Opinion: Clive McFarlane: Kathy Shaw used her craft to enrich the lives of others

By Clive Mcfarlane
Telegram & Gazette
June 29, 2018

http://www.telegram.com/news/20180629/clive-mcfarlane-kathy-shaw-used-her-craft-to-enrich-lives-of-others

In 1974, Joseph A. Fredette, a local priest and the live-in manager of a halfway house for juvenile delinquents, fled the country after Worcester police issued a warrant for his arrest on charges that he had sexually assaulted some of the boys in his care.

Years later, as the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal dominated headlines, a dogged pair of Telegram & Gazette reporters, Kathy Shaw and George Griffin, began searching for the fugitive priest. The duo learned that the priest, after fleeing the country, had been writing frequently to one of his victims, who shared the letters with Mr. Griffin and Ms. Shaw.

From those letters they were able to pinpoint his location and contact him in New Brunswick, Canada.

“I called him up, and I thought he was going to crap in his pants,” Mr. Griffin, now an adjunct professor at Worcester State University, recalled.

After the priest hung up and refused to accept further calls, Mr. Griffin said, he and Ms. Shaw flipped a coin to decide which of them would go to Canada to confront him.

Ms. Shaw won the honors, and in her bio she described “walking up and rapping on the front door of his rustic house in the wilderness,” and discovering that “questions had been raised by some area residents regarding young men he had living with him when he served in a nearby parish.”

The pair’s investigative work eventually led to the priest being extradited back to Massachusetts to face trial in 1994.

“It remains the only time one of these pedophile priests has been extradited from another country to stand trial here,” Mr. Griffin noted.

For Ms. Shaw, who died on Sunday, that investigative effort was the start of what would become a lifelong commitment to chronicling the atrocities of the clergy sexual abuse scandal, a commitment she kept up to her death.

A native of Athol, she spent most of the 40-years she worked as a reporter at the Telegram & Gazette, serving as the paper’s religion writer from 1991 until she retired in 2006. In 1991, she also took on a second career as a mental health crisis counselor and clinician.

But it was her work on the clergy abuse scandal, which includes her being the first to write the story of a 1962 Vatican document instructing the church how to keep sexual abuse by priests and bishops secret, that is the hallmark of her career.

A year earlier, she had accepted a request from journalist Bill Mitchell at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies to work on a clergy abuse tracker he had started in 2002. The tracker, which compiles clergy abuse stories around the world, is currently operated by Bishop Accountability.org.

“Kathy was among several reporters that responded,” Mr. Mitchell said of his outreach for help with the tracker.

“She took it in a way unlike anyone else. She became good at it, dedicated to doing it, and doing it all on a volunteering basis in the early years. It is an enormous gift she gave to everybody. It wasn’t long before it became clear how indispensable it had become for attorneys, survivors, and church officials.”

David Clohessy, former national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the largest and oldest self-help group for victims of clergy molestation in the United States, was among those who benefited tremendously from Ms. Shaw’s work.

He said he was abused as a kid for a period of four years. Three of his siblings were abused by the same priests, and one of them became a priest and went on to abuse children as well, he said.

“I don’t think of anybody on earth who benefited more than I in my work with the survivors network,” he said.

“I would get up early every day to peruse the tracker so I could get a handle on what was uncovered that day, so I could say to the people I speak with the rest of the day, ‘I am sorry your bishop is in court today trying to keep a lid on these secrets. Don’t feel alone. In New Orleans, Fresno, Tallahassee, they are doing the same thing,’ and to say to a grieving mother whose abused daughter killed herself, ‘If it is any consolation, your daughter is not unique in that she found her pain unbearable.’ ”

Terence McKiernan, the tracker’s archivist, spoke of its importance in a video on the website Bishop-accountability.org.

“Each of these stories is the story of a priest, a brother, a nun intimidating a victim into silence, a victim being afraid to speak,” he said.

“When a priest was returned to a parish, that parish wasn’t necessarily informed about the priest’s past. There are all these overlapping silences and reticences. Because of that, information was really crucial in all of this.”

Ms. Shaw, in a video appearance, concurred.

“Years down the road when the church would pretend there never was a problem because people were making it up, there is this massive archive now where people can go and say, ‘Oh no, no, no, no.’ ”

Ms. Shaw’s niece, Renee Whitenett, recalled how her aunt was dedicated to tracking down information for the tracker.

“She was at it day and night,” she said.

“It wasn’t work to her. It was pursuing what was right. It was doing what was required.”

If we are humble, we acknowledge that in our profession journalists are merely placeholders, that at the end of the day we will move on and another will take our place. But while we are on the job, the potential to greatly enrich the lives of those living in our communities is there if we only take advantage of the opportunity. Kathy did. She will be missed.