MASSACHUSETTS
Canton Citizen
By Jay Turner
Editor’s note: The name of the victim who was interviewed for this story has been changed in order to protect his privacy.
When reports first surfaced in late 2012 that Father Thomas H. Maguire had been removed from public ministry in Norwell following allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct, Mark L., a Canton native and former St. John the Evangelist parishioner, felt a complex flood of emotions ranging from anger to regret to disgust.
Then he picked up the telephone and made a call that he felt was long overdue.
Contacting the Norwell police and speaking to an investigator, Mark would go on to recount his own experiences with Father Maguire in Canton in the early 1990s, back when Mark, his brother and their friends were students at Canton High School and members of the St. John’s CYO leadership board. Maguire, who was assigned to the parish during those years, worked directly with the CYO, and Mark recalled multiple instances where Maguire both supplied and consumed alcohol with the teens, along with one or more instances of inappropriate behavior and alleged sexual misconduct during “off-site” CYO meetings.
Ultimately, police determined that none of the alleged offenses could be prosecuted because they all fell outside of the criminal statute of limitations. However, the Archdiocese undertook its own investigation into the matter, and on March 31, 2016, following a lengthy probe and a church process undertaken under canon law, Maguire was found “guilty of abuse of a minor” and removed from the priesthood by order of the Holy See.
According to a public database of accused priests provided by the Archdiocese on its website, Maguire is the first Boston area priest since 2009 to be defrocked due to allegations of abuse and just the seventh in the last decade. And it was the reports of inappropriate conduct from the “mid 1990s and before” — coinciding with his years at St. John the Evangelist (1989-1996) — that appeared to carry the most weight in the decision.
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