Gerald Renner, 75; writer broke ground on priest abuse

Gerald Renner, who won international recognition for his pioneering reporting in the Hartford Courant on allegations of sexual abuse within a Roman Catholic religious order, died Wednesday at Norwalk Hospital in Connecticut after a battle with abdominal cancer. He was 75.

Renner joined the Courant as a religion writer in 1985, after serving as editor and director of Religion News Service in New York and vice president of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Earlier, he worked as a reporter in the Navy, at a newspaper in Pennsylvania and for United Press in Washington, D.C.

Until his retirement in 2000, Renner wrote hundreds of news and feature stories on religious topics for the Courant. The Courant and The Times are both owned by Tribune Co.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, Renner reached his widest audience with a series of articles and a book he co-wrote about the Legionaries of Christ, a secretive and conservative Roman Catholic order with an American headquarters in Connecticut.

In 1989, he began researching the rapidly growing order, which was founded in Mexico in 1941 by the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, and enjoyed close relations with the Vatican.

Renner published his first Courant article about the order in 1996. He teamed with writer Jason Berry of New Orleans, the author of an early book about sexual abuse by Catholic priests, to produce an in-depth story on Maciel in the Courant the following year.

The article documented how, after decades of silence, nine former seminarians from Mexico and Spain accused Maciel of abusing them in European seminaries from the 1940s to the 1960s.

“Jerry was particularly a delight to work with,” Berry said, “because he was trained like a laser to get the facts, but never at the expense of being unfair to people.”

Renner and Berry teamed up on a book, “Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II,” which was favorably reviewed. The book, published in 2004, argued that Pope John Paul II had protected Maciel and that the church covered up other reports of sexual abuse by priests. “Vows of Silence” was credited with helping to force the Vatican to remove Maciel from the active priesthood in 2006.

The Rev. Richard McBrien, a University of Notre Dame theologian who was interviewed by Renner several times, said: “Renner, Berry and the Courant blew the whistle on the priestly pedophilia crisis way before anyone else in a really groundbreaking way. The Legion people were very upset, but they couldn’t lay a glove on Renner because the facts were so solid.”

Renner, a native of Philadelphia, served in the Navy from 1951 to 1955, part of that time aboard the battleship Missouri. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1959 and was the recipient of the Templeton Prize awarded by the Religion Newswriters Assn.

He is survived by his wife, Jacqueline Breen Renner; four daughters; a son; and 10 grandchildren.