Good Start but Look for Follow-Through, by Margery Eagan, Boston Herald, April 18, 2008

Good Start, but Look for Follow-Through

By Margery Eagan
Boston Herald
April 18, 2008

http://bostonherald.com/news/opinion/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1087956

"It was the right thing to do and it's also brilliant public relations. The question is what was Benedict's motive. I think we'll know in time."

So said church scandal expert Anne Barrett Doyle yesterday, expressing perfectly my own reaction yesterday to news that Pope Benedict XVI had met with a handful of Boston survivors.

How will we know the pope's motivation? By his follow-through. Whether hearing survivors' stories first-hand will cause him to act against those American bishops who allowed this to go on and on. Whether he'll remove Bernard Cardinal Law from his position in Rome or John B. McCormack, bishop of Manchester, N.H., for the past 10 years.

The Capitol looms in the background as worshippers attend a papal Mass with Benedict XVI yesterday at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.
Photo by AP

At least two of the five survivors who met with the pope yesterday were victims of predator priest Joseph Birmingham, who molested dozens of young boys in the Boston area beginning in the 1960s and whose abuse, many Birmingham victims say, was not only known but covered up by McCormack.

Bernie McDaid, who met with the pope yesterday, was molested by Birmingham as an 11-year-old altar boy at St. James Church in Salem. Olan Horne, who met with the pope, was molested by Birmingham at St. Michael's Church in Lowell.

Bishop McCormack went to seminary with Birmingham and lived in the rectory with him at the Salem church. That is where Paul Cultrera, the victim whose story is at the center of the scandal documentary "Hand of God," said Birmingham began molesting him when he was a high school freshman.

That is where James Hogan described sexual abuse continuing over four years in the late 1960s when he was in grammar school at St. James parochial school. Hogan said Birmingham would call him out of class to molest him, or take him to his rectory bedroom. Hogan has also said repeatedly that he knows McCormack saw him there, and did nothing about it.

Anne Barrett Doyle works for Bishop-Accountability.org, the most comprehensive Web site documenting the church scandal in Boston and around the country.

If you visit it, you can read survivors' accounts of what hundreds of priests, and many bishops, did to them when they were 8, 10, 12 years old. You can read about mothers calling the rectory - even traveling to the old chancery in Brighton to meet with McCormack himself, who later became a top Law aide, to report abusive priests to him.

In their the-church-is-all-powerful naivete, these mothers expected McCormack to do something. They expected him to call police. They expected the abusers to get arrested, go to jail.

You can read a letter one frantic father wrote to McCormack asking if he should fear that his son, too, was a victim of Birmingham. No, no, came McCormack's reply. Don't worry.

You can read the survivors' own words about running from the room after this priest or that priest molested them. They were scared and crying but too petrified to tell. So they kept their secrets for years.

When you read all this, you understand that listening to victims, as Benedict did yesterday, is good and right and an excellent start, but it is only a start. To fix the Catholic Church in Boston, those who knew what happened and kept silent must now pay a steep price.

Pope Benedict heads a church that is supposed to be about doing what is right, even if it's difficult, especially if it's difficult.

Perhaps now, after hearing what he heard yesterday, he will begin, finally, to do it.