Deacon on Leave, Ex-Pastor Mason Moves After Alleged Destruction of Child Porn

MASON, Ohio — Father Barry Stechschulte will begin his new assignment at several rural churches north of Dayton on October 14. He resigned as pastor of St. Susanna in Mason more than two months ago when hundreds of parishioners called for his departure.

His reassignment comes after a WCPO 9 I-Team investigation into the destruction of alleged child pornography on a parish computer that belonged to a different priest years earlier.

Meanwhile, Deacon Marty Brown, who told police he removed the computer’s hard drive and destroyed it with a blowtorch at Stechschulte’s request, has been placed on leave from active ministry.

“I cannot comment further as this is a personnel matter,” said Mike Schafer, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, who confirmed the leave.

Stechschulte announced in a message to St. Susanna parishioners on July 29 that he was stepping down. This came after more than 500 people signed a petition calling for his resignation following a WCPO 9 I-Team report showing he ordered the destruction of alleged child pornography and waited six years to report it to police while in a different parish.

He will now minister to a group of churches in the northwest section of the archdiocese near his hometown of Minster and not far from his old church, Holy Rosary in St. Mary’s, where he admitted ordering Brown to destroy a hard drive.

The archdiocese posted Stechschulte’s new assignment on its website: He will be named parochial vicar of a family of parishes that includes Holy Trinity, Coldwater; Mary Help of Christians, Ft. Recovery; San Antonio, San Antonio; Saint Joseph, Saint Joseph; Santa Maria, Filotea; St. Paul, Sharpsburg; and St. Peter, St. Peter.

Brown resigned as director of facilities at the parishes of St. Patrick and Holy Rosary in August. An Aug. 25 parish newsletter posting said the Parish and Holy Rosary School wanted to hire a full-time maintenance supervisor.

“Parents at St. Susanna asked Father Barry to step down and a number of parents at Holy Rosary asked their deacon to do the same, believing they had breached the Child Protection Decree and their trust,” according to a statement from Ohioans for Child Protection. co-founders Rebecca Surendorff and Teresa Dinwiddie-Hermann.

“Our Archbishop has allowed Father Barry to continue to entrust the moral guidance of another parish, while the deacon has stepped down. But when will our Archbishop be held accountable for his failures as a leader while these recent cases and others such as Father Drew, Father Barry, Father Cutcher, Seminarian Witt and more, were produced under his leadership,” they wrote.

While the I-Team report focused on former priest Tony Cutcher, it also revealed Stechschulte’s role in delaying public knowledge of what he did.

He went to the church of Sant Rosari de Santa Maria, a rural area full of churches with cross-points. Cutcher was pastor there for several years.

When Stechschulte arrived as the new pastor in July 2012, he and Brown told police they discovered what appeared to be child pornography while refurbishing an old desktop computer that Cutcher had used from a storage room.

“Father Barry said that when he looked at the computer he found two file folders, one containing male homosexual pornography, and the other file containing pictures of boys… he said he only remembered shirtless boys. I told him asking if the children were obviously minors with him saying ‘yes’ and that they were pre-teens, probably between 8 and 10 years old,” according to the St. Louis police report. Mary’s of 2018.

“She described the boys as being in provocative positions. She again said she couldn’t remember the nudity or not, but it might have been,” Stechschulte told police, according to the report.

The police were never able to determine if anything illegal existed on that computer’s hard drive.

The deacon told police he removed the computer’s hard drive and destroyed it with a blowtorch at Stechschulte’s request, according to the police report.

“Father Barry said at the time that he did not realize the repercussions of not disclosing what they had found. Father Barry again said he should not have destroyed the evidence,” according to the police report.

Cutcher was never charged with a crime.

Just over two years later, Montgomery County prosecutors investigated Cutcher in 2021 for sending hundreds of text messages to a 14-year-old boy while he was pastor of St. Peter in Huber Heights.

Cutcher resigned from active ministry in April 2021, following a scandal at the parish.

Stechschulte, however, moved on from Holy Rosary to become pastor of a much larger church: St. Susanna, where he also oversaw a school.

“I understand that the information in this report is distressing to many of you and may affect your trust in me as a pastor…I instructed that the hard drive be destroyed. I realize that not reporting this was a terrible mistake, which I am sorry for,” Fr. Barry Stechschulte wrote in a July 12 letter to the Santa Susanna community, days after the WCPO report.