BRAINTREE (MA)
The Sun Chronicle [Attleboro MA]
August 13, 2024
In 1992, a detective went on a Boston television show to play a tape he had recorded.
The detective was there with other men who, they said, had been abused by a priest, Father James Porter, at St. Mary’s Church in North Attleboro while they were growing up in the early 1960s. On the tape, Porter admitted to abusing children at St. Mary’s.
It became an immense scandal for the Roman Catholic Church.
Quickly, the Vatican appointed Bishop Sean O’Malley to straighten out the mess.
O’Malley addressed the situation in a much different manner than Catholic hierarchy had in the past, when bishops and cardinals would arrange a quick settlement to make matter disappear without public scrutiny.
O’Malley preferred to address the concerns of the victims, to really listen to their stories.
Porter’s victims would meet in secret with their lawyers and therapists in a community center. They were on guard for intrusions from the news media.
But they were taken by surprise one evening when in walked O’Malley, unaccompanied by anyone else.
“You don’t have your lawyer here, Bishop, you really shouldn’t be here,” the lawyer for the victims, Roderick MacLeish Jr., told the New York Times.
“I just want to listen,” MacLeish recalled Bishop O’Malley replying.
And listen he did.
O’Malley addressed the scandal with compassion, something that the church had failed to do in the past. He didn’t sweep the issue under the rug.
He became the Church’s fixer, cracking down in the Diocese of Fall River, where he brought comfort to Porter’s victims and established new procedures for screening. Later, he did it in Palm Beach, Florida, where two previous bishops had been implicated in sex scandals.
And O’Malley was called upon again in 2003 when an enormous clergy abuse scandal was exposed by the Boston Globe. A coverup of the abuse was tied to Cardinal Bernard Law, one of the most powerful members of the Catholic Church in America.
Law was reassigned to the Vatican in December 2002, and O’Malley later appointed to head the Boston Archdiocese.
And again, he treated the victims with compassion, addressed the appointment of pedophile priests and did so with transparency. The Boston scandal led to a series of reforms not just within the Catholic Church but for the public at large, where religious organizations are now required to report cases of child abuse.
O’Malley, 80, will be retiring in October, to be succeeded by Bishop Richard Henning, the head of the Providence Diocese.
The faithful of the Boston and Fall River dioceses owe O’Malley a great deal of thanks.
“He helped create a state-of-the-art policy on sexual abuse for the Fall River Diocese,” MacLeish later said. “It was a model program, and it remains a model program.”
O’Malley’s legacy will be as the broom that swept the room clean.
But we prefer to see the cardinal as a man of compassion, who cared more for children than the institution he represented.
And a man who just wanted to listen.