Bruce Ritter

Rev. Bruce Ritter (February 25, 1927 – October 7, 1999) was a Catholic priest and one-time Franciscan friar who founded the charity Covenant House in 1972 for homeless teenagers. By the 1980s, it had grown to an $87 million agency, operating numerous large centers in New York and six other major United States cities, as well as locations in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Latin America.

In 1990 Ritter was forced to resign from Covenant House after widespread reports that he had engaged in sexual relations with several young boys in the care of the charity, and had financial improprieties in the operations of the organization. It was one of the most widely publicized cases of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, which was revealed to be widespread over the next two decades. He also left the Franciscans, but retained his priestly faculties. He retired to a small town in upstate New York.

John Ritter was born in Trenton, New Jersey and grew up in nearby Hamilton Township. His father died in 1931 when he was four, and his mother struggled financially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, raising five children on a widow's pension and a series of odd jobs. Ritter graduated from Hamilton High School in 1945, worked briefly in a local industry, and joined the United States Navy near the end of World War II.

In 1947 following the war, he took the name Bruce when he entered the Order of Friars Minor Conventuals. He transferred for a time to explore monastic life as a Trappist, but returned. Ritter was ordained as a Franciscan in 1956. He completed his doctoral thesis on The Primacy and the Council of Florence at the Conventual seminary in Rome in 1959, but never revised or published it in an academic journal. After a series of short-term teaching assignments at a variety of Franciscan institutions, Ritter arrived at Manhattan College in the Bronx to teach theology in 1963.

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