MASSACHUSETTS
Dorchester Reporter
Nov. 24, 2015
By Lew Finfer, Special to the Reporter
The very first scene in “Spotlight,” the new movie detailing how The Boston Globe exposed the pedophile priest scandal, is set at the Area C-11 police station in Dorchester. It’s the mid-1970s. In one room, a priest sits alone; in a second room, another priest assures a woman that the cleric who had just sexually assaulted her children would be reassigned and kept away from other potential victims.
But just the opposite occurred. As the Globe would report in 2002, the Boston Catholic archdiocese took such predator priests and reassigned them to other parishes over and over again, placing more young children in their paths. And Cardinal Law knew this and participated in this cover-up.
There’s also a scene at Boston College High School in Dorchester about a meeting of Globe reporters with officials there about an accused priest who served there.
The Globe has a website listing the 271 accused priests. It also tells what parishes they served in. This sent a shudder through the laity as they realized that so, so many parishes at one time or another had one or more of these priest abusers at their own parish. The list includes the names of 22 priests who served in Dorchester parishes.
I have met four of the priests who turned out to be abusers. I still feel haunted remembering the unkindly piercing eyes of Fr. Paul Mahan whom I worked with at St. Matthew’s Church when they participated in one of our community improvement organizations. I later learned he was one of the abusers. Another abuser, Fr. Paul Shanley, actually had an acclaimed ministry to homeless youth. Clearly, he constantly found hopeless youth whom he could abuse while in that so-called ministry. I will always remember the anguish of one priest who told me that he had to live with knowing he’d referred troubled youth to Fr. Shanley because he was thought to be effective with youth.
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