Sins of the Fathers hidden by cardinal are laid bare at last (CHURCH SCANDAL UPDATE)

The Sunday Telegraph ^ | December 8, 2002 | Julian Coman

[MadIvan]

The sex, drugs and paedophilia scandal in the heart of the US Catholic Church has brought the Boston archdiocese to the edge of ruin, reports Julian Coman

Leo Inzaghi, the manager of the Caffe dello Sport in Boston's Italian district, stopped reading the local newspapers last week. As a practising Catholic and a father, he found their contents too shocking.

"My wife telephoned me and said, 'Have you seen what the Church knew about Father Nyhan?' It turned out that the priest at the private school where we sent our daughter was transferred there after being accused of molesting two little girls in another town. People are calling for our cardinal to resign in disgrace and that's exactly what he should do."

Mr Inzaghi is not the only Boston Catholic shaking his head in disbelief. Last Monday a court order, vainly contested by the Church, allowed lawyers acting for local abuse claimants against the archdiocese to publish secret memorandums and personnel files concerning 65 priests. Many bear the personal handwriting of Cardinal Bernard Law.

As a result, two million Catholics in the archdiocese of Boston are finding out what senior figures in the Church knew about a string of scandals over 30 years.

The American Catholic Church was already in crisis because of nationwide allegations of sexual abuse of children by clergy. In Boston, a city founded by Irish, Italian and Polish Catholics, the latest revelations have brought the archdiocese to the brink of financial and moral collapse.

Three thousand pages - from 11,000 - have so far been released, mainly dealing with eight priests. They reveal patterns of drug abuse, physical violence, kept mistresses and paedophilia.

They also document the strenuous efforts of senior Church officials to buy the silence of victims and transfer miscreant priests to parishes and jobs where their history was not suspected.

In an informal poll, a majority of Boston priests said that Cardinal Law should resign. A decision on whether the archdiocese should file for bankruptcy, to mitigate the effects of more than 450 pending lawsuits, is likely to be made by the cardinal next week.

In the words of one churchgoer, the papers have carried the city's Catholics "beyond outrage to a feeling that nobody knows how to name".

One priest, Richard Buntel, was known to local youth as "Father Pothead" and the "Blow King". Fr Buntel was reported by fellow priests to the archdiocese in 1983, amid allegations that he was distributing cocaine to young parishioners in the small Massachusetts town of Malden. Nothing was done.

Eleven years later he was accused of performing sex acts in exchange for cocaine. A secret payment of $55,000 was made to a young man. In 1999 Fr Buntel, after a period on "administrative leave", was transferred to another parish.

In 1993, the Church was told by James Foley - until last Thursday the associate pastor at St Joseph's church in Salem - that he had fathered two children with a woman who later died of a drug overdose while she was with him.

The priest, summoned to an interview with Cardinal Law to answer allegations of affairs with other women, confessed that he fled the house and failed to call for emergency help in time.

Notes taken during the meeting read: "Had two children in '65 and relationships married women . . . overdosed while he was present . . . started to faint . . . left came back . . . she died . . . a sister knows."

Fr Foley later wrote in a letter to the archdiocese: "Who will reveal it? The cardinal? Myself? A family member? Whoever knew the truth would not have waited 27 years.

How can the Church suffer scandal from an episode that will never possibly be revealed." Fr Foley was suspended last week as soon as the papers became public.

Fr Thomas Forry was found by Church authorities to have thrown a housekeeper downstairs after an argument and to have had an 11-year relationship with a married woman. Fr Forry was also alleged to have sexually abused her son. He retired last year.

More then $2 million was paid out in secret settlements to protect Robert Burns, accused of molesting six young men in Boston between 1982 and 1991. Before that, Fr Burns had spent a year at a therapy centre for priests.

According to a letter sent to the Vatican by Cardinal Law, he was allowed back into a Boston parish having given "solemn assurance of his ability to control his impulses".

Fr Burns left the Church in 1996, when a victim made her claims public. He was later imprisoned for sexual assaults on boys in New Hampshire.

Mike Emerton, the spokesman for Voice of the Faithful, a lay Catholic group formed in response to the sex abuse cases, said: "These documents signal the complete breakdown in trust between the laity and the men who have run the archdiocese of Boston, the jewel in the crown of American Catholicism."

Church attendance across the archdiocese has dropped by 20 per cent over the last year. Cardinal Law has insisted that he will only resign if asked to do so by the Pope.

"It's beyond time for him to leave," said the Rev Stephen S. Josoma. "It's now clear they knew all along and didn't do anything, and that they moved people around again and again and again."

Mr Inzaghi is just glad his daughter has left school. "These were serial crimes that people kept from us. Is a crime not a crime when it's committed by a priest?"

[ppaul]

Saturday, December 07, 2002, 12:00 a.m. Pacific

Cardinal sins

Mired in moral bankruptcy, the Archdiocese of Boston compounds its failings by contemplating Chapter 11 to evade its financial responsibilities for sexual abuse by priests.

Choosing the most contemptible route would be consistent for Cardinal Bernard Law. His brazen disregard for the welfare of the laity in the midst of the most despicable behavior by the priests under his leadership is stunning.

The release this week of 2,000 additional pages of diocesan documents was so deeply upsetting for some Boston-area Catholics, they were questioning the very roots of their religious faith.

The relentless accounts of predatory sexual assaults by priests — including those on young children, altar boys, girls pursuing religious vows and married women — would be over the top in the most steamy Andrew Greeley novel.

The vocation of the priesthood is wounded to such a profound degree that basic changes might be necessary. The issue of celibacy is the most obvious, and the most unlikely, to change.

Still, given the horrific revelations of the past decade, the wonder is the church hierarchy could imagine communicants thinking a married priest with a supportive family was any less Christ-like than a child molester with multiple parish transfers. Priests who consider their celibacy a gift from God could make that personal choice. For the institution, however, what is in place is not working.

That is especially true if the organization sees itself above and outside the law. The arrogance and corruptibility of absolute power is at the heart of decisions of a scared fraternity protecting its own.

The terrible toll on the faith of believers is a tragedy.

Who will remind these people their church is grounded in the Trinity, baptism and holy Eucharist? Predatory priests and accommodating bishops and cardinals are an administrative failure.

The institution is in deep trouble, but its foundation is solid as a rock.

[Chemnitz]

Add Phoenix to your list. The same things are being revealed. The previous bishop was outrageously perverted and the current one was his Vicar General before becoming bishop. It's really blowing up in Phoenix at the same time.

I believe the primary cause is NOT the media but the network of victims getting the information out.

I went to a Lutheran seminary where one graduate was known to be a drug dealer. The Lutherans let him accept a position as youth minister for another denomination. That was back in the 1970's.

[mssnoop]

Sounds like perjury to me Cardinal Law.

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

it was published in March or April. Mutiple times.

What was published multiple times in April were unnamed sources saying that Law had offered to resign. Law stated that the subject of his resignation wasn't raised in his private meeting with the Pope. There were other unnamed sources that said Mahoney called for Law to resign in the meeting of the Cardinals with the Pope. Like I wrote earlier, if you have the link to someone going on the record stating that Law offered to resign then please post it. If it was published multiple times then you shouldn't have any trouble finding it, should you?