Cincinnati priest made parochial vicar after destroying hard drive of possible child porn

CNA Staff, Oct 15, 2024 / 16:35 pm

A priest in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati has been reassigned to a parochial vicarship months after resigning from another parish after it became known he had destroyed possible child sex abuse material without notifying police. 

Father Barry Stechschulte was appointed parochial vicar of a family of parishes in the western part of Ohio, near the border with Indiana. That appointment went into effect on Monday, according to the archdiocesan website.

In July, Stechschulte announced his departure from St. Susanna Catholic Parish in Mason, Ohio, weeks after a bombshell media report revealed that in 2012 he ordered the destruction of a hard drive reportedly containing inappropriate pictures of children — and potentially child pornography — and then delayed reporting the incident to police. 

The pastor did not report the incident to law enforcement until 2018. In an apology to parishioners prior to his departure the priest said he had wanted to protect others from seeing the contents of the hard drive.

Several hundred members of St. Susanna called for the pastor’s resignation after the revelation, stating that his failure to report the potential child sexual abuse material had “severely compromised” the parish’s confidence in him. 

Stechschulte indicated in his resignation that he would be sent to another parish at some point. He wrote at the time that he would “step down as pastor, effective immediately, to be reassigned elsewhere in the archdiocese.”

The archdiocese declined to comment on the situation on Tuesday evening. Archdiocesan spokesman Mike Schafer told Cincinnati ABC affiliate WCPO last week that he “[could not] comment further as this is a personnel matter.”

The revelation about Stechschulte destroying the hard drive came as part of a report by WCPO, which earlier this year published an extensive exposé on a yearslong controversy involving Dayton-area priest Father Tony Cutcher.

Cutcher left ministry in 2021 amid a scandal involving “hundreds of text messages he exchanged with a 14-year-old boy.”

Part of the report touched on the 2012 incident in which Stechschulte discovered “what looked like child pornography” on a computer at Holy Rosary Church in St. Marys, north of Dayton. Cutcher had previously served at that parish.

Deacon Marty Brown later told police he “took the hard drive out of the computer and destroyed it with a blow torch at the request of Stechschulte.”

The archdiocese confirmed to WCPO last week that Brown himself is presently on a leave of absence. 

The family of parishes in which Stechschulte is serving comprises seven total churches located just a few miles from the Indiana border.

Parish families in the archdiocese are served by one or more parochial vicars as well as a pastor, the archdiocese says on its website.