What not to do: Bishop Miege HS president phones woman filing complaint about him | Opinion
Around 10 p.m. on Tuesday, May 27, Taylor Kelsey, a Wichita doula and mom of three, sent emails to a bunch of officials at Bishop Miege High School in Roeland Park, where Phil Baniewicz is president. She also sent some to Maur Hill-Mount Academy in Atchison, Kan., where he was president until two years ago, and to the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. In these messages, one of which she sent to Baniewicz himself, she said that she was coming forward to complain about what she considered a highly traumatic and inappropriate closed-door meeting when she was a student at Maur Hill. She did not accuse him of touching her.
Kelsey was in school with three of his children, all of whom she holds in high regard, and that’s why she hadn’t complained before, she said. But with her own oldest child about to go to kindergarten, trust is on her mind.
In the email to Miege, Kelsey said that when she was at Maur Hill, in the class of 2015, she had a one-on-one, closed-door meeting with Baniewicz. He started on the other side of the desk, she told me, but then moved around to sit on the same side of the desk, speaking about sexuality and purity and saying he wanted to pray with her. In the emails, she asked that Miege and the archdiocese remove Baniewicz “from any role that gives him authority over youth. The risk is too great.”
Baniewicz, about whom I raised these same concerns in a 4,500-word piece in April of 2024, has now been suspended while the archdiocese investigates “his ability to oversee a safe environment.”
A day after receiving the email, Kelsey said, Baniewicz picked up the phone and called her — initially denying that anything like what she was reporting had happened, and then saying that it hadn’t happened as she said it had.
Whatever the investigation finds and the diocese decides to do, anybody who calls someone accusing him of not understanding appropriate boundaries has not helped himself.
He did not respond to a message asking in particular about his call to Kelsey, as well as about the broader allegations. I did speak to someone helping the archdiocese with communications, who told me nothing more can be said right now, to protect the investigation.
Central question never answered
Kelsey’s story is nearly identical to one I reported from another former student in that piece last year, which asked how fully vetted Baniewicz really had been.
My main question then, to officials and in print, was whether, in focusing solely on whether Baniewicz had sexually abused a 14-year-old boy in 1985, as he’d been accused of doing, they had ignored other concerns. Like, for instance, the potential failure to protect others from the highly sexualized environment that, according to a criminal indictment and news accounts, he’d been bringing kids into all those years ago.
Baniewicz was accused of sexually assaulting a boy in the rectory of St. Timothy Catholic Church in Mesa, Ariz.. No criminal charges were ever filed against him. The Diocese of Phoenix settled a 2005 civil suit against him and two priests for $100,000. Both priests accused in the suit pleaded guilty to different crimes involving minors.
One of them, former Father Mark Lehman, is a convicted pedophile who served 10 years in prison for the sexual abuse of a girl at St. Thomas the Apostle Roman Catholic School in Phoenix. He was also sentenced to lifetime parole for the sexual abuse of three other girls and one boy.
The other man accused in that civil suit, former Monsignor Dale Fushek, describes Baniewicz as “like a son to me” in his memoir, and together, the two men founded a popular charismatic program called Life Teen, in which Baniewicz still participates. It’s having a conference at Benedictine College in Atchison later this month.
Fushek was accused of fondling seven boys and young men and was initially charged with three counts of assault, five counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and two counts of indecent exposure. After one of Fushek’s alleged victims died, he took the plea deal offered by prosecutors and avoided five separate trials by pleading guilty to a single count of misdemeanor assault. The Maricopa County Attorney, Andrew Thomas, said at the time that he couldn’t believe that the crimes in question weren’t felonies.
What grooming looks like
Fushek’s indictment said that between 1984 and 1994, he fondled boys, walked around naked in front of them, invited one into his bed and asked another to join him naked in a hot tub. Prosecutors also said Fushek conducted “sham confessions” in which he asked question after question about the sex lives of boys for his own gratification. That’s a behavior known as grooming.
As I said in the piece last year, the written response I received then from the diocese, which I was told to take as a joint answer from Baniewicz, Miege and the archdiocese, never did address my central question of whether the diocese had ever looked at that environment instead of at that one allegation. Instead, the answer only professed shock that I was asking such a thing.
None of Baniewicz’s many defenders could or would say whether any Catholic institution, in the years since Baniewicz left Arizona, had looked at the broader context of the world Baniewicz had come out of and had brought kids into. Yet before my piece ran, Miege put a letter out to the school community asking everyone to remember that news reports sometimes lack context. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I did not laugh.
The letter attached some talking points for parents, labeled, “Phil Positive Points.” The statement sent to me did say, though, that the new president had already “increased year-over-year enrollment” and had “motivated alumni.”
After the story came out, and all of this was laid out in detail, Miege and the diocese not only continued to stand by Baniewicz, but continued to pretend that the only issue being raised was whether or not he had sexually assaulted Billy Cesolini — now an award-winning teacher of children with special needs — at St. Timothy’s.
‘I have been so careful at Bishop Miege’
She didn’t know it, but the Tuesday that Taylor Kelsey took a deep breath and sent those emails — “I was nervous, but I’d thought about it for so long that I was ready” — was by complete coincidence the same day that new Archbishop Shawn McKnight was installed, succeeding Archbishop Joseph Naumann., who was retiring after 20 years.
On Wednesday, Kelsey said, “the archdiocese got back to me and said, ‘This is concerning. Can we speak to you about this?’“
So on Thursday morning, when she saw a 913 area code pop up on her phone, she figured it was someone from the diocese again. “I pick up, and it’s Phil f****ing Baniewicz! He was like, ‘Taylor, what is this?’ The archdiocese was furious,” after she told the investigator she spoke to later that same day what had happened. “They were very apologetic.”
At first, Kelsey said, Baniewicz tried to tell her that such a meeting had never occurred, and later in the call, said that it had, but that he at no point had moved to her side of the desk. “I said yes, it did, and yes, you did. He said, ‘If you’re going to talk about it, say I was trying to bring you to God.’ I said, ‘Phil, I know.’ She does not think of him as a bad guy, she told me, but one who has done a lot of harm all the same.
“He told me, ‘I have been so careful at Bishop Miege.’ I don’t even know what that means, but it means even he is aware” of something. “I said, ‘I believe you, Phil.’ This is him on his best behavior. … He said, ‘What are you after, a smear campaign?’ I said no, I want you to get a new job.’ “
When they got off the phone, she said, he told her to call him if she needed anything. Which she did not take as an offer of a bribe, but just more not knowing where the lines are.
She sent him a text thanking him for the call, but telling him she was going forward with the complaint all the same. The more she thought about it, though, the more she felt that he’d called her to manipulate her: “I started feeling like he wanted me to not talk.”
Unlike Kelsey, however, who feels that the archdiocese has responded quickly and appropriately, also giving her therapeutic support, the former Maur Hill student who talked to me a year ago, Parker Valdez, never received any response to her complaint to the archdiocese.
I asked her again on Monday about that and she said, “I wrote an actual letter and signed it. I sent it directly to Naumann. I put my email and a phone number on it and said I was happy to answer any questions. I never heard a peep.”
That does not mean that Naumann received it, of course, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t, either. I asked a spokeswoman for the diocese about it and have not yet gotten a response. In any case, the diocese did know of her complaint, because it was all in my story in The Star.
‘Dad talks’ about sex
The night before Baniewicz’s June 5 suspension was announced, Valdez told me, she had seen that Baniewicz had been a guest on Naumann’s podcast and “I went to bed feeling so defeated,” like no one was ever going to care about what she saw as a clear abuse of power. Then she woke up, saw the news, and “cried so many tears of relief,” she told me that same day. “Today I feel validation.”
On Monday, Valdez sent an email about her own experience with Baniewicz, this time to multiple officials in the archdiocese. It said in part, “Although he never physically touched me, his actions constituted sexual abuse of a minor. He exploited his position of power to manipulate, sexualize, and control me in ways that were deeply violating. The absence of physical contact does not lessen the harm — the abuse was emotional, psychological, and spiritual, and it left lasting damage.
“This is my second time reaching out to the Archdiocese to express concerns about Phil Baniewicz and his fitness to lead in environments that serve children. … Unfortunately, my experience was not even dignified with a response. I can only hope that this time, my words will be taken seriously and given the consideration they deserve.
“My experience is not hearsay or speculation — it is firsthand and personal. For two years (2016-2018), I was subjected to behavior from Mr. Baniewicz that was manipulative, boundary-violating, and emotionally abusive, particularly under the guise of spiritual guidance and pastoral care. He often described himself as a ‘father figure’ to students and used this position to initiate what he called ‘dad talks’— which were, in reality, deeply invasive interrogations about students’ personal lives, relationships, and bodies.”
Do I still need to say how hard it is to do what these young women have done in going public? When Valdez did so last year, in print as well as by post, and then was ignored, that was awful. I am actually hopeful that these complaints will be fully investigated now.
But it’s still frightening to me, after all my church and everyone in it has been through, that not only Phil Baniewicz but all of those who have defended him, and profited from his prolific fundraising, either can’t or won’t even see the boundaries that Taylor Kelsey and Parker Valdez are talking about. I do hope we all know by now that not touching kids is not the same thing as keeping them safe.
This story was originally published June 10, 2025 at 9:32 AM.
