Latest Abuse Revelations Stun Boston

A longtime parishioner telephoned Father Walter Cuenin early Wednesday at Our Lady Help of Christians Church. After the latest disclosures about how the Roman Catholic archdiocese here covered up clerical sexual abuse for decades, she told her priest, she had no choice but to leave the church.

Not the parish, she stressed. The faith.

“It seems to me that we are in total disarray,” said Cuenin, adding that he too was struggling to process the descriptions of sordid behavior contained in thousands of pages of church documents made public Tuesday. He learned from the new material that one of his seminary classmates had earned the sobriquet “Father Pothead” because of his habit of supplying drugs to members of Catholic youth groups.

Around Boston on Wednesday, Catholics who thought they had heard it all were reeling. After nearly a year of crisis, church officials here were speaking as recently as last week about healing. Cardinal Bernard Law paid an unprecedented visit to a gathering of clerical-abuse survivors. He met with leaders of Voice of the Faithful, a breakaway Catholic organization that he had steadily denounced after it emerged in January in response to the scandal.

Then a new bombshell hit in the form of 11,000 pages of confidential church records ordered released as part of a series of civil suits against Law and the archdiocese. Encompassing the case histories of eight priests over a 40-year period, the first 2,200 pages of these documents were made public Tuesday. These once-secret personnel files both broadened the range of offenses committed by priests and implicated virtually every bishop and archbishop who worked in Boston in the last four decades.

“Just when we thought we had heard the worst, we hear more,” said Thomas H. Groome, a theology professor at Boston College. “This scandal weighs heavily upon us.”

So powerful are the emotions wracking many Catholics here, said Voice of the Faithful spokesman Mike Emerton, that “I almost think there needs to be a new word to portray our actual feelings. It would be a word that encompasses anger, sadness, outrage, shock and shame. I don’t think that word exists yet.”

Surveys taken in October at many parishes in the nation’s fourth-largest archdiocese show that Mass attendance is down by 20% or more over the same time last year. Weekly collections also have dropped, and giving to the annual Cardinal’s Fund has plummeted.

Much of the animus is aimed at Law. The country’s senior Catholic prelate dodges pickets outside Holy Cross Cathedral by entering through a rear door before Mass. And he canceled his annual spring garden party, traditionally a top event on Boston’s busy social calendar.

The cardinal has sat through days of depositions in lawsuits brought by hundreds of alleged abuse victims. Excerpts of his testimony have circulated like best-selling reading material.

Law spent months after the scandal broke insisting that underlings were responsible for transferring deviant priests from parish to parish. Recently, he stood before the sparse congregation that attends his weekly Mass at the cathedral and offered a near-abject apology.

But Law’s name and signature appear over and over in the documents released here. In some cases, he sends upbeat messages to priests accused of terrible activities.

“I think the thing that surprises me most is that Cardinal Law is still here,” said Rodney Ford, whose son Greg allegedly was raped for years by retired priest Paul Shanley. “What kind of man is he?”

Joe Gallagher, founder of Boston’s Coalition of Catholics and Survivors, said the latest revelations further weaken the cardinal’s credibility.

“It is inconceivable to me that a guy who has had 18 years to fix it, and now says he is going to fix it, will fix it,” Gallagher said.

Groome said his e-mail at Boston College contained many new messages Wednesday calling for Law’s resignation.

“But if he hasn’t resigned by now, I doubt if he will do it now,” said Groome, author of “What Makes Us Catholic: Eight Gifts for Life.”

The new evidence about abusive priests and the hierarchy that protected them comes just days after reports surfaced that the Boston archdiocese may file for bankruptcy protection to minimize costly settlements with survivors. (An archdiocesan financial panel Wednesday gave the green light for such a filing, should church leaders deem it necessary.)

But Emerton, of Voice of the Faithful, said the real issue goes beyond financial solvency.

“What we’ve seen with these new documents is complete moral bankruptcy across the board,” he said. “And this ranges from priests in the parish engaging in drug abuse or the beating of individuals to the bishops who have actively known of their problems, but yet repeatedly transferred them into new parishes without alerting the community.”

Reams of new documents -- close to 10,000 additional pages -- will be released by plaintiffs’ lawyers in coming weeks. Far from disquieting, for some Catholics here the prospect of taking the lid off more church secrets is a welcome development.

“Jesus said someplace in the Gospel -- Luke, Chapter 12, Verse 2 -- that what is concealed will be revealed,” Groome said. “It looks as if that is what is happening to us. There will be a deep purging. And hopefully, it will be a crucifixion before a resurrection.”

At his church in Newton, outside Boston, Cuenin said he was writing a note to the woman who was leaving the church.

“I am asking her to keep the lines of communication open,” the priest said. “Maybe down the road there might be some possibility for healing.”