MAINE
Bangor Daily News
Maine’s new Catholic bishop to be installed Friday; was investigator of sex abuse while at the Vatican
By Judy Harrison, BDN Staff
Posted Feb. 13, 2014
PORTLAND, Maine — Bishop Robert Peter Deeley, 67, will become the head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland and spiritual leader of nearly 200,000 people at a Mass Friday afternoon at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The event will be broadcast live on Catholic television and radio and will be streamed on the diocesan website.
The Massachusetts native to be installed on Valentine’s Day as Maine’s Catholic bishop may be a bit of a mystery to his new flock, but while in Rome his work led to the dismissal of more than 3,000 priests amid the church’s global sex abuse scandal, according to a reporter who covers the Vatican.
A native of Cambridge, Mass., Deeley was born in 1946 to Irish immigrant parents. He served as a parish priest, then in various capacities in the Metropolitan Tribunal, the ecclesiastical court in the archdiocese of Boston, for 20 years. In 2000, he assumed the presidency of the Canon Law Society of America.
Deeley moved to Rome in September 2004 to assist as an official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF, under the cardinal who became Pope Benedict XVI, according to information released by the Maine diocese in December. He returned to Boston in summer 2011 and was appointed an auxiliary bishop in January 2013.
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