South Shore Chamber gets homily from Cardinal O'Malley

By Lane Lambert
Wicked Local Randolph
March 18, 2015

http://randolph.wickedlocal.com/article/20150318/NEWS/150316180

Cardinal Sean O'Malley spoke to the South Shore Chamber of Commerce Wednesday.

RANDOLPH – The South Shore Chamber of Commerce rarely gets homilies, but the business group got one Wednesday from Cardinal Sean O’Malley.

Speaking to a full room at the Chamber’s luncheon at Lantana, the cardinal said “we are here to take care of each other.”

He also said the church is “a field hospital” whose primary mission is to tend to “the poor and downtrodden.”

“If we don’t, the patient will die,” Cardinal O’Malley said, referring to the communities in which the church is active.

This was his second visit to the Chamber since he became Boston’s Archbishop in 2003.

In between two standing ovations, Cardinal O’Malley also gave what his corporate audience would call a turnaround story for the once-troubled Archdiocese.

He outlined the bleak situation he faced when arrived, in the wake of a clergy sex abuse scandal that forced his predecessor, Cardinal Bernard Law, to resign.

“The Archdiocese was in free fall,” he said. “We had a thousand (sex abuse) lawsuits. We owed the Knights of Columbus millions. Our Catholic hospitals were losing millions.”

“Welcome to Boston,” he quipped.

He said the Archdiocese’s finances and programs are now “much improved,” after a decade of lawsuit settlements, parish closings and mergers, and property sales.

Now, he said, “the church has to be aware of our resources, while we take care of the needs and look to our hopes.”