosphere created around the sexual-abuse issue.”

Harris, the third Jesuit priest with links to the school who has been identified by name in accusations of sexual misconduct in recent weeks, was not available for comment, the Seattle Times reported Friday.

Announcing his decision in a letter to faculty and students, he wrote that he retains a “deep and abiding love” for Seattle U and didn’t want to become a distraction.

“I believe that it is in the best interests of both me and the university, and my decision comes from careful Jesuit discernment and prayer,” Harris wrote.

Sundborg also said Thursday he had learned of a new accusation against a fourth former Seattle U priest and said he would investigate. He did not identify the priest but said the accusation involved alcohol and inappropriate behavior with a student.

Earlier this week school officials revealed that a former Jesuit professor and ethics expert, the Rev. Englebert M. Axer, is believed to have molested a boy in Northern California in 1956. Axer died in 1989.

Seattle U came under unwanted attention last month in a federal lawsuit involving a well-known Seattle U professor, the Rev. Michael J. Toulouse, who died in 1976. In the lawsuit Toulouse is accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy in the campus Jesuit residence in 1968.

Harris was one of three senior priests named in an earlier $1 million lawsuit filed by John Bollard, a former Jesuit who claimed he was sexually harassed as a trainee priest in his mid-20s in Berkeley, Calif., and San Francisco between 1990 and 1996.

Without admitting any wrongdoing, the Jesuits settled with Bollard in 2000. Details remain confidential.

Harris, assigned to the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, was accused in the lawsuit of sending Bollard about a dozen pornographic greeting cards, some depicting fully aroused men, while other priests were accused of unwelcome sexual advances, such as asking Bollard to join them in cruising gay bars and in talking about sex.

Bollard, now business manager of a University of California, Los Angeles, research center, said appointing Harris to the high-ranking Seattle U job after the lawsuit was settled in 2000 was a “pompous snub.”

Sundborg said he discussed the lawsuit with Harris, previously a religious adviser at Jesuit High School in Portland, before the hiring.

“It was bad judgment that he’d already apologized for and was ashamed about,” Sundborg said. “I went to the Board of Trustees and explained the situation and the background. They had questions about that. Then they approved” the appointment.