QUINCY (MA)
Patriot Ledger [Quincy MA]
September 24, 2025
By Peter Blandino
Correction: Jim Petosa is a former president of Quincy’s United First Parish Church. His role was misstated in an earlier version of this story.
Mayor Thomas Koch made inflammatory comments about homosexuality and the Catholic Church child sexual abuse scandal while appearing on a radio show this week.
The 25-minute interview on the WBZ News Radio program Nightside with Dan Rea aired Monday, Sept. 22.
It focused on the controversy around two statues of saints that Koch commissioned for the new public safety headquarters, which are the subject of a lawsuit claiming the artwork violates the constitutional separation of church and state.
The conversation turned to the church and child sexual abuse when Rea expressed his anger at church leadership for not defrocking pedophile priests, to which Koch responded:
“That was mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia.”
Koch downplayed the extent of sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church, claiming higher rates of child sexual abuse in other professions where adults have unsupervised contact with minors, such as teaching and coaching. He then portrayed the Catholic Church as the victim of biased media reports.
“The church was not very popular with the secular media,” he said. “They took a beating. You don’t read about (child sexual abuse) when it happens around the country in other circumstances. It’s bad and evil in any circumstance, but I don’t believe the media treats it equally in the various situations where it happened.”