MAINE
Portland Press Herald
By Kelley Bouchard kbouchard@pressherald.com
Staff Writer
The Rev. Robert P. Deeley, newly appointed bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, promised Wednesday to protect children, serve the poor and the sick, and continue efforts to strengthen Maine’s parishes and grow the priesthood.
Maine Catholics and people who know Deeley have great expectations for Maine’s new bishop, seeing shades of Pope Francis in the Boston-area native who has served in the Vatican.
Others are concerned that Deeley, who is now auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Boston, is a “company man” who won’t bring the change that critics want in the way the church handles issues such as gay rights, abortion and sexual abuse by clergy members.
The Vatican announced Deeley’s appointment by Pope Francis at 6 a.m. Wednesday, ending a 17-month wait for news of a new leader for Maine’s 193,392 Catholics. Deeley will be formally installed as bishop during a special Mass on Feb. 14 at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland. …
PLAYED ROLE IN CLERGY ABUSE RESPONSE
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is a cadre of bishops in Rome that since the abuse scandal has largely been responsible for responding to hundreds of complaints against clergy members. Deeley was assigned to help reduce the backlog, Garabedian said.
Cafardi, the expert on church law, dismissed the idea that, because Deeley was in the Boston archdiocese during the abuse scandal, he was in some way directly involved. Cafardi, a co-author of the National Review Board’s report on the abuse scandal, said that in the extensive research and interviews done to assemble the 2005 report, Deeley’s name never came up.
“That’s the kind of guilt by association that I hope most Christians would avoid,” Cafardi said.
Local and national anti-abuse groups have called for Deeley to open the diocese’s records on abusive clergy members, and do what more than two dozen archdioceses around the nation, including the Archdiocese of Boston, have done already: publish the names and judicial outcomes of priests who are accused of abuse.
In a statement issued shortly after Deeley’s appointment Wednesday, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a national victim advocacy group, said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was integral in an orchestrated cover-up of abuse, and called for transparency about priests’ past crimes.
“This is a bare-minimum public safety step that every prelate should take,” the group said.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.