NEW YORK
New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS
MAY 15, 2017
Thomas V. Daily, the bishop emeritus of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, who raised tens of millions of dollars to repair schools and churches but whose last years were marred by criticism of how he had handled the church’s sexual abuse scandals in Boston and Brooklyn, died early Monday in Queens. He was 89.
A diocesan spokeswoman announced his death, at the Immaculate Conception Center in Douglaston, where he lived at the Bishop Mugavero Residence, named after his predecessor, Francis J. Mugavero. …
But the bishop’s legacy was clouded by criticism, coupled with his own second thoughts, about his response to lawsuits by people alleging that they were abused as minors by priests in Brooklyn and especially in Boston. Bishop Daily had been chancellor and vicar general in the Diocese of Boston under two former archbishops, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros and, briefly, Cardinal Medeiros’s successor, Cardinal Bernard F. Law.
It was Bishop Daily who allowed the Rev. John J. Geoghan on a planned two-month sabbatical to Italy before placing him back in the same parish near a family whom Father Geoghan had traumatized. Bishop Daily informed neither law enforcement nor the parish priest of the allegations against Father Geoghan, who became the country’s most notorious example of a predatory priest.
Bishop Daily was named as a defendant in dozens of suits filed by people who claimed that Father Geoghan, who was later defrocked, had molested them in his three decades as a priest. In 2002, the Boston archdiocese settled the Geoghan lawsuits for millions of dollars.
Father Geoghan, who was accused of molesting almost 150 boys, was convicted of groping a 10-year-old boy and was serving a sentence of nine to 10 years in a Massachusetts state prison when he was strangled by another inmate in 2003.
Asked in a deposition why he never investigated whether Father Geoghan had molested children beyond those of a family he had met with in 1982, Bishop Daily replied: “I’m not a policeman. I am a shepherd. I am a pastor who has to go after the Lord’s sheep and find them and bring them back to the fold and give them the kind of guidance and discipline them in such a way that they will come back.”
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