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	Many Victims Will Not Attend By Tom Dalton Salem News May 26, 2006 http://www.ecnnews.com/cgi-bin/05/snstory.pl?-sec-News+1k589g0+fn-priest26-20060526- SALEM — Jamie Hogan will not be attending Mass tomorrow at St. Agnes Church in Middleton. The former Salem man who filed a 2002 lawsuit alleging years of abuse by the late Rev. Joseph Birmingham, a serial child abuser who served at Salem's St. James parish, does not live in Massachusetts anymore. But even if he did, Hogan said he would not be at Cardinal Sean O'Malley's pilgrimage of repentance. "I can't go in a church and look a (priest) in the face with all the evil that was there," he said yesterday in a telephone interview. "... This Mass doesn't mean anything to me. It's like throwing a cup of water on a 2-million-acre forest fire. It's a little late." It's impossible to know how many victims will attend any of the nine Masses O'Malley will say around the archdiocese over the next week to publicly acknowledge the "sins and crimes" of the Catholic church in the priest sex abuse scandal. Some, like Bernie McDaid of Peabody, another Birmingham victim, have agreed to participate, but even he has serious misgivings. "A lot of guys are having problems in their marriages, their jobs — just functioning — because this thing opened up a wound again without a completion," he said. McDaid is speaking on Saturday, June 3, at the archdiocese's chancery in Brighton on the final day of the 10-day pilgrimage that began last night. Like others, he said he struggled before and after the scandal broke in the Boston Archdiocese in 2002, and that struggle continued after the $85 million settlement the next year with more than 550 alleged victims. Individual settlements ranged from $80,000 to $300,000, with lawyers taking about a third of the payouts. But the money, many say, wasn't a magic fix. Far from it. "I can tell you that the overall status of the average survivor that I met over the last four years is not great," said Gary Bergeron of Lowell, another Birmingham victim who went on to write a book about his experiences. "I know men that are homeless, men that are in rehab, men that have repeat suicide attempts — and that is all post-settlement." Bergeron, who got married a month ago, said he is doing well. Even so, he is not sure he will go to Mass on Monday at St. Michael's Church in Lowell, which, like other stops on the pilgrimage, was picked because of its notoriety in the sex abuse scandal. This is where Birmingham served after leaving St. James in 1970, when Salem parents confronted church officials about the alleged abuse. "I really haven't made up my mind what I'm going to do," Bergeron said. Mistrust lingers Even with Cardinal Bernard Law gone, there is still mistrust among many of the victims. One man in the Birmingham group said he is upset that New Hampshire Bishop John McCormack, who served with Birmingham at St. James and has denied knowing about the abuse back then, is still in power. "I don't have a lot of confidence in any of these people that they are really sincere," said Brian Hogan of Danvers. "I don't believe they just all of a sudden turned around. If they did, they would have done something about McCormack." Hogan, a cousin of Jamie Hogan, had what he called a "brush" with Birmingham but never joined the lawsuit. Another of the Birmingham survivors, Olan Horne, spoke last night at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston. Interviewed before his speech, Horne said he planned to tell church leaders and lay people of the difficult plight of victims, many of whom spent their settlements and aren't getting the counseling and help they need. Worse, he said, some question what was accomplished by coming forward. "Many of us are faltering worse now than we were before," Horne said. "I think there's a sense of being doubly burned. (We) expected that through the lawsuits it would cause systemic and fundamental change, and it didn't."
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