BOSTON (MA)
Pawtucket Times
AP and JRC News Service reports 02/12/2005
BOSTON -- Former priest James Porter, whose widespread molestation of dozens of children foreshadowed the clergy sex abuse scandal that swept the American Roman Catholic church, died on Friday night.
Porter, 70, died at 6:12 p.m. at New England Medical Center in Boston. He had been treated there since being transferred from Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston, a Department of Correction medical facility, on Jan. 26, department spokeswoman Diane Wiffin said. A cause of death was not immediately available, but Porter's attorney had said the former priest had incurable cancer. The hospital declined to comment.
Porter was the first high-profile case involving allegations that a priest had molested children in his parish -- and that the church had simply moved him from parish to parish to try to avoid scandal.
Porter pleaded guilty in 1993 of molesting 28 children, but once told a television reporter that he molested as many as 100 children during his time as a priest in the 1960s and early 1970s in the Fall River Diocese.