Forgive me, fathers, for you have sinned.
Three Catholic priests who run homeless charities in Manhattan are anything but Christian behind closed doors, longtime female staffers at St. Francis Friends of the Poor claim in a lawsuit.
Franciscan Friars John McVean, John Felice and Tom Walters subjected the women to racist rants and took a veritable vow of silence as the ladies were repeatedly manhandled for three years by a leering, oversexed co-worker, court papers allege.
The trio “ruled St. Francis with an iron fist and fostered a culture of intimidation,” according to the Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit. “The priests, who many at St. Francis suspect occasionally come to work drunk, often lashed out at employees and frequently screamed at subordinates.”
McVean, Felice and Walters — all friars in residence at St. Francis of Assisi Church on West 31st Street — launched their nonprofit in 1980 and now house 250 mentally ill men and women at three Manhattan locations. The charity is independent of the Archdiocese of New York.
McVean routinely referred to the building manager as “a goat-loving Muslim,” “an idiot Muslim” and “often said that ‘Muslims are dangerous,’ ” according to court papers.
Latinos rated no higher with McVean, say employees Donna Graves and Ann O’Leary, both of Brooklyn, and Maria Colon, of Manhattan, who target the nonprofit, the priests and a co-worker in their lawsuit.
“A lot of Latinos are lazy or dumb and that is why they don’t know English,” McVean allegedly said on “multiple occasions,” according to court papers.
When Colon related to McVean an anecdote about her 14-year-old son coming to the aid of a teenage girl who was being bullied, the priest allegedly asked, “Well, didn’t he pull a knife out? Don’t all Latinos carry them?”
The nonprofit’s cleaning and maintenance workers were simply “lazy Ricans” who didn’t need an invite to the annual Christmas party because “they wouldn’t know what’s going on . . . none of them speak English,” McVean allegedly said.
Blacks were not welcome either, according to the lawsuit, in which the women say one program manager was ordered not to interview “too many blacks” for housing with Friends of the Poor.
Graves, who is black, showed McVean a picture of her 89-year-old stepmother, and allegedly got the reply, “She does look amazing. Black don’t crack,” according to the legal filing.
“There have been so many inappropriate things that Father McVean has said over 26 years that it is impossible to recount even most of them,” the women charge.
It was such hell that two of the women, O’Leary and Colon — both raised Catholic — grapple with “a fear and an overwhelming anxiety of priests” and are near to abandoning their faith altogether, according to court papers.
The most traumatizing experience, the women say, came at the hands of Friends of the Poor program director Gyasi Bramos-Hantman, who subjected the women to an atmosphere that “would not be tolerated in any locker room,” according to the lawsuit.
About “twice a month,” Bramos-Hantman would corner the women for unwanted hugs, rubbing himself against them and once embracing O’Leary so forcibly “it loosened [her] colostomy and drainage bag,” she claims.
The women turned to McVean, Felice and Walters for help, but were threatened with termination by the priests, who engaged in “a massive coverup,” they allege.
The three priests denied the allegations.