Boston Priest Defrocked by Vatican

Yahoo News ^ | July 29, 2005

[NYer]

The Vatican has defrocked the priest who was the first in Massachusetts convicted of sexual abuse more than two decades ago, the Boston Archdiocese said Friday.

In 1984, Eugene O'Sullivan was sentenced to probation after he admitted sodomizing a 13-year-old altar boy. A condition of his sentence was that he not be allowed to work with children.

But O'Sullivan was later assigned to four New Jersey parishes. He was recalled to Boston in 1992 after church officials learned of another allegation against him dating to his time in Massachusetts.

The Vatican's action to defrock O'Sullivan means he may no longer function as a priest in any capacity, except to offer absolution to the dying. Defrocked priests also are cut off from any financial support from the archdiocese.

Documents from O'Sullivan's personnel file, made public in 2002, show that that the archdiocese was alerted as early as the 1960s to allegations against him.

In a 2003 deposition he gave in lawsuits filed against the archdiocese, Cardinal Bernard Law defended his decision to allow O'Sullivan to transfer, saying he wanted to give O'Sullivan a chance at "redemption."

Law resigned as archbishop of Boston but remains a cardinal.

A second priest, Paul E. McDonald, also was defrocked. According to McDonald's personnel file, he was accused of sexually abusing several boys in the 1960s, when he was a priest at St. Joseph Church in Boston.

[NYer]

I'm smelling "housecleaning" here.

There have been quite a few that never made the News Forum. Here's one from earlier this month, in Seattle.

Vatican acts against local priest

[Eddie01]

It's about Frocking time.

[SaltyJoe]

"40 years to take action"

Will God be as Merciful with our sins? Probably more so.

[skinkinthegrass]

..it took them over 350+ years, for them, to admit Da Vivci was right. :P

[McGavin999]

God is moving quite quickly these days. We are seeing a lot of things coming to right.

[Siobhan]

The grundprinzip in the Latin Church is that the ancient canons are present within the current Code of Canon Law, which Code expresses the content and intent of the ancient contents within the structural reality of the Latin Church throughout the world. The Code of the Eastern Catholics has a similar notion though that Code is more easily recognisable to the Chalcedonian Orthodox churches not in communion with the Bishop of Rome as well as Churches such as the Armenian Apostolic Church.

[Siobhan]

"the ancient contents" = "the ancient canons"

Trying to type with a child upon the lap is just not working....Ciao.

[Dr. Scarpetta]

Documents from O'Sullivan's personnel file, made public in 2002, show that that the archdiocese was alerted as early as the 1960s to allegations against him. In a 2003 deposition he gave in lawsuits filed against the archdiocese, Cardinal Bernard Law defended his decision to allow O'Sullivan to transfer, saying he wanted to give O'Sullivan a chance at "redemption." Law resigned as archbishop of Boston but remains a cardinal.

As a churchgoer myself, I cannot imagine how Cardinal Law didn't stop priests from raping children. IMO, he should not be living a lifestyle of prestige, power, and wealth.

[DainBramage]

lol

[HostileTerritory]

We know of the connection between Boston liberalism and the spread of evil in Boston

No city has been spared this plague, and some areas like Louisville and Louisiana have been hit harder than Boston. If you think child abuse is a Boston thing, you put children in other areas in greater danger by fostering an attitude of "it can't happen here."

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Will God be as Merciful with our sins? Probably more so.

You strike the right tone. The greater sin might have been that by eccleastic authorities who allowed this situation to fester. One can hate the sin, love the sinner and still take measures to avoid putting the sinner in a position to sin or do damage to his beloved institution.

[Desdemona]

Just because articles have not been posted doesn't mean it hasn't been happening. Where I live, the laicizations in the fallout from the scandal started three years ago. There weren't that many because the archbishops here had been getting the job done quietly for the previous 40 years. I can name three off the top of my head who were laicized long before the MSM got ahold of the story.

It could just be that there was a backlog and that they are finally getting to the ones in Boston.

[Republic]

In a 2003 deposition he gave in lawsuits filed against the archdiocese, Cardinal Bernard Law defended his decision to allow O'Sullivan to transfer, saying he wanted to give O'Sullivan a chance at "redemption."

And simply, 'to hell' with any future victems (CHILDREN) of his perverted lust, right Cardinal Law?

It is YOU, and the twisted use of your authority that opened the door for this man to terrorize children, little boys participating in their faith ( what could be more heinous than grabbing a little boy and sodomizing him under the umbrella of God's house?), that opened the church doors to the buffet of little boys, innocent and trusting in their church leaders, and allowed this monster to feast.

[Jim Noble]

I believe they should investigate Law. He was just a bit too lenient with the pedophile priests to be totally innocent IMO.

I met Bernard Law the year he came to Boston, and had several occasions to interact with him professionally for a few years after that.

Imagine yourself in this situation:

You are sent to take over the Boston Archdiocese and promptly made a Prince of the Church. Millions of faithful Catholics are lined up to kiss your ring and want to treat you with great respect. You are the successor (twice removed) to their beloved Richard Cardinal Cushing, whose picture is in hundreds of thousands of parlors next to JFK.

You find out that your see is shot through with homosexual child molesters, and that Cardinal Cushing was presiding over the most prolific seminary of perversion in the US, perhaps the world.

You believe that thousands, maybe millions, will have their faith crushed if you act openly to reform.

What do you do? (Granted, open, public, and radical reform is what he should have done).

What he did do was arrest the problem, try to reform the worst offenders (always with seemingly authoritative professional advice), and prevent future cases by reforming the seminary.

He failed and he deserves his disgrace.

But he does not deserve to go down in history as the #1 criminal in the Boston homosexual priest scandal. THAT title should go to his predecessors, especially IMO Cushing.

[SaltyJoe]

I hope for God's Mercy when He rectifies me to recover from my sinful wickedness (like vanity, laziness, and masturbation). As dismissive as that may be, if God can be as Merciful to me, then there's Hope for us all.

"If little faults, proceeding on distemper,
Shall not be wink'd at, how shall we stretch our eye
When capital crimes, chew'd, swallow'd and digested,
Appear before us?"

A thousand gazoonies for the correct answer of whom wrote the quote! A thousand gazoonies more the correct work in which the quote was wrote!

[Peelod]

Willie Wigglelance

Henry V, Act II, Scene 2

[mdmathis6]

The priests involved won't go quietly...It won't belong before the major lawsuits develop...with liberal courts just eager to attempt to strip churches(catholic and protestant) of their private religious rights and to make them fully taxable!

[SaltyJoe]

Your Google search of Willie Wigglelance turned up zero search results. Did you mean Willie Wiggle dance?

---

Henry V!

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[bert]

....Nice to see that it only takes Rome 40 years to take action against serial pedophiles....

That's pretty quick when measured against action to pardon Galileo

That process took 636 years. The conquest of North America has been in progress for 500+ and is still ongoing

[George W. Bush]

That's pretty quick when measured against action to pardon Galileo That process took 636 years.

Yep. But they're ready to canonize JP2 ASAP, the same guy who knowingly tolerated this scandalous abuse of children. And this man who idly stood by while this occurred and then did a big coverup and helped Law to escape justice is supposed to be a saint? The real truth is that JP2 aided and abetted child molesters, just like Law did.

When I think of the word 'saintly', these kinds of people just aren't on my list. Or the list of most devout RCs, at least, not the ones I know.

Hey, Rome doesn't need to worry about me. They need to be more concerned with RC folks slipping over to the Orthodox. Or becoming SSPXers. Or punishing Rome by withholding donations which is certainly happening in many places. RCs aren't stupid and they do love and protect their children like anyone else. So Rome will continue to pay the price for their indifference to the suffering the pedopriests have inflicted upon innocent and defenseless children and their parents.

Rome places great emphasis on the supposed authority of Tradition. But one of the real hallmarks of the ancient church was its efforts to combat institutionalized sexual slavery, particularly of children, in the old Roman empire. But today, they are the baby-mashers using their secular power to escape justice at the hands of the civil authority. Rome has judged itself. And the RC faithful, as much as they want to be obedient to tradition and the authority of Rome, can't help but wonder what justifies their faith and confidence in Rome and its edicts.