Tragedy Shatters Headmaster’s Dream Murder Puts Cloud Over Holy Cross

Father Gregory Wendt’s dream rose from the fields of West Kendall like a medieval vision.

A school built in the 1980s to look as though it had endured since the 1580s, with carved stone arches and gold-topped turrets. Classrooms where black-robed instructors taught the ancient tongues of Greek and Latin to rows of neatly uniformed students. A monastery where Ukrainian monks-in-training labored in somber garb under vows of poverty and obedience, devoting their lives to Eastern Catholic ideals.

And, presiding over it all at Holy Cross Academy: Headmaster Wendt, a bearded, six-foot-four-inch priest whose usual choice of attire included a pope-like hat and imposing black robes.

Then, during Sunday morning Mass on March 25, the dream was ripped at the seams: The school’s bookkeeper, a woman studying to be a nun, turned up dead. Sister Michelle Lewis died in a pool of blood in her room on campus, stabbed more than 90 times.

And the accused killer? One of Wendt’s monks-in-training.

But the young man from the Ukraine didn’t stop after confessing his own sins. Mikhaylo Kofel, 18, lobbed an explosive accusation of his own. He told police he had been sexually abused for years by Wendt and the school’s second in command, Father Damian Gibault.

The murder has thrust the monastic community and school under the microscope of police, prosecutors and the media.

Though lawyers for Wendt, 56, and Gibault, 46, denied the allegations, investigators quickly focused on the seven youths Wendt had recruited from the impoverished Carpathian mountains of Ukraine – some as young as 14 – to enter the monastery at the school. They questioned his motives for adopting one of the young men and attempting to adopt another.

Even immigration officials and social workers opened investigations. All that Wendt has labored to build at Holy Cross – his spiritual vision, his showcase of Byzantine Catholicism – has been thrown into jeopardy.

”They were working day and night for years to get it off the ground,” said Anthonia Noels, a plastic surgeon in the Netherlands who is one of Wendt’s oldest friends and a Holy Cross board member. ”It was a very hard time. It took years before they could put up a permanent building.”

CONTROL WAS EXTENSIVE

Headmaster kept a video eye on the students and monks

Wendt oversaw every part of the school. Nothing got past him, not even the movements of students and monks, captured on video cameras installed in every corner of the school complex.

A 1999 copy of the faculty handbook warns that because Holy Cross is independent of the church, ”it is inappropriate, and, in fact, useless to contact the bishops. There is no higher authority to whom to direct a suggestion, concern, complaint, or appeal than the Chancellor-Headmaster who is the president and highest authority regarding this corporation.”

But all that control couldn’t prevent the moment of uncontrolled rage that left Lewis dead and the future of the school in question.

”[Wendt] is very depressed at the moment,” Noels said. ”He takes it all very seriously and worries a lot.”

Wendt, who grew up in Miami, felt a pull toward the priesthood early in life. He enrolled in St. John Vianny Seminary in Miami in 1959, when he was just 16.

But it wasn’t until he attended St. Bernard’s Abbey in Cullman, Ala., in 1963, that he was exposed to the Byzantine Rite, a more traditional form of Roman Catholicism that would become his driving passion, according to a biography released by the school’s public relations firm, Wragg & Casas.

“I fell in love with the Byzantine Rite,” he would say later.

INTERVAL IN NETHERLANDS

Wendt `was very serious about his calling as priest and monk’

After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Alabama College – now the University of Montevallo – Wendt followed his spiritual advisor back to Miami, where he and a group of other monks intended to found a monastery.

But he was temporarily sidetracked in his mission by an offer to study theology in the Netherlands for four years. It was there that he met Noels.

”He was very serious about his calling as a priest and a monk. And apart from that, he is quite a likable man,” Noels said in a phone interview from her home in Nijmegan.

She said Wendt was a serious musician as well, studying the organ and the harpsichord. Their friendship flourished even after Wendt ventured back to the United States in 1970 to be ordained in his home church of St. Hugh’s in Coconut Grove by Oklahoma Bishop Victor Reed.

He followed Reed to Oklahoma, serving as a priest there until 1973, when he returned to Miami to work at St. Basil’s, a Byzantine Catholic church that fed his desire for the more traditional rites. After another stint in the Netherlands to complete his postdoctoral studies, he decided to switch from Latin Rite to Byzantine Rite in 1978.

The next year, he founded the Monastery of the Three Holy Hierarchs in Lantana, on land owned by the Passaic eparchy, or diocese, with the blessing of now-retired Bishop Michael Dudick.

By all accounts, the venture was a failure. At something of a cross between a farm and a monastery, the monks tended beehives, goats and chickens as they tried to renovate an airplane hangar for a chapel.

Members of a new parish in the area, the Holy Apostles Catholic Church, did not yet have a church building and met a few times in the chapel at the Lantana monastery.

”It was a mess over there,” former parishioner Andy Denick said. ”We didn’t want to have anything to do with that monastery. It was constantly under construction.”

Parishioner George Brodi said that on the few occasions when services were held there, ”all you could hear was slapping coming from the other rooms. People were slapping mosquitoes. The place was infested.”

The bishop closed the monastery in 1980, less than two years after it opened. Wendt returned to Miami, sick with colitis.

But the monastery was not a total loss for Wendt. That’s where he met James Gibault, a seminarian 10 years Wendt’s junior who would become his loyal assistant at Holy Cross.
Gibault, who later took the religious name Damian, worked for two summers at Wendt’s monastery as part of his studies at St. Vincent de Paul seminary in Boynton Beach.

When Gibault was asked to take a leave of absence from the seminary – his superiors cited, in seminary documents, a possible drinking problem and concern about his ability to relate to others – he found a willing new spiritual advisor in Wendt.

The two embarked on a push to found a new monastery in Miami. For the next two years, they took teaching jobs. Gibault taught at Cardinal Gibbons High in Fort Lauderdale, then at LaSalle High in Miami. Wendt signed on at Gulliver Academy and then Columbus High, both in Miami.

In the meantime, Gibault completed his studies at St. Vincent de Paul, joining Wendt in the Byzantine Rite section of the Catholic Church. He began the process to become an ordained priest, a goal he would reach in 1992.

HOLY CROSS OPENED IN ’85

Current 15 acres of land assembled a little at a time

In 1985, Gibault and Wendt opened Holy Cross Academy, teaching students in makeshift classrooms in other churches for the next 16 months, until the first building opened.

Wendt and Gibault have come far since their spartan Lantana days.

In Miami, they bought a few acres at a time, eventually putting together the current 15-acre parcel. Holy Cross quickly became a multimillion-dollar nonprofit operation, with four active corporations, including Holy Cross Academy, Protection of the Mother of God, Monastery of the Exaltation of the Most Holy Cross, and Holy Protection Monastery.

Tax returns from 1996-98 show that Holy Cross Academy typically took in more than $3 million a year in revenue, almost all from tuition and fees. Its expenses were typically less than $3 million a year, creating a financial cushion. At the end of 1998, that cushion – the school’s net assets and fund balances – stood at $3.8 million, the tax returns show.

Tax returns for those years show that top staff was paid about $40,000 a year. The returns say Wendt and Gibault received no compensation.

Over the years, the private school also has qualified for several bank loans that helped it buy land and build facilities. Eastern National Bank gave the school a $3 million loan in 1996, for instance.

”For Eastern to give that kind of loan and that kind of money, they must have been checked out pretty good, because banks don’t give out millions that easily,” said lawyer Frank Segredo, who represented the bank.

Last year, Holy Cross Academy also won approval for a lucrative $8 million tax-exempt bond issue from the Miami-Dade County Industrial Development Authority that would allow the school to double in size and build new facilities.

Holy Cross, a private, nonprofit religious school, qualified for the bonds under a change in the law passed by the Legislature in 1998 that included private, nonprofit schools among entities eligible for such bond money.

EXPANSION ON HOLD

Spokeswoman says plans delayed by investigation

Why would a private school qualify for tax-exempt bonds typically associated with industry?

”We’re supporting the educational development of the community. And to go along with good industry, you need good education,” said James Wagner, the authority’s executive director.

But a school spokeswoman said the plans for expansion are now on hold, pending the investigation into the murder and sex-abuse allegations.

There’s very little left for Wendt to control these days.

His lawyers won’t let him talk. The school’s public relations firm releases statements for him. The bishop in Ukraine is now advising parents against sending more children to Wendt’s school until the investigations are completed.

Noels says Wendt can hardly believe the position he is in.

”He never thought it could happen.”

Herald staff writers David Kidwell, Manny Garcia, David Green and Luisa Yanez and researcher Elisabeth Donovan contributed to this report.