In January 1994, I published a column on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The article appeared in the Cambridge Chronicle and started like this:

“When will it ever end? Yet another revelation of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy of children and adolescents has shocked a nation grown accustomed to such reports.”

Even with the resignation of Cardinal Law, the crisis I wrote about almost a decade ago has not yet come to an end.  However, the hope of something better has finally begun to shine through. A new archdiocesan administration, on a temporary basis, and then the prospective appointment of a new archbishop offer the promise of something better: action to repair some of the damage and to find new ways of putting  the needs of people first.

Rome, after a time of seeming eyeless like an ancient classical marble statue, has finally acted to sweep away the old leadership and bring on the new. Catholics and others can now hope that a new era can begin. But it is much too early to stop thinking about the Archdiocese’s betrayal of public trust.

In reflecting on the trauma of the past year, one can pretend that church corruption in Boston is without precedent. However,  for the Catholic Church in Boston, moral crisis is nothing new. Some of its history, not widely known, reveals seeds of corruption planted long ago.

The tone of ecclesiastical life was set here back in 1907 with the appointment of William O’Connell as the fifth bishop of Boston, the second to be an archbishop and, in 1911,  the first cardinal. He was to reign (the appropriate word) until 1944.

In 1912 the cardinal appointed his nephew, James O’Connell, to the office of chancellor of the archdiocese. Only 28 years old at the time, James O’Connell benefited from this nepotism to assume great power over church affairs. A fine account of this period can be found in the 1992 book Militant and Triumphant, written by James O’Toole,  now professor of history at Boston College.

The astonishing fact hidden behind the career of Monsignor James O’Connell is the fact that,  during most of the time of his chancellorship, he was secretly married. Under the name James Roe, he lived with his wife for a few days each week in New York City, where he became prosperous through investment of money apparently embezzled from the Archdiocese of Boston. Each week,  he would take the train to and from New York, changing back and forth from his clerical costume to mufti.  

Eventually word of this marriage reached Rome where Pope Benedict XV, in 1920, confronted Cardinal O’Connell with the fact of his nephew’s marriage. The cardinal denied the charge until the pope angrily produced a copy of the marriage license. Thereafter began a serious effort by some of his fellow American bishops to get the cardinal fired, an effort that lost steam when Pope Benedict XV died.

Thus ended a cover-up of dramatic proportions, one in which the cardinal was almost certainly complicit. In addition to this case of corruption, his biographer writes that William O’Connell’s opponents found in him a “ lack of true religious feeling.” One priest said of him: “an awful worldliness has crept into the sanctuary here” and he condemned the cardinal’s “scandalous parade of wealth, .  .  .  his arrogant manners, his strange and unecclesiastical method of living.”

Historian O’Toole also reports serious “irregularities” in O’Connell’s handling of finances when he was bishop of Portland, Maine. The evidence suggests that when he left Portland for Boston in 1907, he took with him some 25,000 dollars that belonged to the diocese he was leaving,  money that he was forced to return.

His predecessor, Archbishop Williams,  had lived in a room in his cathedral rectory in the South End. By contrast, O’Connell in 1926 took up residence in a Renaissance palace he had built at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Lake Street in Brighton. This was yet another step in establishing a princely style of life and a clericalism that was to take firm hold in Boston.

One cannot perhaps easily establish a direct link between the events described here and the current crisis. However, the history inherited by the clerics of the Boston Archdiocese suggests a disconnect  with the values of Jesus professed by the church at large. In fact, Boston has been long regarded by Catholic observers in other parts of the country as both unprogressive and highly clericalized  

My maternal grandmother, I remember, used to speak warmly of Archbishop Williams who  served the church in Boston from 1866 to 1907. His simplicity and unassuming personal style presumably represented to her what a bishop should be. But, as the Catholic community grew and developed in presence and power,  its leaders took on power without a corresponding sense of social responsibility and fidelity to Gospel values.

The mess we have now has deeper roots than is commonly realized.

Richard Griffin