The Sault Star
09 June 2011
By FRANK DOBROVNIK, The Sault Star
Over the five years Harvey “Butch” Barsanti worked under Rev. William Hodgson Marshall at St. Mary’s College, he says there was never any inkling the Basilian priest was in reality a lifelong sexual predator.
“I never had any suspicion about unusual behaviour or anything like that … Right now I’ve got goosebumps, even talking about it,” said Barsanti Thursday, after Marshall was sentenced to two years behind bars in a Windsor courtroom.
On Wednesday he pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting 17 victims in the Sudbury, Toronto and Windsor areas in incidents dating back to 1953.
Barsanti said he got to know Marshall “as well as you do when you’re working pretty closely. I’d say I got to know him pretty well.” However, the news that he abused children in his care also makes him second-guess himself.
“You think back, ‘Was there something that I missed? Was he obvious about things?’ No, I can’t put my finger on anything that would say the signs were there. I didn’t see any signs,” said Barsanti, 68, who was St. Mary’s principal during the time teacher Ken DeLuca was sexually harassing and assaulting female students there between 1989 and the time of his arrest in 1994.
A former St. Mary’s student who started teaching their in 1966, he served as vice-principal while Marshall was there from 1980 to 1984, and feels like he “dedicated my life to the Basilian fathers.” When he hears of sexual abuse in the church he served, “it’s a reflection on everybody that was connected with it. It’s a sad thing for that to happen.”
Mostly, “you feel bad that something like that happened to students who were there. They’re the ones who suffered.”
Marshall, 88, Marshall was first charged in May 2010 with one count of sexual assault related to alleged incidents in Windsor in the early 1980s. In the ensuing months 15 more men and one woman from cities where he was assigned during his five decades as an active priest came forward to say they too had been abused by him.
No one from his time in Sault Ste. Marie came forward to allege abuse here. However, one of the incidents from Windsor occurred in Sault Ste. Marie, where Marshall had brought a Windsor student between 1985 and 1986.
Barsanti did not want to speculate about whether he continued his sexual assaults on young people while in Sault Ste. Marie. “You say, ‘Thank God nothing happened here in the Sault,’ but you don’t really know. You don’t know if somebody doesn’t want to come out, doesn’t want to go through that and they keep themselves as a victim forever.”
Ordained in 1951 at age 28, Marshall was moved around before settling in at St. Charles College in Sudbury for almost 17 years. One of his earliest postings was as a teacher at Windsor’s Assumption College Catholic high school in 1955. After leaving Sault Ste. Marie, Marshall returned to Windsor in 1985 where he was the founding principal of Holy Names high school.
He carried out missionary work in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia from 1989 to 1996. Upon his return from St. Lucia, he was forced into retirement and placed in the Saint Luke Institute in Silver Springs. Md., which offers treatment programs for clerics with psychological or spiritual problems.
“Never had any inkling”??? Was I the only 15 year old in 1953 at St. Mikes who felt uncomfortable watching Marshall take a student to the stands on the football field, out of sight from the school, of course, to give him a whisker rub and pink belly?