MASSACHUSETTS
Crux
By Margery Eagan
On Spirituality columnist September 22, 2015
David O’Regan will tell you he’s had a “beautiful, blessed life.” Six grown children. Forty-three years of marriage to a wife he adores. “The baby lady.” That’s what they call Jane O’Regan around the town near Boston where the O’Regans live in a rambling house with a great big yard. They are foster parents. Jane O’Regan always has a baby in tow. They’re caring now for the 69th and 70th child they’ve welcomed: one five months old, the other nine months.
David O’Regan, an imposing, 6-foot, 4-inch 65-year-old, will also tell you he is a prayerful man of faith raised on the Baltimore Catechism in the Catholic Church. “My mother wasn’t well. She was bipolar and treated herself with alcohol and so unfortunately, there was no peace at home.”
But there was peace, even a “mystical solace,” at church, says O’Regan, who became a Eucharistic minister, a prayer group leader, and a CCD teacher who made daily Mass during many, many Lents.
But O’Regan will then tell you this: he stopped going to Mass years ago.
And he nearly lost much else in that once-ordered life: his letter carrier job, his money, even his home. For a time, Jane O’Regan bought groceries on a credit card and Dave sold old electrical equipment on eBay for an extra $20 here and there. This unraveling began in 2002, when The Boston Globe started running story after story about the Church cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by deviant priests.
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