By Kilian Melloy
EDGE Boston
December 3, 2009
http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=news&sc3=&id=99683
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| Cardinal Edward Egan |
The Dec. 2 defeat in the New York State Senate of a bill that would have extended marriage equality to the state’s gay and lesbian families was promoted--and celebrated--by New York’s Catholic leadership.
But questions still linger about the role one New York church official in particular played in the clerical sex abuse scandal.
A statement released by the New York State Catholic Conference on the day of the Dec. 2 vote, which saw the measure lose 38-24, declared that, "it has become clear that Americans continue to understand marriage the way it has always been understood, and New York is not different in that regard," reported a New York Times article from that same day. Added the statement, "This is a victory for the basic building block of our society."
But if the nuclear mixed-gender family is society’s basic component, some see the church as having failed to protect its most vulnerable members. A separate new York Times article also published on Dec. 2 noted that questions still linger about the role played by Cardinal Edward M. Egan, then a Connecticut bishop, who was questioned about cases of child molestation committed by priests under his supervision. When a lawyer taking Egan’s deposition asked why the bishop had failed to intervene immediately in cases involving complaints about a predatory priest, Egan told him, "I didn’t make a decision one way or the other. I kept working on it until I resolved the decision."
That deposition and masses of additional information finally came to light after the Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., spent seven years trying to keep the records from being disclosed. The information was connected with 23 suits brought against he church in connection with the alleged activities of seven priests; the suit was settled in 2002. As the records finally come to light, Egan, now a Cardinal, retired earlier this year from his post as the Archbishop of New York.
The New York Times was one of several papers that sued to bring the records out into public; the case was finally over when, in October, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to take on an appeal. The records contain transcripts in which then-Bishop Egan and a lawyer went back and forth about the exact nature of Egan’s supervisory role and the options he might have chosen to exercise--but did not--when it came to stopping pedophile priests before further harm could result from their predations. At one point, the article noted, Egan claimed that "these things [sexual molestation of children by priests] don’t happen, and we are talking about ifs."
Responded a lawyer, "Forgive me, Father - Bishop. But these things do happen because that’s the reason why we’re seated here today."
Egan also drew distinctions between reports of sexual abuse and the actual events, which he suggested might never really have taken place. When talking about a priest who had been accused by a dozen people of acts that included physical violence, oral sex, and anal sex, Egan said, "I am not aware of those things. I am aware of the claims of those things, the allegations of those things. I am aware that there are a number of people who know one another, some are related to one another, have the same lawyers and so forth."
In the case of another priest who was asked by Egan to forfeit his priestly status, in the wake of three accusers claiming that they had been abused for years, Egan drew similar distinctions, saying that although he had requested the man’s resignation from the priesthood in the wake of the accusations, that was different than the purported abuse actually having happened. Denying that his request for the priest to resign was a form of "punishment" for any errant conduct, Egan offered the explanation that, "It was an administrative decision of mine about what was best for him and the church."
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