Bizarro Bishop Rick Stika Back in the News

 

Bishop Rick Stika is well known to savvy internet Catholics for all the wrong reasons.

He sometimes says pretty Catholic stuff...Other times he says some bizarre stuff! But that's not all he is known for.

Stika is known for being unwell. He is 65 and suffers from type 1 diabetes and uses an insulin pump. He underwent cardiac bypass surgery in 2004 and suffered a major heart attack in 2009, during a visit to South Florida. He had an angioplasty in 2018. He is also blind in his right eye.

Stika has quite a reputation for getting into Twitter battles. It often seemed this happen after he had indulged in a few beverages of the alcoholic variety, as his on-line emissions were often inconsistent & poorly spelt. There are quite a few examples of this.

Stika built a financially calamitous cathedral in his diocese. The budget for the build was $25M and he spent $42M. This is way beyond the needs and the finances of his diocese, which will be paying this off for the next fifty years.

Stika lives with a cardinal and sends weird Christmas cards. Sometimes, he posts them on Twitter. EG:

These Christmas cards typically show him along with his live-in cardinal, Justin Rigali and three dogs.

The cardinal and the bishop are casually dressed. The card’s text says, “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Cardinal Rigali, Bishop Stika, Stella, Rosie and Molly.” Stika served as a vicar general and chancellor of the Saint Louis Archdiocese when Cardinal Rigali was the archbishop there. After Rigali's retirement in 2011, Stika invited him to live in Knoxville diocese. Two men, living together with their fluffy doggies.

Rigali has his own history of cover-up, retiring as shepherd of Philly in 2011 while engulfed in sex abuse scandal.

A former parish organist has sued Bishop Rick Stika and the Knoxville diocese. The organist says he was raped by a seminarian and Stika covered it up. Stika has admitted it.

Now The Pillar reports that Stika made this seminarian, accused of a variety of serious sexual assaults, his special friend, lavishing gifts and special attention on him.

The now former seminarian came to the Knoxville diocese in 2018, after he was reportedly dismissed from the Society of Jesus amid allegations of sexual misconduct at St. Cyril and Methodius Seminary in Orchard Lake, Michigan. 

Seriously, how bad do things have to be for you to get dismissed from the Jesuits? 

I have heard of cases like this myself, where a man in seminary moves around dioceses following instances of sexual misconduct, until he finds a place that will overlook his inclinations out of complicity, ignorance or desperation.

He then embeds himself and entangles a member of the local clergy in some nefarious, compromising behaviour that will allow him to manipulate them and wheedle his way into a position of power, because these men always seem to be overtly interested in power rather than what they should be interested in: service.

A big part of the promotion and recruitment of abusers we see works like this: a senior cleric takes you under his wing in seminary. He makes advances to you. If you go along with the abuse and keep your mouth shut - you can be trusted. This is the way a cycle of abuse and promotion begins.

Stika received a copy of allegations against the seminarian in March 2021. Two months later, he described them to The Pillar as “boundary issues” that did not merit dismissal from seminary formation.

“I think it was a knee-jerk reaction,” Stika said of the seminarian’s dismissal.

The bishop insisted that Sobczuk was only dismissed from St. Meinrad’s because administrators had learned online about a 2019 sexual assault allegation made against Sobczuk, which Stika said was also not true.

“The rector told me that were it not for what was on Google [about the 2018 allegation], they would have handled it internally with therapy or behavioral…. They’re all three behavioral, or could have been perceived as behavioral [issues],” Stika told The Pillar.

Stika's seminarian received $4,000 of diocesan funds as cash gifts between mid-2018 and 2020 according to diocesan records. Stika also directed the diocese to purchase for Sobczuk a $2,000 laptop, to supplement the laptop provided to each seminarian for schoolwork.

Fiscal records indicate that the Knoxville diocese also paid Sobczuk’s monthly cell phone bill from 2018 until 2020 as well as "reimbursing" Sobczuk nearly $30,000 during that period for travel, car repair, “birthday expenses,” and other expenditures — in addition to covering educational expenses and the $600 - $1,000 allocated to Sobczuk in monthly stipends.

During several months of the period between 2018 and 2020, Sobczuk lived in Stika’s house. After Sobczuk was dismissed from St. Meinrad’s, the bishop took him on a 10-day road trip vacation.

The Pillar asked the Knoxville diocese whether those gifts and expenditures are comparable to outlays for other diocesan seminarians, but the diocese declined to comment.

After Sobczuk was dismissed from St. Meinrad’s in 2021 he remained classified as a diocesan seminarian. Concerned about the impact of the 2019 allegation on the Knoxville Catholic community, the diocesan review board attempted its own investigation of the matter.

While that investigation was organized under the aegis of the diocesan review board, Stika unilaterally replaced the initial investigator appointed by the board before his investigation got underway, because, the bishop told The Pillar last year, he “was asking all these questions.”

In addition, Stika and the Knoxville diocese are also facing litigation on charges that the bishop did not act to discipline or remove a priest for nearly two years after the priest was accused of sexually assaulting a grieving parishioner.

More details on this assault can be found here.

The Vatican last year commissioned Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville to investigate allegations against Stika, after the Congregation for Bishops received approximately 10 complaints about the bishop’s leadership, which included concerns about his relationship with Sobczuk, in order to concerns about erratic behaviour and fiscal imprudence.

While Kurtz has reportedly filed a report with Vatican officials, no action has yet been announced.

Even if Stika has just been unlucky in attracting so much trouble, the best you could say is that he has no business being a bishop. How did he end up a bishop and why hasn't he been removed??

Why is the Vatican dragging its heals over this man?