Commentary
Story Becomes All Too Familiar

By Dennis Duggan
Newsday
April 3, 2002

You'd like to feel sorry for Romano Ferraro.

But then you think of the shame and humiliation he has allegedly visited on trusting children and you want to take him into a small room and bat him around.

Even his own Brooklyn diocese threw him overboard in 1988. Officials there had heard sex abuse allegations similar to the ones that got him indicted in Massachusetts.

You can't do much worse to a priest than strip him of the duties that define his priesthood. For the past 14 years Ferraro hasn't been allowed to say Mass, to give baptism or to hear confessions.

He was a priest without portfolio.

He was given a nice one-bedroom apartment in a middle-class neighborhood in Jamaica, across the street from Mary Immaculate Hospital, one of eight hospitals run by Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers.

That's where the cops from the 112th Precinct's Special Victims Squad in Forest Hills went Monday afternoon to arrest him as a fugitive from justice, a technicality to bring him into court to face extradition to Massachusetts.

I talked to a spokeswoman for the hospital who said she didn't know much about Ferraro, who had lived in an apartment on one of the top two floors of Parsons Manor for the past 12 years.

But clearly there was concern by hospital officials that this latest pedo-priest scandal might rub off on the highly respected hospital across 153rd Street from Parsons Manor, a one-time monastery that is now a live-in facility for nurses, nuns and priests, many of them retired.

"He was not associated with the hospital," the spokeswoman emphasized yesterday.

An elderly red-haired woman sat in the lobby of Parsons Manor under a portrait of Bishop Thomas Daily, who, each passing stonewalling day, reminds me how much I miss his predecessor, Bishop Francis V. Mugavero. Mugavero, who ran the diocese from 1968 to 1990 and was known as Mugsy, had humility, humor and heart.

"This is a tragedy," said the woman, who did not want to give her name. "I think the church has to take some of the blame for not dealing with such priests properly."

But, she said, "My faith is rock-hard."

Earlier in the morning I sat in a Queens courtroom for two hours watching a parade of perps pass before the priest-in-name-only was finally hauled into the dock.

He came and went in a flash, a balding, graying man wearing a windbreaker. He looked like your everyday parish priest except for the stark fact that a Massachusetts grand jury has indicted him on a sordid charge, the alleged repeated rape and sexual abuse of a little boy over a seven-year period.

It's a story that has become so familiar that it is beginning to lose its shock value. The term "pedo-priest" has already crept into the lexicon.

Ferraro looked straight ahead in a basement courtroom covered with graffiti. The one in front of my third-row bench read "-- this courtroom."

Normally, you wouldn't take a second look at Ferraro unless you knew he was accused of tearing away at a beleaguered Catholic Church like a termite.

The church has moved bad priests from one parish to another in an attempt to keep the lid on the scandal. It's no longer working.

Ferraro, ordained in Brooklyn in 1960, worked in several parishes in Brooklyn and Queens before being assigned to the U.S. naval base in Key West, as a Navy chaplain.

Looking at him, I found him lacking the forthrightly pathetic face of John Geoghan, the defrocked Massachusetts priest who found young boys far more interesting than the sinners who sought absolution in his confessional.

Someone once said that you get the face you deserve after you turn 50. Geoghan had earned that dreadful splotchy face and then some.

Ferraro is back in jail. He will be handed over to the Massachusetts cops Friday, and the fugitive-from-justice charge lodged in New York will be dropped.

Then Ferraro will face his worldly judgment.

The other comes later.