The principal of Fenwick High School in the mid-1990s — now superintendent for Diocese of Joliet schools — let a male teacher finish out the academic year at the elite Catholic institution in Oak Park after learning the man may have been having sex with female students, according to a lawsuit brought by an accuser and recently settled in secrecy.
Filed in Cook County in 2022 against the ex-principal, James Quaid, and Fenwick, the lawsuit said the decision to let social studies teacher Matthew Dineen remain at the school for those extra months led to more alleged sexual abuse suffered by the girls.
The suit accused the school of conducting a “sham” investigation seemingly designed to clear Dineen, and failing to notify authorities about the accusations — even though that was required under state law — or girls’ parents.
Fenwick also didn’t document anything in Dineen’s personnel records — essentially white-washing matters so he would be able to get another teaching job, the suit says.
Indeed, Dineen was subsequently hired in a school district in Maine where he groomed, kissed and groped a 16-year-old girl, leading to a 2010 conviction on a charge of unlawful sexual touching and given jail time, records show.
Fenwick officials “intentionally placed the reputation of Fenwick over the truth, and over the safety and well-being of its female students,” the lawsuit alleges. “As a proximate result of Fenwick High School’s failure to adequately investigate and/or report Matthew Dineen’s acts of pedophilia, Matthew Dineen continued to sexually abuse.”
Dineen declined to comment.
Court records show the lawsuit was settled in November, but neither side would discuss specifics, including if any money was paid out to the accuser and, if so, how much.
Lawsuits filed in 2023 by two other women who attended Fenwick when Dineen was there and accused him of sexually assaulting them also were recently settled with the school, where annual tuition hovers around $20,000.
Quaid — who also has worked at Marmion Academy in Aurora, St. Rita High School on the South Side and DePaul College Prep on the North Side — declined comment, saying, “This matter has been settled and is subject to confidentiality.”
But Quaid insisted in sworn testimony for the case his priority has always been students.
“My overriding concern with everything is the safety of the kids,” he said in the 2023 deposition. “That’s it.”
If Fenwick’s internal investigation into the accusations against Dineen did not go “far enough,” Quaid said, “it was not in any way to protect him over the children.”
Quaid’s boss, Bishop Ron Hicks, wouldn’t comment. He oversees the Joliet diocese, the arm of the church for DuPage, Kendall and Will counties that includes several dozen Catholic elementary schools and a half-dozen Catholic high schools.
Nor would Hicks’ previous boss, Cardinal Blase Cupich, who oversees the Archdiocese of Chicago. That’s the arm of the church for Cook and Lake counties, encompassing Fenwick.
Why the school agreed to settle the cases with confidentiality provisions is unclear.
These days the church generally frowns on such secrecy because non-disclosure agreements were used for so many years to hide the clergy sex abuse scandal and were seen as helping to perpetuate misconduct and protect the guilty parties from public scrutiny. After the biggest wave of the crisis surfaced in 2002, church reforms were enacted discouraging confidential settlements, unless desired by victims.
Fenwick officials declined to comment.
Michael Mertz, an attorney for all three female accusers, said he can’t comment. His clients all filed the lawsuits anonymously under variations of the pseudonym “Jane Doe.”
Along with Saint Ignatius College Prep on the West Side and Loyola Academy in Wilmette, among others, Fenwick has long been considered a top-tier Catholic high school in the region, with ex-Gov. Pat Quinn among the notable alumni.
Though in some ways answerable to Cupich, Fenwick is more directly overseen by the Dominican religious order, which has been among the more secretive Catholic groups in the Chicago area when it comes to disclosing which members have been credibly accused of sex abuse over the years.
Most dioceses and archdioceses — jurisdictions of the church based on geography — now have publicly available lists of credibly accused clerics, embracing transparency as a means of healing for the victims in the decades-long abuse scandal and living the church’s stated values of love and truth.
Many male religious orders — which often have a specific mission, follow in the mold of a particular saint and transcend borders — also have public lists of their child-molesting priests and religious brothers.
The Dominicans’ Midwest province, based in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, was a long-time holdout on coming clean, with its leaders pledging to create a list, then reneging, then reversing course in 2022 and releasing a public log of allegedly abusive members.
But it’s been criticized as purposely incomplete, with an alumnus who attended Fenwick in the 1960s telling the Chicago Sun-Times that a Fenwick priest had him strip naked back then so he could take photos of him — something the cleric, the late Rev. John Gambro, may have done with other minors as well, according to interviews.
The accuser said he and his parents told Fenwick leaders about Gambro while he was still enrolled there decades ago.
Yet, Gambro wasn’t on the original list of 13 accused current and former Dominicans from the Chicago province.
The Sun-Times asked the Rev. Louis Morrone, the head of the province, about this in 2023, and received no response. Then in August, Gambro’s name appeared on the Dominican list — with an online acknowledgment that the order had known about at least some of Gambro’s misdeeds since 2002.
Morrone, who’s on Fenwick’s board, still won’t comment.
Told of the Dineen accusations, the Gambro accuser sees “parallels” to Gambro in that the priest “was allowed to continue teaching for the rest of the school year” at Fenwick before landing at another school out of state.
He says he was treated brusquely by administrators after reporting Gambro, who records show came back to Fenwick in 1978 and stayed until 2002.
When Gambro died in 2021, his order lauded him as “an accomplished teacher . . . well-respected by his students.”
The Sun-Times has done a series of stories about incomplete church accounting on the abuse scandal, leaving the public lacking information about the scope of child rape by clergy and the culpability of clerical enablers.
Most public lists, including the one from the Dominicans, only include clerics and not laymen such as Dineen, although a few U.S. dioceses do name non-clergy offenders, as reformers say more should do.
Officials with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and Oak Park police say they could find no records that an abuse accusation was ever reported about Dineen.
One of the recently settled lawsuits says: “Under the guise of furthering his duties as a teacher . . . Dineen sought and gained Plaintiff’s trust, friendship, admiration and obedience. As a result, Jane Doe was conditioned to comply with Matthew Dineen’s direction and to look to him as an authority figure.”
“During the 1995-1996 academic year, Fenwick . . . knew or should have known that Matthew Dineen spent significant after-class time with Jane Doe, where he used this time on campus to groom Jane Doe and set up his blackmail of her by giving her answers to tests and quizzes,” which was also done to other female students.
The suit says Dineen used the “grooming and blackmail to sexually abuse its student.”
The suit says Dineen would attend “student parties where alcohol was consumed and where he sexually abused Jane Doe,” and he was able to do this because Fenwick “failed to adequately supervise him, fostered a toxic and misogynistic atmosphere, and failed to protect its students.”
For decades Fenwick was all-boys, until the early 1990s when girls were admitted.
When Quaid became aware in 1996 that Dineen might have been allegedly sexually abusing female students, the principal spoke to one of the girls and said: “I am going to ask you a question, and if the answer is ‘Yes’ you will be kicked out of school. Are you having an affair with Mr. Dineen?’” according to the lawsuit.
The suit portrayed that interaction in March of that year as Quaid victim-shaming and bullying the girl “into denying Matthew Dineen’s sexual abuse had occurred.”
Quaid said in his deposition that he didn’t remember the conversation but “I remember I never said anything like that in my life.”
Dineen was allowed to keep teaching at the school for another couple of months until the end of the academic year, at which time he left his teaching post and role as a boys’ hockey coach.
The lawsuit says Fenwick’s president at the time, the Rev. Dan Davis, agreed with Quaid in letting Dineen finish out the school year. Davis declined to comment.
Fenwick “should have noted the sexual abuse allegations” in Dineen’s personnel file, but didn’t, the suit says. Instead, it said the school “was not renewing his contract due to staffing reasons, not because it feared he was a sexual predator.”
The lawsuit says Dineen was also “acting in an inappropriate manner” with several other Fenwick students beyond the three accusers in the litigation — and the school once “reprimanded” a teacher there who raised concerns.
Most of those girls were not interviewed by school officials to find out what if anything transpired, but officials did talk to Dineen, according to the suit. They “accepted his denials.”
Some of the girls were abused by Dineen at Fenwick, according to the litigation.
By 2010, Dineen was employed by Gardiner Area High School in Maine, serving as a boys’ hockey coach and a girls’ soccer coach.
Police records say he aggressively pursued an underage girl there. Once, as she sat on the bench and he sat next to her he “asked her how she liked soccer and then stated to her that they should have sex.”
In a separate incident in his car, “he leaned over and began kissing her and . . . put his hand on her inner thigh and moved it up her body and touched her breast outside her shirt,” records show.
School leaders in Maine eventually learned something might be going on and flagged local police.
They investigated and arrested Dineen, who was convicted of a misdemeanor charge and sentenced to several months in jail and probation.
Authorities also discovered Dineen had used his school district email account to send or receive messages of “a sexual and inappropriate nature.”