UNITED STATES
G. Wayne Miller
A shorter version of this ran on the op-ed pages of the January 10, 2016, Providence Journal.
Watching Spotlight, the Oscar-bound movie about The Boston Globe’s investigation of Massachusetts clergy who raped children, and reading about employees of St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island, who sexually abused students has prompted memories of my 1960s and ‘70s childhood.
Only luck, I have concluded, spared me and my friends the fate of these many victims here in New England and others like them across America.
Back then, we were youngsters in a world where authority was accepted without question, and where certain authorities with sanctioned access to children – clergy, teachers, coaches and scout leaders among them – were almost god-like in stature. In the case of priests, they may as well have been God, at least in the view of adults like my mother, a daughter of Irish immigrants who was born and raised in Boston and who brought up her children with the Baltimore Catechism. You won’t find a hint that clergy could be anything but pure in that book.
It was a world of blind obedience and absolute trust of elders. And it was a world where monsters cloaked in authority roamed free, although no grownup warned us of that.
A resident of Wakefield, Mass., a suburb of Boston, from birth until college, I spent eight years at Saint Joseph parochial school and was an altar boy during much of that time at the parish church, which was under the control of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The priests I knew best at St. Joseph were good stewards, and one remained an acquaintance for decades. But another, William F. Maloney, who I saw only at Mass, was later publicly accused of sexually abusing someone in the late ‘60s at another parish in North Reading, four miles from my home.
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