Year in review: Vermont’s Catholic Church finds atonement a slow go

By Kevin O'connor
VT Digger
December 29, 2019

https://bit.ly/2thHoUk

Vermont Catholic Bishop Christopher Coyne addresses reporters at a recent press conference. Photo by Kevin O’Connor

From left, Bishop Christopher Coyne and members of the church’s lay committee, Mike Donoghue and Mark Redmond. Photo by Mike Dougherty

St. Stephen Catholic Church in Winooski. Seen on Friday, November 15, 2019. Photo by Glenn Russell

Vermont Catholic Bishop Christopher Coyne had hoped 2019 would be the year the church’s history of priest misconduct would stop making headlines.

Coyne, the former spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston in the aftermath of the 2002 scandal dramatized in the Oscar-winning “Spotlight,” seemed to have shed the past when he became head of the Green Mountain State’s largest religious denomination in 2015.

That changed a year and a half ago when BuzzFeed posted a story about the “unrelenting physical and psychological abuse of captive children” at the Vermont diocese’s long-shuttered St. Joseph’s Orphanage, which operated in Burlington from 1854 to 1974.

The local press already had reported most of the facts in the 1990s, while authorities have yet to confirm BuzzFeed’s most shocking claim — that a nun supposedly threw a boy out a window to his death three-quarters of a century ago. But that didn’t stop the story from sparking calls for investigation.

Coyne shocked those accustomed to decades of church stonewalling by scheduling a press conference a day before another set by police and prosecutors. There he pledged to work with authorities before going on to release accusers from past nondisclosure agreements and form a lay committee to review clergy misconduct files and publicly release the names of offenders.

The bishop had hoped the committee could finish its work by the start of 2019, allowing the church to finally move forward. Instead, its members were continuing to meet when the national Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests protested this past summer outside the diocese’s office in South Burlington.

“We set what turned out to be a totally unrealistic deadline for finishing,” the committee said in a statement. “Once we saw the personnel files — some of them 1,000 pages or more — we knew it would take many more months.”

Coyne released the lay committee’s report in August. It revealed the diocese knew at least 40 Vermont priests — about 10% of all the state’s Catholic clergy since 1950 — faced accusations of sexually abusing children over the past seven decades but did nothing to alert the public or police.

“While most of these allegations took place at least a generation ago, the numbers are still staggering,” Coyne said at the time. “If only a list of priests with credible allegations of sexual abuse of a minor had been released 15 years ago, perhaps we would be farther along our collective path of healing.”

Instead, the report’s release has sparked more headlines and headaches for the church.

In coverage, throughout the fall, VTDigger recounted not only the horrors of survivors and problematic priests, but also the diocese’s history of efforts to shield an estimated $500 million in property into protective trusts.

For his part, Burlington attorney Jerome O’Neill, who has secured some $30 million in settlements for more than 50 Vermont accusers over the past quarter-century, has filed five new lawsuits.

The church, as a result, is finding atonement more challenging than expected. Coyne, for example, called for the release of a list of accused clergy back when Vermont restricted the filing of court cases to a confined time period after alleged misconduct. Then the state Legislature surprised everyone this past session by repealing all restrictions on introducing civil actions involving child sex abuse.

The diocese also is frustrated by news reports about past problems that spur some to believe they’re continuing. It closed its orphanage 45 years ago but has received calls from BuzzFeed readers who, mistakenly thinking the facility remains open, have taken current leaders to task for not shutting it down.

Coyne, one of a group of U.S. bishops ordained after the 2002 revelation of the scandal, hasn’t given up.

“I would say personally, from day one when it was happening,” the bishop told the Boston Globe, “it made me more committed to the church because I wanted to be someone who would try to fix it if I could.”

Coyne may find reconciliation this coming year if he can settle the remaining lawsuits rather than see them go to trial. For all the seemingly repeating news, his attempts at moving forward are drawing notice.

“I think Bishop Coyne is trying to deal with the legacy problem of abuse,” O’Neill said recently. “I perceive him as someone who wants to be fair. But whether the amount of money the diocese has is adequate to resolve the cases remains to be seen.”