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Don't Ask, Don't Tell
For 40 years, the Episcopal Church of Texas turned a blind eye to a priest who was sexually molesting male students.

..."I wrote them a letter, and I said, 'That's a big mistake. You guys are going to get bit in the ass for starting a scholarship in Jim Tucker's name,'" Haslanger says.

This warning was summarily ignored. A single accusation of child molestation was not going to gum up the gears of the fund-raising machine.

But about ten years later, another accusation surfaced. And another. And then another, this one from the Episcopal church and school in Houston where Tucker worked after St. Stephen's.

That's when the Episcopal Diocese of Texas went back and looked at Woodruff's notes from his 1993 talk with Haslanger. And that's when diocesan officials figured they had a problem on their hands: It looked like, for the past 40 years, a series of diocesan and school authorities had conspired to cover up allegations of sexual abuse. Now the school and diocese are facing a $45 million lawsuit for that cover-up. And now, say Haslanger and the other two plaintiffs, the diocese is abusing them all over again....

...During a July 2007 Houston Press interview about the allegations against Tucker, diocese spokeswoman Carol Barnwell chuckled over the idea of a "conspiracy." How ludicrous.

Either Barnwell wasn't being candid, or her boss didn't fill her in on the fact that the diocese had hired a risk analysis company to investigate the allegations and had, three months earlier, outlined clear evidence that there was in fact a conspiracy among St. Stephen's and diocesan authorities. And, in September 2007, the diocese released a summary of that investigation, which substantiated Haslanger's claim that he told Becker about the abuse in 1966, and that Becker did nothing.

Instead, Becker's response to continued allegations was to tell the St. Stephen's community that Tucker had heart disease and was leaving Austin for St. James Episcopal Church in Houston. Apparently, this satisfied everyone — no one questioned why Houston was better for his heart than Austin.

Then again, Becker's word was gold, especially among the more progressive families who sent their children to St. Stephen's. According to a 2000 article in Focus on St. Stephen's (an alumni publication), when Becker "was offered the position of headmaster [in 1957], he accepted on one condition — that the school 'remove race as a criterion for admission.'" The school had long been coeducational, but, reflective of the time, the school's trustees found the idea of black students studying alongside white students unpalatable...