1,300 seek change in N. Catholic High name
A petition on Change.org aims to remove Cardinal Donald Wuerl’s name from Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School in Cranberry Township.
As of Wednesday night, more than 1,300 people had signed the petition.
Wuerl’s name appears more than 100 times in a state grand jury report on sexual abuse by priests in Pennsylvania’s Catholic organizations. Wuerl is quickly becoming associated with church efforts to minimize sexual abuse allegations over the years, and he’s repeatedly described in the report as dealing with accused priests by relocating them.
For instance, in June 1999, Wuerl was informed by a letter from a Catholic official that the Rev. Paul Spisak, who worked at St. Andrew Roman Catholic Church on North Main Street Extension in the mid-1990s, was at risk of “use of pornography, compulsive masturbation and possible sexual activity either with minors or adults.”
The next month, Wuerl reassigned Spisak to St. Mary Church in Cecil.
Spisak wouldn’t leave the church until 2003, despite parish staff finding photographs of Spisak pulling childrens’ pants down along with a stash of pornography in Spisak’s room in 1998. In 2006, police arrested Spisak for filming another man in a bathroom stall in a shopping mall.
A spokesman for the Diocese of Pittsburgh did not return a call for comment.
A 1999 graduate of North Catholic, Megan Fialkovich signed the petition. Her father, Steve Fialkovich, taught at the school for about 25 years before dying in the early 2000s, she said.
“From what I understand of the report, (Wuerl) was complicit,” the Bellevue resident said in a phone interview Wednesday. “He aided and abetted people who were sexual predators.”
Fialkovich said fellow students had suffered abuse, and that they did not know what to do about it. She said she believes officials like Wuerl knew abuse was happening and kept it from people in the church, including teachers like her father who, she said, would have helped protect children.
On the petition’s website, Fialkovich wrote: “There can be no recompense for all of the victims, but the very least we can do is strip Wuerl of any vestiges of honor for his active role in protecting these subhuman creatures, and his complicity in allowing these activities to continue.”
She suggested in an interview that the school be renamed after Dan Rooney, a longtime Pittsburgh Steelers chairman and an involved Catholic.
The high school was named after Wuerl when it relocated from Troy Hill to Cranberry in 2014.
