BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
October 30, 2024
By Brian MacQuarrie
In 2002, the Archdiocese of Boston was reeling, battered by a devastating sexual abuse-crisis, its face that of an aloof cardinal, Bernard F. Law, whose obstructionist response to the scandal seemed as out of touch as his palatial mansion in Brighton.
Law resigned in disgrace, replaced in summer 2003 by Archbishop Sean O’Malley, an introspective Capuchin friar whose plain appearance and humble demeanor offered a striking contrast to his strong-willed, regal predecessor.
The jarring optics carried a message for the faithful: A forceful, dismissive prince of the church had been succeeded by a quiet, empathetic man dressed simply in brown robe and sandals.
“I know how surprised people were, beginning with myself, when a scruffy bearded Capuchin in his bare feet was not exactly what people were suspecting,” O’Malley said at a fund-raiser for archdiocesan priests in September.
The 80-year-old O’Malley is now retiring as head of the archdiocese, his last day Thursday. Beyond the abuse crisis, his two-decade tenure was tested by other daunting threats: the archdiocese’s finances were in the red and dwindling congregations forced the closure of numerous parishes and schools. The church in this heavily Catholic city was shrinking.
And though much of O’Malley’s skills as a listener were spent in trying to heal the deep wounds caused by the priest scandal, that work continues even to this day.
In 2003, O’Malley’s official car was outfitted with tinted glass, which obscured him from the view of disgruntled members of the church. And on Thursday, protesters are expected outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End for the installation of O’Malley’s successor, Archbishop Richard Henning.
The ancient ceremony will occur two days after O’Malley faced backlash over a new report on clergy sexual abuse released by a Vatican commission he leads.
The echoes are a reminder that the pain of the crisis endures. In 2011, O’Malleyreceived praise forreleasing the names of 159 clerics who had been accused of abuse, but was also criticized forwithholding the names of 91 others, many of whom had died and could not respond to the allegations.
O’Malley, speaking at the Vatican on Tuesday, described the recent report by the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors as a “snapshot of the journey” toward “a transparent and accountable ministry.” There is “much to be done,” he said.
“Nothing we do will ever be enough to fully repair what has happened,” said O’Malley, who also serves on the small, powerful Council of Cardinals. “But we hope that this report and those that will come, compiled with the help of victims and survivors at the center, will help to ensure the firm commitment that these events never happen again in the church.’’
Critics said more needs to be done.
“The report is commendable in some ways,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, codirector of BishopAccountability.org, a Waltham-based watchdog group. “It calls for victims to have access to information about their cases, for instance, and it emphasizes the moral imperative of reparations for victims. But fundamentally, it’s an assessment of window-dressing. It gives us no sense of the reality on the ground.”
The enormity of the challenge has been unlike anything that this Capuchin Franciscan, pledged to simplicity and poverty, had confronted before his appointment as Boston’s sixth archbishop by Pope John Paul II.
“In the history of the Catholic Church in America, no one has inherited an archdiocese that was in worse shape,” said Michael Sean Winters, an author and political columnist for the National Catholic Reporter.
O’Malley had been known as a go-to fixer before coming to Boston, a pragmatic and problem-solving cleric the Vatican could summon in times of crisis, beginning with his 1992 appointment to the Diocese of Fall River during a sexual-abuse scandal. A decade later, he was dispatched to Palm Beach, Fla., to deal with a similar crisis.
In less than a year, O’Malley was in Boston, opting to live in the cathedral’s down-scale, inner-city rectory instead of the four-story cardinal’s mansion in Brighton.
In 2003, the archdiocese agreed to pay $85 million to 552 victims and parents who had filed civil lawsuits. That sum, a record at the time, followed $10 million the archdiocese had paid to victims of former priest John Geoghan, who had been transferred among several parishes despite the archdiocese’s knowledge that he had molested young boys.
To date, the archdiocese has paid more than $175 million in settlements since 2002, according to Terrence Donilon, a spokesperson for O’Malley. By comparison, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles this month agreed to pay $880 million to 1,353 people who said they were sexually abused. In 2007, that archdiocese paid an additional $660 million to 508 victims.
To Terence McKiernan, founder and president of BishopAccountability.org, O’Malley’s record falls short.
“For us, his legacy is really the list” from 2011, McKiernan said. “When people look back at what the Boston Archdiocese was under Cardinal O’Malley, they see a list that’s full of holes. Release the names.”
The global ramifications of the crisis, and the hurt that lingers locally, can mean that O’Malley’s work in other areas is overshadowed. But since 2003, Winters said, the cardinal has turned around the archdiocese “in every way that an archdiocese can be turned around.”
The finances of the fourth-largest archdiocese in the country are now in the black; 11 priests were ordained this year, the second-most since 1997; parishes have been consolidated for savings and efficiency; and the Catholic school enrollment of 32,370 students in fall 2022, although well below that of 2003, appears to have stabilized, according to the archdiocese.
O’Malley also has made a priority of reaching out to urban parishes with large congregations of people of color, said the Rev. Carlos Flor, pastor of a collaborative that includes St. Thomas Aquinas and Our Lady of Lourdes in Jamaica Plain, and St. Mary of the Angels in Roxbury.
“My parishes are mostly Hispanic, and his efforts to make sure that everyone is served and everyone is ministered at all levels is not just words. It rings true,” Flor said.
The archdiocese also supports a robust network of social services for the marginalized.
“Homelessness, deep trauma, poverty. These issues have always been close to the cardinal’s internal mission, where his heart has been at,” said Alexis Steel, president of the St. Mary’s Center for Women and Children, a Boston multi-service organization that assists more than 500 families annually. “He’s had a longstanding relationship with our agency. In times of crisis, we get the support that’s needed.”
Governor Maura Healey echoed that assessment.
“When I think about Cardinal Sean, I think about his deep faith, his empathy and compassion. Over his two decades of leadership, he has demonstrated that time and time again.” Healey said. “While not elected, he’s a leader.”
Healey said that she contacts the cardinal occasionally for advice, and that he reached out to her before she traveled to the Vatican in May to meet Pope Francis and address a summit on climate change.
O’Malley told the governor what to expect at the Vatican, she said, and added that Francis would not want her to kiss his ring. “He’s not that kind of a pope,” Healey recalled the cardinal saying.
Despite a low-key and introspective persona, O’Malley exudes caring, warmth, humor, and wide-ranging interests in one-on-one conversations, according to several people who know him.
Winters, of the National Catholic Reporter, recalled that O’Malley unfailingly has asked about his young grand-nephew, whose mother died two years ago from an overdose.
Franceso Cesareo, the former president of Assumption College in Worcester, said he and his family once encountered O’Malley by chance at the San Diego airport, where Cesareo and the cardinal had arrived for a bishops conference. Cesareo also has chaired the National Review Board, which works with US bishops to help protect children from abuse.
“He came over and talked to the kids and talked to my wife. He was very genuinely attentive to them and grateful to them for their willingness for me to give up my time for this important work,” Cesareo said. “He could have just walked right by. It showed what a very simple, humble, personal man he is, even though he’s a cardinal.”
Flor, the Jamaica Plain and Roxbury pastor, recalled O’Malley calling him about a decade ago to ask if he knew the family of a young child who had been killed accidentally by gunfire.
“I was doing the funeral, and he came to the wake. He personally came to meet the mother, who was Hispanic,” Flor said. “I saw there not just a leader who is looking for the spotlight, but truly a father and a pastor who was looking to console.”
Thomas Groome, a Boston College theologian, said O’Malley set a new tone for the archdiocese immediately upon his arrival, a shift symbolized by his decision to live in the South End.
“He took one look at the cardinal’s residence and said, ‘I can’t live here.’ It was contrary to his vows of poverty and his identity as a Capuchin Franciscan,” Groome said. That choice was “in many ways a portent of what was to come, the kind of values, attitude, and spirituality that he was bringing to his job.”
Through the turmoil, the soul-searching, the restructuring, and the outreach, the last two decades have been a tumultuous ride for the Boston Archdiocese. For Winters, who counts the cardinal as a friend, O’Malley “reminded the Catholics of Boston why they could take pride in being Catholic again.”