"Massive" Abuse of Children
State's Report Details Hundreds of Cases, Cover-Up in Boston

By Carol Eisenberg
Long Island (NY) Newsday
July 24, 2003

In a case with national implications for a scandal-plagued Roman Catholic Church, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly documented yesterday just how much top Boston church officials knew about 800 allegations of child sex abuse by priests, when they knew about them and how they made decisions to cover them up.

"The mistreatment of children was so massive and so prolonged that it borders on the unbelievable," Reilly said at a news conference yesterday. "It represents one of the greatest tragedies ever to befall children in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts."

Though Reilly offered stern rebukes to a half-dozen top Roman Catholic leaders who participated in what he described as "a massive and pervasive failure of leadership" - including Brooklyn Bishop Thomas Daily and Rockville Centre Bishop William Murphy - he handed down no indictments.

"Certainly, no one is more disappointed than me and my staff that we cannot prosecute criminally," he said.

Reilly said he had pursued every possible legal theory to bring criminal charges under the laws then in effect in Massachusetts, but none were tenable. The clergy was not covered by mandatory reporting laws until last year.

"The grand jury understood we operate under the laws of the state. We tried. They tried. And in the end, we were not able to bring criminal charges because the law did not allow us to do so. It was not a close call."

But Reilly said the officials' actions were "deplorable," even if not criminally actionable.

"... Any claim that the cardinal or senior management didn't know what was going on is simply not credible," he said.

"They knew full well that children were being sexually abused, yet time after time ... when they were faced with the choice of protecting children or protecting the reputation of the church and priest abusers, they chose secrecy."

Asked whether such leaders were fit to continue to serve in the church, the attorney general stopped just short of calling on the Vatican to sanction them - a call that was taken up later by members of Voice of the Faithful, a lay group formed in response to the scandal.

"I believe that every person who was in a position of authority ... [who] was any part of the secrecy in what has occurred in the Archdiocese of Boston should not be in a position of responsibility," Reilly said.

Besides criticizing New York-area prelates Murphy and Daily, the grand jury report also included sections about decisions by other deputies of Cardinal Bernard Law, including Bishops Robert Banks, now of Green Bay, Wis., Alfred Hughes, now archbishop of New Orleans, Walter Edyvean, now vicar general in Boston, and John McCormack, now bishop of Manchester, N.H.

It also offered the most comprehensive statistics to date of the scope of sexual abuse by priests, citing the archdiocese's own files that 789 victims had complained of sexual abuse by 250 priests and church workers over six decades.

"The actual number is far higher than that," Reilly said. "I can tell you that over the past 18 months, there has rarely been a time when I have attended a large public gathering where someone has not approached me to say that they were abused, but felt they could not come forward."

While the report says that Law, who resigned as archbishop in December, "bears ultimate responsibility for the tragic treatment of children ... and had direct knowledge of the scope, duration and severity of the crisis," it stressed that he was not solely responsible.

"With rare exception, none of the Cardinal's senior managers advised him to take any of the steps that might have ended the systemic abuse of children," the report said.

The Rev. Christopher Coyne, an archdiocesan spokesman, said the archdiocese has already taken "substantial steps" to prevent child abuse by priests.

"The Archdiocese of Boston reiterates its commitment that the Archdiocese will treat sexual abuse of a child as a criminal matter, that it will end any culture of secrecy in the handling of such matters ... and that the Archdiocese is committed to work at every level to ensure the safety of children," Coyne said.

Law, who is now based at a convent in Maryland, could not be reached.

But in Boston, the news that no indictments would be forthcoming against top church officials - which was leaked last week - was widely lamented by victims advocates as well as Catholics in the pews.

"With so much criminal activity documented as having taken place, most of us are just dumbfounded that there wasn't some law under which they could be prosecuted," said Ann Hagan Webb, an abuse survivor who heads the New England chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

Yesterday, leaders of Voice of the Faithful called on Catholics to keep the pressure on by beginning a letter-writing campaign on the abuse issue to Bishop Sean O'Malley, who will be installed as Boston's new archbishop-designate next week.

And they called on the Vatican to publicly reprimand church officials who participated in the cover-up.

"... There can be no reasonable doubt that Cardinal Law and Bishops Daily, Banks, Hughes, McCormack and Murphy failed in their ministry to the people and families of the Archdiocese of Boston," said Jim Post, the group's president. "These bishops - and all other church officials throughout the country who engaged in these shameful behaviors - must be disciplined by the Vatican."

With Law already gone, many in Boston watched to see what effect the report would have on the half-dozen sitting bishops around the country who it criticized.

"Bishop Daily, Bishop Murphy, Bishop Hughes, Bishop McCormack were all supervisors of John Geoghan," said Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston attorney who represented more than 100 of the alleged victims of Geoghan, who has been defrocked. "And they were part of this culture that allowed the sexual abuse of children. Now they're spread out in dioceses throughout the country.

"So don't you think they've taken their past practices with them?"

[Photos and captions: 1) AP File Photo - Cardinal Bernard Law during a news conference in Boston in December, 2) AP Photo - Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly]