Area Clergymen Found Selves in Harm’s Way

A small plaque on an interior wall of the Catholic Charities building on West 9th Street hints at the crime.

“Father John B. Thom. He was a gentle priest.”

Men and women of the cloth, of any denomination, can be victims of violence because they often minister to troubled souls.

“It’s a risk of the profession,” said Msgr. Francis J. Weber, archivist for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

In July 1965, Father Thom was serving as interim summer secretary for Cardinal James Francis McIntyre at the chancery office, where Catholic Charities is today. Thom, 32, was just six years out of the seminary. Handsome and athletic, he had passed up a chance to play professional baseball to enter the priesthood.

Dorothy Margaret Bressie, 55, had been demanding to see the cardinal for days. Her husband had divorced her more than 10 years earlier, in 1952. She had asked the church to help her secure an annulment, but the church had refused.

In the spring of 1965, she had been dismissed from her job as a hospital nurse for “emotional instability.”

When she couldn’t get in to see McIntyre, she made an appointment with Thom under another name. On July 23, she and Thom went into a conference room, and moments later she pulled out a derringer and opened fire.

Weber was nearby in the hallway when the shooting started.

“I thought someone was driving a nail into the wall,” he said. “Then Thom opened the door to the lobby [and] fell across the threshold, gasping, ‘My God, I have been shot, I have been shot.’ ”

Bressie calmly put down her gun at one end of a conference table and seated herself at the other to await the police.

“She just walked in, and bang, it was over,” Weber said.

Thom was struck by twin bullets from the .32-caliber derringer. One hit his heart, the other his head.

Bressie admitted the killing but wouldn’t say why she had done it.

“I’ll take the reason with me to the electric chair,” she said.

Days earlier, she had hired a private detective to check her home for listening devices. The man found nothing. Then she asked him to help her “against the Catholic conspiracy.” He refused and told her to see a doctor, according to Weber and a Times news story about the crime.

She told the detective: “Be sure to watch the papers. That’ll explain it all to you in the next few days.”

After the killing, the archdiocese found a letter from Bressie in its files. She’d written that she was being “tormented by Catholics and their collaborators.”

Bressie was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to Patton State Hospital, a mental facility near San Bernardino.

She escaped briefly in April 1967 but was recaptured when she aroused a bank teller’s suspicions as she tried to cash a check.

The next year, Bressie was released after a sanity hearing. No public records indicate what happened to her after that. The church doesn’t know either.

“For years, the switchboard had a note tacked up to call a special number if she ever came into our building again,” Weber said.

He and Thom had been in the seminary together. While Thom was in high school, Weber said, the Cleveland Indians offered him a $50,000 contract to play ball, but Thom turned it down to follow his religious calling. One of his brothers, William, went on to serve as mayor of Anaheim in the 1970s.

Thom was also a skillful carpenter with a sharp sense of humor, Weber said.

“He was a great guy,” he said, who “prayed an hour every day and was totally devoid of personal ambition.”

Weber himself had a close call in April 1976, while he was pastor at San Buenaventura Mission in Ventura.

A knife-wielding man ran into church during Lent and chased out some parochial schoolchildren. When Weber saw the children pouring out the door, he said, he assumed that they were just tired of praying.

Then the principal told him what had happened.

Weber went inside to investigate. “I found a lone man piously kneeling in a pew,” he recalled. “I never noticed his weapon. I asked him if he’d seen a man with a knife. He glared at me and said he was Jesus Christ and then slashed my arm” and groin.

Weber escaped, locked the man in the church and called police. They found the assailant standing naked on the altar, a Bible in one hand and a knife in the other.

Then a policewoman walked in. The assailant, evidently a modest man, grabbed his clothes and surrendered.

He turned out to be an Ojai house painter who was having an LSD flashback, Weber said. Later, when his assailant asked him to drop the charges, Weber obliged.

“It was Cardinal Timothy Manning who suggested that I was now a ‘confessor for the faith,’ ” Weber said, a special designation for those who shed blood or otherwise suffer for their religion and live to tell about it. “But when I asked what perks went with the role, he suggested that I could have the term chiseled onto my tombstone. My hint about a raise in salary fell on deaf ears.”

Weber also related an earlier instance of violence against a local priest.

In November 1942, a hysterical woman called St. Vibiana’s Cathedral looking for a young priest who had counseled her two years earlier. The woman, a nurse, said she was going to kill herself but wanted to talk with Father Gustavo Gonzales first. County-USC Medical Center, where Gonzales had been chaplain, had fired the woman for stealing and using drugs.

Gonzales, 29, rushed over to try to save her. By the time he got there, she had calmed down and even offered him a cup of coffee.

He began to drink it but quickly realized something was wrong: His hostess had spiked it with cyanide. He called the cathedral, slumped into a chair and died.

The nurse called a neighbor to help her determine that Gonzales was dead. Then she drank the rest of the poisoned coffee.

Today, Weber thinks of the gentle souls who died ministering to others as martyrs for the Catholic faith.

They demonstrate how dangerous it can be to do God’s work.