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Thomas V. Daily, Bishop With Legacy Tarnished by Response to Abuse, Dies at 89
By Sam Roberts
New York Times
May 15, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/nyregion/archbishop-thomas-v-daily-of-brooklyn-dead.html?_r=0
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Bishop Thomas V. Daily in 2002. In his 13 years overseeing the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, he forgave more than $100 million in parish debts, raised $67 million in a capital campaign and consolidated parishes.
Photo by Ruby Washington |
Thomas V. Daily, the bishop emeritus of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, who raised tens of millions of dollars to repair schools and churches but whose last years were marred by criticism of how he had handled the church’s sexual abuse scandals in Boston and Brooklyn, died early Monday in Queens. He was 89.
A diocesan spokeswoman announced his death, at the Immaculate Conception Center in Douglaston, where he lived at the Bishop Mugavero Residence, named after his predecessor, Francis J. Mugavero.
Appointed by Pope John Paul II in 1990 as the sixth bishop of the diocese, which covers Brooklyn and Queens and is home to about 1.5 million Catholics, Bishop Daily presided until 2003, when the pope accepted his resignation 10 months after he was required to submit it at age 75.
In his first news conference in 1990, Bishop Daily distinguished himself from the more liberal Bishop Mugavero, saying in response to a reporter’s question that he would bar Gov. Mario M. Cuomo from speaking at parish churches in the diocese, which included Mr. Cuomo’s home borough of Queens, because of his position on abortion. The governor had said he supported abortion rights and public funds for abortions for the poor while being privately opposed to abortion.
“I find that a contradiction, and I don’t buy that,” the bishop said. “Politicians have to be consistent, especially when it comes to the life issue.”
In his 13 years overseeing the diocese, Bishop Daily developed a reputation as a genial priest’s bishop who forgave more than $100 million in parish debts, raised $67 million in a capital campaign and consolidated parishes.
In 1995, he helped arrange Pope John Paul II’s visit to Queens, where he celebrated Mass at Aqueduct Racetrack.
But the bishop’s legacy was clouded by criticism, coupled with his own second thoughts, about his response to lawsuits by people alleging that they were abused as minors by priests in Brooklyn and especially in Boston. Bishop Daily had been chancellor and vicar general in the Diocese of Boston under two former archbishops, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros and, briefly, Cardinal Medeiros’s successor, Cardinal Bernard F. Law.
It was Bishop Daily who allowed the Rev. John J. Geoghan on a planned two-month sabbatical to Italy before placing him back in the same parish near a family whom Father Geoghan had traumatized. Bishop Daily informed neither law enforcement nor the parish priest of the allegations against Father Geoghan, who became the country’s most notorious example of a predatory priest.
Bishop Daily was named as a defendant in dozens of suits filed by people who claimed that Father Geoghan, who was later defrocked, had molested them in his three decades as a priest. In 2002, the Boston archdiocese settled the Geoghan lawsuits for millions of dollars.
Father Geoghan, who was accused of molesting almost 150 boys, was convicted of groping a 10-year-old boy and was serving a sentence of nine to 10 years in a Massachusetts state prison when he was strangled by another inmate in 2003.
Asked in a deposition why he never investigated whether Father Geoghan had molested children beyond those of a family he had met with in 1982, Bishop Daily replied: “I’m not a policeman. I am a shepherd. I am a pastor who has to go after the Lord’s sheep and find them and bring them back to the fold and give them the kind of guidance and discipline them in such a way that they will come back.”
James M. O’Toole, a history professor at Boston College, said of Bishop Daily by email that “without excusing anything that he did or did not do, it seems to me that at some level he simply did not know what to do.”
“Should Daily have done more?” Mr. O’Toole continued. “Obviously. But there was something in the way that he and other priests of his generation had been trained that prevented them from recognizing the larger patterns of abuse.
“Each case seems to have been handled individually. Only later did the full, systemic dimensions of abuse become clear to everyone. For that reason, though there was surely culpability on his part and that of other bishops, there was for me also a kind of sadness to it — that a fundamentally good man did such a tragically poor job in addressing this issue.”
Thomas Vose Daily was born on Sept. 23, 1927, in Belmont, Mass., a Boston suburb, to John Daily, an official of the Knights of Columbus, and the former Mary McBride.
He graduated from Boston College and St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Mass., and was ordained as a priest in 1952. (His brother became a priest, too.)
In the 1960s, he spent five years in Peru with the Missionary Society of St. James the Apostle, becoming proficient in Spanish, before returning to Boston, where he was consecrated as an auxiliary bishop and appointed vicar general of the archdiocese.
In 1984, he was installed as the first bishop of the Diocese of Palm Beach, Fla. He also served as the supreme chaplain of the Knights of Columbus.
In response to the sexual abuse scandals, many revealed by The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team, the subject of an Oscar-winning 2015 film, Bishop Daily said he regretted some of his actions but argued that he had been following procedures generally accepted at the time. When he resigned, he acknowledged that the scandal had brought sleepless nights.
“Some people carry heavy, heavy crosses,” he said. “They do it in union with Jesus Christ. For what? For life. They hold it for life everlasting.”
The bishop said, though, that he preferred to focus for the moment on the people of Brooklyn.
“The greatest treasure that Brooklyn has is its people, good people,” he said. “I know that in the streets of Brooklyn you can find evil. You pick up the papers, and you can see it. But I’ve got to tell you, there are saints walking the streets of Brooklyn.”
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