BishopAccountability.org
	Clearing the Air on Abuse By Kevin Cullen Boston Globe January 12, 2010 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/12/clearing_the_air_on_abuse/ MASSACHUSETTS -- Last week, during a radio debate on WTKK, Martha Coakley and Scott Brown said they would call on Cardinal Sean O'Malley to release the names of all priests in the Archdiocese of Boston who were credibly accused of sexual abuse. A week later, the candidates have yet to send a letter or make a phone call to the cardinal. So I spoke to the Rev. John Connolly, one of O'Malley's aides, and he said the cardinal is committed to the principle of releasing the names. Although there are some remaining questions about due process, he said, the goal is to release them sometime this year. Coakley and Brown were asked the question after a group called BishopAccountability.org recently repeated its demand that O'Malley release the names, including those of Irish priests who were stashed in Boston. Dublin 2010 is like Boston 2002. Over the last month, four Irish bishops have resigned after they were accused of being complicit in the abuse of minors by moving abusive priests around Dublin like so many pieces on a chess board. The police weren't told, neither were the parishioners, and many of those priests abused again. Sound familiar? Here, there were five bishops who, as representatives of Cardinal Bernard Law, were accused of being complicit in abuse. They weren't forced to resign, as Law was in 2002, before he was given a sinecure in Rome. They were all allowed to run their own dioceses. Three of them - Alfred Hughes in New Orleans; Robert Banks in Green Bay, Wis.; and Thomas Daily in Brooklyn, N.Y. - have retired. The other two remain bishops: John McCormack in Manchester, N.H., and William Murphy in Rockville Centre, N.Y. When he got the gig, Murphy kicked some nuns out of their convent and converted it into an opulent residence. For this, he was nicknamed Mansion Murphy by the incomparable Jimmy Breslin. The allegations against McCormack, the patron bishop of enablers, were worse than anything leveled at the Irish bishops. But McCormack rode out the outrage and the depositions and has enjoyed a long, comfortable run in ski country. Bernie McDaid was hoping that the fact that the Irish bishops, however reluctantly, had found something close to a conscience might be somehow contagious. "In Boston, we were ahead of the curve. Boston was the epicenter of the abuse scandal," he said. "But the Irish have accomplished a lot more. They got the enablers. The enablers were the real problem, and we never got the enablers." Bernie McDaid is a survivor of Rev. Joseph Birmingham, a sociopath in a Roman collar who was allowed to rape the bodies and souls of many young people, some of them because Bishop John McCormack was far more interested in protecting the reputation of his church than he was in protecting children. "I always felt, and a lot of victims said, we couldn't heal unless these bishops resigned. There would have been a domino effect, like we've seen in Ireland. But no one would get behind us. None of the politicians did," Bernie McDaid said. Two years ago, Bernie McDaid knelt before Pope Benedict XVI in Washington, D.C., put his hand over the pope's heart, and said something he hoped would inspire the pope to go after the enablers like McCormack and Murphy. "Holy Father," Bernie McDaid said, "you have a cancer in your flock and you have to do something about it." Yesterday, Coakley said she will send O'Malley a letter, asking him to release all the names. She said complicit bishops like McCormack and Mansion Murphy should resign. The Brown campaign did not respond to a request for its position. The bishops, of course, answer only to the pope and couldn't care less what the pols say. "The bishop is not planning to resign," said Kevin Donovan, McCormack's spokesman. I put a call into Bishop Murphy, too, but didn't hear back. In fairness, Breslin told me it's a long walk to the phone in that mansion. Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.