Seton Hall - ‘By faith, not by sight’

Seton Hall is pushing back on critics of its president. Will Catholics believe the university's claims?

When Msgr. Joseph Reilly was invested as president of Seton Hall University last November, Newark Cardinal Joseph Tobin hung from the priest’s neck a medallion bearing the symbol of the university: Mary, the Mother of God, holding a cross, and standing a scroll inscribed with the Latin motto of the bishop who founded Seton Hall: “Per fidem non per speciem.”

“By faith, not by sight.”

Cardinal Joseph Tobin congratulates Msgr. Joseph Reilly at his November 2024 presidential investiture at Seton Hall University. Credit: Seton Hall University/YouTube.

After the medal was hung around his neck, Reilly gave a stirring and humble oration, declaring three things about himself — “the Joe Reilly trifecta,” he called it.

“The first thing is that I love Jesus Christ,” he said. “The second thing is that I love being a priest. The final thing is that I love Seton Hall.”

In his remarks, Reilly emphasized that Christ is the center of his life, and that he is humbled to “make a gift of myself to the Lord in service as a priest.”

The priest emphasized a desire for his faith — and his love for Jesus Christ — to “define” his term of service at Seton Hall, and asked audience members, including civic leaders and ecclesiastical officials in attendance, to “hold me accountable.”

It was, by any account, stirring rhetoric, delivered by a priest who seemed convicted by the mission of leading the Archdiocese of Newark’s own diocesan university.

When Reilly was finished, Tobin himself took the podium.

The cardinal said the new president of his university was “truly a son of Seton Hall,” and that there were “few people who understand this place better than its new president.”

Predicting his presidency would lead to “remarkable achievements,” Tobin spoke directly to his priest:

“Joe,” Tobin said, “I have no doubt that you're the right person, at the right time, for Seton Hall.”

Whether that’s actually true is now a subject of public debate, and will soon be subject to a new forensic review.

The situation is this: Recently leaked documents suggest that Tobin had plenty of reason to doubt Reilly’s suitability for the position, because the priest reportedly failed to handle sexual abuse allegations appropriately.

But Seton Hall University says otherwise.

And despite public reporting suggesting that Reilly’s appointment was a scandal, the university’s leadership — including the Tobin-led board of regents — is pushing back, with Tobin recently hiring a law firm to review the law firm which previously investigated his university.

Tobin, and Seton Hall, have seemingly pushed all their chips into the center, calling recent reporting on Reilly outright false, and gearing up to prove their version of events.

But whatever facts emerge, Seton Hall’s push will be an uphill one, precisely because it comes in Newark, a diocese where Catholics are still waiting for forthright transparency on Theodore McCarrick, and because Reilly’s highest profile defender is a cardinal plagued by an ecclesial reputation for ambiguous situations and less-than-complete transparency about governance, especially on matters concerning sex.

In short, no matter how many lawyers Tobin hires to investigate his previous lawyers, at least some Catholics will assume he is not telling the truth — or at least not sharing all the facts.

The entire situation points to a challenge for bishops in recent years: Widely perceived to have promised transparency and not delivered, many now face a nearly insurmountable trust gap — not from an oppositional media, but from practicing Catholics themselves.

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If you ask Newark priests, a contingent will tell you that Msgr. Joe Reilly has a good reputation among them, for zeal, orthodoxy, and a love for Seton Hall.

The university itself is unique: one of few Catholic colleges in the U.S. to be the direct apostolate of a diocese, rather than be overseen by a religious community, as are most others.

Some Newark priests say that Reilly has had a vision for Catholic renewal at the college, and that he was especially a good candidate to unify the university after the tumultuous presidency of psychologist Joseph Nyre, who resigned in 2023 over clashes with the board, and whose hand-picked CFO uncovered almost $1 million in embezzlement at the university’s law school.

But Reilly’s term as rector of one of the university’s affiliated seminaries, which he led from 2012 until 2022, is now characterized by controversy of its own.

In 2018, Seton Hall, under Tobin’s leadership, began an independent investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and abuse of seminarians at Immactulate Conception Seminary and St. Andrew’s Hall, the archdiocesan college seminary.

In 2019, the independent investigation concluded in a public summary that federal Title IX policies “were not always followed at Immaculate Conception Seminary and St. Andrew's Seminary, which resulted in incidents of sexual harassment going unreported to the University.”

Reilly was not mentioned by name in the public summary. But Politico reported this month a pair of 2019 and 2020 letters from a university task force to Reilly, which both said that the priest was “aware of sexual harassment allegations involving ICS seminarians in or about summer and fall 2011 and did not report such allegations in SHU officials, in violation of the university’s Title IX policies.”

Both letters also said that as a result of Reilly’s failure to properly report abuse, the investigators’ report — dubbed a “responsive action plan” — “recommends that the Archbishop of Newark remove you from your position as rector of [Immaculate Conception Seminary]. The Responsive Action Plan also recommends that you be removed from your position on the [university board of trustees] and [board of overseers],” but that the priest should be permitted to remain on the university faculty.

Reilly was seemingly not removed as rector at the investigators’ recommendation — he remained in post until taking a sabbatical in 2022, and then took up a vice provost’s job a year later, before the presidency in 2024.

There is a dissonance between the recommendations of the 2019 and 2020 letters — which suggested that Reilly was going to fade from the spotlight — and what actually happened.

Seton Hall this week made some extraordinary claims on that front — including that the 2020 letter, which seemed to finalize the recommendations against Reilly, was never actually sent to priest — and that the task force recommendations were largely favorable to Reilly’s future at the university.

“The February 18, 2020 letter implying disciplinary action against Monsignor Reilly was never sent and Monsignor never saw it until it was reported in the Politico story,” Seton Hall told Inside Higher Ed this week.

Seton Hall officials also said that the investigation team ultimately recommended that Reilly remain “on the Board of Trustees and the Board of Overseers.”

And the university said there is a straightforward explanation to the charges that Reilly failed to properly address an allegation of clerical sexual abuse.

“Soon after becoming Rector/Dean of the Seminary in 2012, a seminarian approached Monsignor Reilly and conveyed an incident in which he felt he had been the victim of inappropriate behavior by a fellow seminarian,” a university spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed.

“After consulting with seminary faculty, Monsignor Reilly investigated the incident and found the claim credible. Taking action, he dismissed the offending seminarian from the seminary soon after the complaint,” the spokesperson said.

While Reilly observed archdiocesan processes, the spokesperson said, he did not know — until he later received Title IX training — that “he should have also communicated the incident with the University’s Title IX office.”

Seton Hall’s claim is that Reilly basically handled a situation well, but was ignorant of a particular reporting university requirement. If that were the entire question, the controversy might be resolved quickly.

The university did not disclose that the dismissed seminarian accused of misconduct remained enrolled at Seton Hall University, with non-seminary administrators having no idea of his issues at the seminary. In 2012, when rising rates of campus sexual assault were a national issue, that could seem a rather glaring omission. Still, given that he had not yet had Title IX training, and archdiocesan policy at the time did not call for public disclosures, Reilly could probably argue he was handling the situation “by the book,” and make a convincing case to at least some of his critics.

But Seton Hall’s leadership will likely have a harder time convincing Catholics that it never received a letter published by Politico, or that its task force made ultimately a contrary recommendation than the one in the published letter.

Of course, the same person, attorney Joseph LaSala, is a signatory on both the 2019 and 2020 letters published by Politico — and could likely verify directly whether he sent the 2020 letter that Seton Hall says was never mailed.

If he didn’t send it, LaSala would seem best positioned to explain why it was drafted, why it wasn’t sent, and what recommendations were ultimately made to the university and its leadership, including Tobin.

But to date LaSala, who was previously a member of the university board of regents, has not spoken out directly — leaving a confusing — and confused — set of claims unclarified.

Absent some affidavit from him, to resolve any of this favorably it seems likely that Seton Hall — and by extension the Archdiocese of Newark — will need eventually to release the entirety of the 2019 investigation it commissioned, the various special task force recommendations, and the entirety of its new 2025 investigation.

Without public disclosure of processes and records, Reilly is likely to face continued pressure in office, and for Tobin the issue will not go away.

In short, if the cardinal intends to stick by his president — and to prove that he didn’t ignore safe environment recommendations from his own task force or act duplicitously about that — he’ll have to do more than ask Catholics to believe summary statements or press releases.

In an archdiocese waiting now seven years for the release of long promised McCarrick records, few Catholics will be willing to believe in Tobin’s assurances “by faith, not by sight.”