BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
January 14, 2025
By Joan Vennochi
It is the wound that never heals, the cloud that never lifts, the scandal that never quits.
More than 20 years after the Archdiocese of Boston achieved notoriety as the epicenter of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, aftershocks are still coming. Last week, it was reported that a former Catholic chaplain at Brandeis University, who was celebrated for calling out Cardinal Bernard Law for his role in covering up abuse, now stands accused of the alleged sexual assault of a Brandeis student in a New York hotel room. The Rev. Walter H. Cuenin, a retired priest living in Virginia, was named in a civil lawsuit for allegedly sexually assaulting a student after the two traveled to Manhattan to attend a performance of the New York Philharmonic in December 2014. Cuenin, 79, denies the charges. Citing pending litigation, the archdiocese had no comment.
To those who lived through it, the clergy sexual abuse scandal is not old news. “It continues,” Ann Hagan Webb, a psychologist specializing in childhood sexual abuse by clergy and a survivor of it, told me. And as the Cuenin case shows, victims are still bravely speaking out, she said.
Many years have passed since The Boston Globe Spotlight Team first exposed the sexual abuse of hundreds of children by priests in the Boston archdiocese and the coverup by church leaders. That exposé led to a cascade of similar revelations across the country and the world, from which the Catholic Church has yet to recover — even under Pope Francis, who pledged to make reform a priority.
Law resigned as archbishop in 2002 and died in Rome in 2017. His successor, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, resigned in August after more than 20 years in that role. Over his tenure, O’Malley tried, but never entirely convinced skeptics, of his commitment to change church culture. As O’Malley’s successor, Archbishop Richard Henning, said during his November installation, “This church of Boston, it is in a very real sense, a wounded church, because of the failure to act with compassion and healing.” Despite years of reform efforts, “still we feel the weight of these wounds,” Henning said.
That continuing weight is largely due to the perceived lack of transparency involving clergy sexual abuse. Last week, for example, Webb said she got a call from the Office of Pastoral Support and Outreach, which operates within the Archdiocese of Boston, informing her that Frederick J. Ryan, a former monsignor and vice chancellor of the archdiocese who resigned from the priesthood in 2005 amid numerous charges of sexual misconduct involving children, was dead.
Ryan, who was put on administrative leave in 2002 after former students accused him of molesting them, died in May 2023. Webb said she appreciated the notification of his death and said she believes those at the Office of Pastoral Support and Outreach told her what they knew when they knew it. But she questions why it took the archdiocese so long to learn of it and why it is unable to provide any further details. “How can it be that this notorious man died [in 2023] and nobody heard about it?” Webb asked.
In a statement, the archdiocese said the lapse in notification was not intentional. “We believe that Frederick Ryan, dismissed from the priesthood in 2005, passed away sometime in 2023,” the statement said. “However, after significant investigation, we have still been unable to locate an obituary or certificate of death. Speculation about his death was provided to us by word-of-mouth in early 2023. Despite the inability to obtain actual confirmation, and out of an abundance of caution, we believed it was prudent to post indication of his death to the public list.”
To Webb, it shows the inadequacy of a system that allowed priests to leave the priesthood — a process known as voluntary laicization — “as a plan to stop child abuse.” Ryan is on a list maintained by the Archdiocese of Boston of accused priests whose cases “have been concluded canonically by laicization.” As the website explains, “The laicization process, because it is voluntary, does not involve a determination of guilt for crimes involving the sexual abuse of children.”
In an interview, Robert Hoatson, a survivor of clergy sexual abuse and a former priest who is president and cofounder of Road to Recovery, a nonprofit that assists victims of sexual abuse, told me that he tracked down Ryan’s gravesite in Washington, Iowa, through “a friend in the funeral business.” Like Webb, he questions what church officials knew about Ryan’s life. “Did they completely sever all recognition, all ties? … It’s implausible to me that somebody didn’t know about Fred Ryan dying.”
As such questions show, church leaders still must convince survivors and other skeptics that they are protecting the vulnerable, not the powerful. For all the task force reports and proclamations of reform, trust in the institution has not yet been restored. Until that happens, the wounds won’t heal, the cloud won’t lift, and the scandal goes on.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.