SMITHFIELD, R.I. — In the last years of his life, the former director of St. Aloysius Home insisted that the children who said they’d been raped by priests and staff at the Catholic orphanage were lying.
“I’m telling you, how could it possibly be that they would say that, when I was there?” retired Rev. Robert McIntyre said in an interview in 2018, nearly 25 years after numerous sexual-abuse complaints forced the orphanage to close. “I mean, there’s nothing that happened there! There’s nothing!”
But the new state law giving alleged victims of childhood sexual abuse the opportunity to bring new claims against the institutions that allowed that abuse is showing otherwise.
More than 50 lawsuits have been filed against the Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence since the law took effect on July 1. So far, St. Aloysius is named in those lawsuits more than any other Diocesan property.
An investigation into Diocesan documents by the attorney general’s office and Rhode Island State Police reviewed reports of sexual abuse complaints going back to 1950. St. Aloysius had the third-highest number of sexual abuse victims of any Diocesan location, behind St. Mary’s Church in Cranston and Our Lady of Mercy in East Greenwich. McIntyre and the late Rev. Rene Guertin, who served at St. Aloysius for decades, were both credibly accused of sexually abusing more than a dozen children.
Six men who lived at St. Aloysius as children have now filed lawsuits alleging that they were raped by the priests and staff — and four of them directly accuse McIntyre.
The lawsuits span from 1969 through 1989, and the victims’ ages ranged from 6 to 12 years old. None had been able to file lawsuits against the Diocese due to the statute of limitations, until the passage of the new law.
The Diocese has not yet filed a response to any of the lawsuits.
“St. Aloysius has not operated for over 30 years, and litigation from that long-ago era against both diocesan and state agencies was well-publicized in the media at that time,” Diocese spokesman Michael F. Kieloch said in an email on July 21 in response to questions about the lawsuits. “Claims like those recently asserted, from 30, 40 and 50 years ago, raise many challenges for courts and litigants including lost evidence, deceased or unavailable witnesses and altered memories.”
The roots of St. Aloysius Home go back to the 1860s, with the Sisters of Mercy serving homeless girls on the streets of Providence. They moved into a building in South Providence and then to an imposing brick building that the Diocese built on its property in Smithfield’s Greenville neighborhood in 1940. The local Observer newspaper wrote that St. Aloysius “represented some of the finest child-caring facilities of its day.”
For many years, St. Aloysius appeared from the outside to be a good steward of the children who arrived at its doors.
Its two longest-serving priests were Guertin, who was there from 1946 to 1969, and McIntyre, who arrived in 1971 and remained until the orphanage closed in 1994.
McIntyre became the director of St. Aloysius in the mid-1970s, when the orphanage was struggling to stay open. Then the Rhode Island Catholic Orphan Asylum Corporation contracted with the state Department for Children and Their Families to provide an emergency shelter, foster care, and residential treatment for boys, giving St. Aloysius a financial lifeline and making it the largest residential child-care program to have a contract with the state.
But the exhaustive investigative report that Attorney General Peter F. Neronha released in March showed St. Aloysius as a troubled and dangerous place for neglected and vulnerable children.
Guertin and McIntyre are alleged to have sexually abused, or attempted to abuse, 15 children at St. Aloysius, according to the attorney general’s report. Both are listed as credibly accused, but neither was criminally charged.
At St. Aloysius, Guertin was alleged to have sexually abused two little girls and physically abused two boys, one of whom was naked, the other who said Guertin groped him while clothed, according to the report. At Our Lady of Good Help Church in Burrillville, where he was assigned after St. Aloysius, Guertin allegedly raped a girl for years when she stayed over in the rectory, starting when she was 10. Guertin died in 1982.
McIntyre was alleged to have sexually abused at least 11 boys between the ages of 8 to 16, from 1968 through the mid-1980s, at St. Aloysius. McIntyre was also accused of having child pornography, forcing children to sexually abuse each other, and involving other men in the sexual abuse.
The first allegations of sexual abuse came to light in 1992, when 16 boys complained that they’d been abused at St. Aloysius. Three staff members and an optometrist were indicted for child molestation.
The state child advocate, Laureen D’Ambra, who is now a Family Court judge, filed a lawsuit over the allegations and findings that St. Aloysius wasn’t reporting the abuse to DCYF, but was doing its own internal investigations. (D’Ambra declined comment for this article.)
McIntyre later told a reporter that he handled the complaints himself. The reports, he said, “were bogus.”
An independent consultant and expert in child sexual abuse also found numerous problems at St. Aloysius. At D’Ambra’s behest, DCYF removed the children from St. Aloysius at the end of 1993 and the home closed in 1994.
The town of Smithfield now owns the property.
McIntyre left the priesthood. Former residents and their families sued him, DCYF, the Diocese, and then-Bishop Louis E. Gelineau. A Superior Court jury eventually cleared McIntyre of being a perpetrator. Other lawsuits never gained traction.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that the Roman Catholic Bishop was not liable for the sexual abuse of a dozen children, because there was insufficient evidence that the Diocese organized and controlled the orphanage’s affairs. In 2002, the state Supreme Court determined that the statute of limitations had closed for a man claiming abuse at the orphanage.
Then, in 2019, the Diocese placed McIntyre and Guertin on its list of priests credibly accused of sexual abuse of children.
McIntyre abruptly moved to Florida. More allegations followed him.
In early 2020, the Rhode Island State Police launched an investigation after a man complained that McIntyre had sexually abused him as a child and that he possessed child pornography. The state police searched McIntyre’s home and found hundreds of pictures on his computer of prepubescent boys wearing diapers.
McIntyre died in June 2020. The Diocese then told the state police about other men who had lived at St. Aloysius as children, who’d come forward with similar allegations of abuse. Even more came forward after McIntyre’s death.
Of the new lawsuits filed in Providence County Superior Court, four are from men accusing McIntyre of raping them at St. Aloysius in the 1980s. One said he was 6 when McIntyre first began sexually abusing him. Another said he was 8 and hoped to be an altar server, and that McIntyre used that hope against him.
Two other men have filed lawsuits alleging abuse by others when they were at St. Aloysius. One said he was abused by a physical education teacher in 1971 when he was 12; he said a nun told him he would “get over it.” Another, David Silipigni, said a priest raped him in the basement when he was 8 years old in 1969.
The Globe does not name victims of sexual abuse without their permission. Silipigni agreed to be named.
In an interview in 2018, Silipigni told a reporter that he never knew the priest’s name. But during an interview two years before his death, McIntyre said he thought he knew who the priest was, but refused to say more.
He took that priest’s name to his grave. But justice could still prevail.
On July 1, Silipigni became one of the first people to sue the Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence, the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum d/b/a St. Aloysius Home, under the new law.
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Amanda Milkovits can be reached at amanda.milkovits@globe.com. Follow her @AmandaMilkovits.