January 28, 2026
By Peggy Fletcher Stack
Salt Lake City diocese confirms it conducted an investigation but says only that it “has taken steps to address its findings.”
William Hambleton alleged last year that he was abused as a teen by a priest in Utah, an assertion the Diocese of Salt Lake City later deemed “credible.”
Now Hambleton contends that the diocese has confirmed to him a wider issue: A powerful cleric occasionally destroyed documents in personnel files of priests.
Monsignor J. Terrence Fitzgerald , the diocese’s longtime vicar general, told multiple priests about his purges of “information that could cast clergy in a poor light,” according to Robert Moriarty, a former priest in the diocese.
“I came to assume that this practice was common knowledge,” Moriarty, a friend of Hambleton, wrote in a letter provided last summer to the diocese’s internal review board during its investigation.
In a meeting earlier this month, Hambleton said, Bishop Oscar Solis told him that the diocese found “credible” the allegation that Fitzgerald had destroyed documents — but that its conclusions would never be made public.
“Such secrecy perpetuates harm rather than healing,” Hambleton said in a statement, “it denies justice and transparency, deepens the wounds borne by survivors of clergy sexual abuse, and further undermines the moral credibility of the church.”
The case
Hambleton first alleged in a December 2024 letter to Solis, leader of Utah’s 300,000 Catholics, that the Rev. Heriberto Castrellion Mejia molested him when he was 16 years old. After a seven-month independent investigation and the publication of an exclusive Salt Lake Tribune story last summer, the diocese determined that Hambleton’s allegations against Mejia were “credible” and publicly apologized for the priest’s actions.
Hambleton, a former principal of The Madeleine Choir School who had dreamed of becoming a priest, was “grateful” for the diocese’s decision, he said back then. But he remained “deeply disappointed” that those priests he believed helped conceal the alleged abuse were not mentioned.
The 52-year-old educator pointed specifically to retired Monsignor Robert Bussen, who served as vicar general at the time, and Fitzgerald, who later took over that role.
Hambleton noted that Bussen and Fitzgerald together held the office of vicar general, essentially a deputy to the bishop, for 30 years. “Their moral and administrative failures contributed to a culture of sexual abuse and misconduct,” Hambleton wrote at the time. “Revoking their priestly faculties would represent a necessary step toward … transparency and accountability.”
But the diocese told him it wanted to investigate further.
Fast-forward to this year. Hambleton said he was invited to meet in person on Jan. 10 with Solis todiscuss the diocese’s findings about the two priests.
The bishop informed him in that meeting, according to Hambleton, that it had finished its investigation. The former seminarian had alleged that Bussen had “knowledge of” Mejia’s misconduct and “failed to act during his tenure as vicar general.”
Hambleton said in his response this month that Solis determined the assertion about Bussen was “unsubstantiated.”
The former parishioner said the bishop did conclude that Fitzgerald had “tampered with and destroyed official church documents during his tenure as vicar general.”
That claim was further buoyed by the letter from Moriarty.
Fitzgerald “first told me that he would destroy files after I returned from a leave of absence in 2000. As part of my return, I had undergone a psychological evaluation, and I was concerned that it remain confidential,” Moriarty wrote to the diocese’s review board. “He told me not to worry and that he had made sure there was nothing in my personnel file apart from basic biographical information. He went on to say that he would occasionally purge priest personnel files.”
Through the years, Fitzgerald mentioned to Moriarty “at least four more times that he engaged in this practice,” wrote Moriarty, who went on to become a Salt Lake City attorney . “Because I found it odd, I remember talking with four other priests (all of whom are now deceased) about what Msgr. Fitzgerald had told me regarding shredding files. All four of them said he had told them the same thing.”
Diocese responds
In response to questions from The Tribune about this month’s meeting between the bishop and Hambleton, the diocese reiterated in a statement that it found allegations about Mejia “credible and believable,” and repeated Solis’ earlier apology.
The statement said the diocese conducted an “internal canonical investigation” about the allegation that Fitzgerald, who died Jan. 14 at age 89, had destroyed documents.
“This internal investigation is complete,” the statement said, “and the diocese has taken steps to address its findings.”
The diocese did not detail any of those findings or if Fitzgerald or anyone else had disposed of records.
According to Hambleton, Solis told him in their meeting that Fitzgerald “would retain his status as a retired priest in good standing within the diocese.”
Among Hambleton’s other allegations was that Fitzgerald had “disparaged victims of sex abuse.” That was the reason, Hambleton said, why he never told Fitzgerald or any other clergy about Mejia at the time.
When Fitzgerald retired as vicar general in 2011, a Tribune profile quoted a leader in the diocese saying that “Fitzgerald met with every victim of abuse.” Fitzgerald himself said in that article that the diocese“ never had leadership that covered up abuse or transferred priests with problems.”
Yet “behind closed doors,” Hambleton insists in his statement, the vicar general “demeaned and insulted some of the very same victims who may have met with him in good faith.”
Hambleton said in his statement that Solis told him in their recent meeting that this accusation was “credible.”
The diocese’s statement made no mention of that.
“Bishop Solis informed me that he does not intend to remove Msgr. Fitzgerald’s faculties,” Hambleton said in his statement. “Instead, minimal penalties were imposed — amounting to little more than a private reprimand. Among them, Msgr. Fitzgerald must privately admit his misconduct and apologize to Bishop Solis. The bishop told me that he does not intend to disclose Msgr. Fitzgerald’s misconduct to the faithful, and that he will not issue a press release.”
By not alerting Utah Catholics of substantiated misconduct by a senior diocesan official, Hambleton said, Solis “has chosen a course that prioritizes secrecy over accountability. Having investigated an entrenched culture of concealment that enables abuse within the church, he has now reaffirmed it through his own decision.”
Hambleton also said that “canon law rightly considers the destruction of church records to be a grave offense — so serious that it permits a bishop to remove priestly faculties from the offender.”
The diocese did not make Solis available for an interview.
In 2018, the Salt Lake City diocese released the names of 19 clerics facing “credible allegations” of sexual misconduct with minors. Meija, who had lost his priestly faculties in fall 1992, was not on that tally.
A year later, the diocese published an independent review that included Mejia on a list of 23 clergymen facing abuse allegations within its parishes.
Appealing to higher-ups
After meeting with Solis, Hambleton said he wrote to Archbishop George Leo Thomas , leader of the Las Vegas archdiocese, asking for “assistance and pastoral intervention.”
According to Hambleton, Solis had told him that he had consulted with Thomas and “the archbishop advised him to respond the way he did.”
After outlining the case, the allegations and the diocese’s findings in his letter to Thomas, Hambleton asked the archbishop “to consider the gravity of this situation and the dangerous precedent it sets … and to advise Bishop Solis to share the findings of his investigation with the faithful of the Diocese of Salt Lake City.”
Thomas replied that he had “consistently applied the principles of transparency and full disclosure when addressing claims of sexual abuse in these dioceses,” according to a copy of the letter provided by Hambleton. “At the same time, it is important to note that during the 1970s through the 1990s, bishops frequently received reports from treatment facilities after sending clergy to these centers for evaluation. During those decades, it was commonplace for treatment facilities to send their aftercare reports with a bold heading marked ‘READ AND DESTROY.’”
When reached this week, the Las Vegas archdiocese declined to comment further.
At a Jan. 20 funeral Mass for Fitzgerald, who had battled cancer and heart failure in his final years, Solis said the priest felt sorrow for any pain he caused others.
“He was grateful, had genuine sorrow for any hurt he had caused, asked for forgiveness with humility, and sought reconciliation and peace with God and with others,” said the bishop, according to the Intermountain Catholic.
“He personally expressed this to me when I last visited him in the hospital a few days before he died. He died in peace, confident of the mercy of God, and asked forgiveness of the church he loved and of the people he might have hurt.”
Going forward, Hambleton said, “the full extent of [the vicar general’s] destruction [of files] can never be known. Nor can it be known how many crimes may have been concealed, or how many victims of clergy sexual abuse may have been silenced or further harmed as a result.”
That, he said, “is the irreversible nature of document destruction.”
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/01/27/catholic-abuse-powerful-utah/
NEWRY (UNITED KINGDOM)
