MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe
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Children of Catholic priests live with secrets and sorrow
By Michael Rezendes, Globe Staff August 16, 2017
Their father was a priest who left their mother to die
James Perry was watching the news for snow cancellations on a December evening back in 2002, when a story unexpectedly caught his eye. The Boston Archdiocese had released records showing that a local priest had fathered two children and later abandoned their mother to die, after she overdosed on sleeping pills.
The woman had lived in Needham, just like Perry’s mother. And she died in 1973, the same year as Rita Perry. Perhaps most telling, the TV reporter said the woman had undergone a lobotomy — a procedure similar to one that Perry’s mother had undergone.
That’s how James and Emily Perry discovered their real father was not the man who raised them, but the Rev. James D. Foley, a deeply troubled priest who admitted in an interview with the Globe to his “ugly and tragic” involvement with Rita Perry. What’s more, church records show that Cardinal Bernard Law, Boston’s former archbishop, allowed him to remain in ministry for nine years after he admitted to fathering the children and playing a role in their mother’s death.
“The thing that stuck out to me when I read the documents is, what is the responsibility to the children? Anything?” said Emily Perry, who was 3 years old and sleeping in an upstairs bedroom the night of her mother’s death.
The only comfort for the siblings was the revelation that their mother had not deliberately taken her own life, abandoning her children.
“My mom didn’t commit suicide on purpose,” said Emily Perry. “This idiot was there and didn’t do anything about it.”
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