By Marie Szaniszlo
Boston Herald
April 5, 2006
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=133635
Pope Benedict XVI yesterday appointed a controversial Boston Archdiocese official as bishop of Cleveland.
Bishop Richard G. Lennon, who became the archdiocese's interim head at the height of the clergy sex abuse crisis, will replace retiring Bishop Anthony Pilla effective May 15, church officials said.
Lennon, 59, was ordained in 1973 and became an auxiliary bishop in 2001. The following year, Cardinal Bernard Law resigned amid revelations he had transferred priests who had molested children from parish to parish without notifying parents or police. Lennon had been one of the cardinal's top aides, and his 14 months heading the archdiocese were frought with discord.
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Richard G. Lennon answers questions at a news-conference. Photo by the AP |
Critics accused him of being complicit during the crisis, pointing to a January 2000 letter in which he certified that Paul Shanley, a priest who has since been defrocked and convicted of child rape, was in good standing when Shanley applied for a transfer.
"Cleveland Catholics have to be aware of the role Richard Lennon played here in hiding the sexual abuse of children by priests," said Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, an online archive documenting the church sex abuse scandal.
Lennon also alienated many Catholics by barring Voice of the Faithful, a lay group that formed at the onset of the crisis, from meeting on church property. Yet he was extremely popular among young priests who got to knew him as rector of St. John's Seminary.
At a news conference in Cleveland yesterday, Lennon defended his tenure.
"I think the healing has moved forward in Boston very definitively in the past three years," the Associated Press quoted him saying. "I think that I was able to be an instrument in a small way in that."
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