BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
December 10, 2025
By Kevin Cullen
Just a year into the job, Richard Henning, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, is already facing his Bernie Law moment.
And, as he did 23 years ago, the Rev. Stephen Josoma, the pastor of St. Susanna’s in Dedham, is the onechallenging the archdiocese’s leadership on a core tenet of Catholic morality and teaching.
As that noted theologian and thespian Yogi Berra once observed, it’s deja vu all over again.
By refusing Henning’s request to remove a sign, ICE WAS HERE, from a Nativity scene outside his church, Father Steve is putting it to the current archbishop as he did to Cardinal Bernard Law in 2002: Where do you stand? With perpetrators and those who would excuse them, or with victims and those who would help them?
For those of us who lived and worked through it all 23 years ago, when the scandal exposed by this newspaper consumed the archdiocese and, not just Boston, but the whole world looked on transfixed, the gravity of subject matter may be less consequential, and the circumstances and level of culpability are very different. But the fundamental question raised today is the same: Whose side is the leadership of the Archdiocese of Boston on?
In 2002, after my colleagues Walter Robinson, Matt Carroll, Mike Rezendes, and Sacha Pfeiffer blew the whistle on how Law protected miscreant priests who raped children, Marty Baron, then the Globe’s editor, sent in reinforcements. Steve Kurkjian, Tom Farragher, Michael Paulson, and yours truly were dispatched to the Spotlight offices, and Ben Bradlee Jr., an editor who was as tough as his old man and namesake who ran The Washington Post during the Watergate years, joined editor Mark Morrow to oversee the investigation.
A decade before, Kurkjian and our colleagues Linda Matchan and Don Aucoin did groundbreaking work on defrocked priest James Porter, who raped and ruined countless children while his superiors whistled past the graveyard.
There was always a segment of Globe readers who accused this newspaper of having an anti-Catholic agenda. And, while trying to save himself, Law played to that sentiment. But those strident voices who always defended Law and the archdiocese began to fade as the Spotlight Team revealed what Law said, in his own words, when he offered comforting words to rapists he supervised while offering bupkis to their victims.
Law’s obsession with protecting his archdiocese and himself from scandal blinded him, and as the months passed, his defiance of the Globe and grip on power ebbed away, like sand in an hourglass.
There were many twists and turns, but I think we at the Globe knew Cardinal Law was toast when some of his ownpriests broke with the silence that was expected and demanded of them and essentially said the archbishop had no clothes, that he had failed his flock.
Not surprisingly, one of those priests was Father Steve.
The archdiocese, which has been cash-strapped since paying out millions to those victimized by its priests, is understandably wary of alienating Catholics who voted for Donald Trump. Polls show Trump carried the Catholic vote handily.
Institutions need money to survive, whether their business is saving nature or saving souls. The Catholic Church needs money not just to pay past debts to those its members victimized, but for all the good works it does.
So Henning faces a moral and institutional existential question: Is the Archdiocese of Boston about Jesus, or the Benjamins? Can it be about both without compromising itself and its moral authority?
Jesus Christ threw merchants and money changers out of the temple.
Father Steve and the good parishioners of St. Susanna’s are calling out the figurative money changers of today: the Trump administration and its masked gunmen, ICE agents, who have been engaged in performative cruelty and brutality against immigrants and not a few American citizens who get grabbed because they look or sound like foreigners to the agents rounding them up. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which includes five Catholics, has said it has no problem with racial and ethnic profiling by ICE.
But Father Steve and his parishioners do.
What galls the parishioners I’ve traded messages with, even more than the cruelty behind these roundups that upend and separate families, is that Trump and his administration bill themselves as champions of Christianity while they thumb their nose at Jesus Christ and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, who insist immigrants be treated with dignity.
The hypocrisy is as offensive as the cruelty.
Despite Henning’s contention the ICE WAS HERE sign is politically divisive, and that a church is not the proper forum for a political protest, Jesus was as political as they come. Jesus’ ideas about helping the poor and challenging authority threatened the status quo. That’s why they killed him.
Henning now has to decide whether to give in or dig in.
Cardinal Law dug in for months, his defiance unable to stem his stunning loss of moral authority and power.
After he resigned in disgrace, Law was rewarded by the Vatican for his “service” to the Catholic Church with a sinecure and finely appointed apartment in Rome, where he was waited on, hand and foot, by nuns until he died.
While Law lived and dined in princely comfort, Father Steve had to fight off the archdiocese’s efforts to close St. Susanna.
Through a spokesman, Henning declined a request for an interview.
In fairness, he’s got a lot on his mind right now. His tenure as Boston’s archbishop, and how his priests and flock come to regard him, may well rest on what he decides to do next.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.