The same day, Rev. Paul Shanley waived extradition from California to face child rape charges in Massachusetts.
Marian Walsh was Cardinal Law's favorite lawmaker. A state senator from West Roxbury, an overwhelmingly middle-class Catholic enclave in Boston of single-family homes and well-kept lawns, Walsh is what they call “lace-curtain Irish” — those who have assimilated and made it.
The odyssey of Walsh's family, from poverty in Ireland to affluence and accomplishment in America, is a prototype for the American Dream, and for Catholic Americans. Her grandparents arrived in the United States with little more than a steamer trunk. Within two years of getting off the boat, her maternal grandfather, John Kelly, was fighting in the trenches for the U.S. Army in World War I. He returned to Boston and got a job as a policeman, only to lose it when he took part in the great Boston police strike of 1919. He went to work as a carpenter for the transit authority and raised nine kids, all of them baptized at Sacred Heart Church in the Roslindale section of Boston. The Church was the focal point of the community. It educated the children. It set the moral tone. It helped give the new arrivals a stake in the New World.
Walsh's paternal grandparents had arrived from Ireland with no money, either. But her grandmother, Delia O'Reilly, was a shrewd Galway woman who read the
Wall Street Journal
religiously. She had no formal education, but she took the money she made renting rooms out in the family's sprawling house and speculated in the stock market. Her hunches were impeccable, as was her timing: she cashed in her stock to pay for her son Francis's first semester at Boston College in September 1929, a month before the crash,
Francis Xavier Walsh, the son of a blacksmith, took the trolley out to Boston College every day. After graduation, he got into Tufts Medical School and became an obstetrician. He married Mary Elizabeth Kelly, a teacher who had obtained two master's degrees from Catholic universities. Like their immigrant parents, they had nine children. The Catholic Church was central to everything the family did and achieved. “My dad was taught by Jesuits and he conducted himself like a Jesuit,” Marian Walsh recalled, sitting in her office in the Massachusetts State House on Boston's Beacon Hill. “He believed very much in social justice.” He was also a daily communicant. “He walked the walk and talked the talk,” she said. “Their faith was important to my parents as a couple. They went on retreats. They tried hard to live their lives according to the basic tenets of the Church, and my parents sacrificed a lot for the Church.”
Walsh's aunt was a nun, and Walsh herself seriously considered entering a convent. Instead, after graduating from Newton College of the Sacred Heart, she enrolled in Harvard Divinity School. It was the first time she had stepped outside the comforting cocoon of growing up Catholic in Boston. “It was good for me because, for the first time, I was a minority” she said. “Harvard Divinity had a Protestant ethos. It was weird, but exciting.”
Still, Walsh emerged from her studies more committed than ever to her Catholicism. After she decided she didn't want to be a nun, her parents were consoled by the fact that she chose a profession that was second only to the holy vocations in status among the Boston Irish: politics.
Walsh had long been an admirer of Cardinal Law, especially for his outspoken opposition to abortion and his work for the poor. It was a mutual admiration society. Law liked her, perhaps because no other legislator's voting record held so closely to the positions the cardinal advocated. Although some Catholic legislators were opposed to abortion, Walsh was one of the few who also sided with the cardinal in opposing the death penalty. “The cardinal and I saw eye to eye on everything legislatively,” she acknowledged.
But in January 2002 she was furious when she read of what she called Law's dishonesty in handling Geoghan and other sexually abusive priests. “I never thought that a leading facilitator for child abuse would be the Church, where the Church would supply the victims and hide the perpetrators. I understand why pedophiles do what they do. I still can't understand, I still can't appreciate, how the Church could do this, how sophisticated and how diabolical this was. And how the cardinal could preside over it.”
Walsh put her legislation where her mouth was. She filed a bill that would make it a crime to move a known sexual abuser from one job to another. Having been the cardinal's leading legislative ally for years, Walsh was now leading the charge to create a law that, had it been enacted a decade before, might have landed him in jail.
In April, after the Father Shanley documents were made public, Walsh became the first state lawmaker to openly call for the cardinal's resignation. And when Law blamed poor record keeping for his failure to appreciate Shanley's perversions, politicians of all stripes let him have it. The Republican minority leaders in the House and Senate called Law's statement deeply troubling and said he should resign. Several Democratic gubernatorial candidates said the cardinal should go, either unconvinced or unconcerned that what previously would have been seen as a cheap shot would cost them votes. There had been a discernible change in the political culture of Massachusetts: the cardinal was fair game. And increasingly so were cardinals and bishops in other places where, as in Boston, the Church had enjoyed a long tradition of polite courtesy from secular authorities.
New York was one of those places. Church officials there had been even less forthcoming than their Boston counterparts, Cardinal Edward M. Egan less contrite than Cardinal Law. And while Reilly and the five district attorneys whose jurisdictions cover the Archdiocese of Boston had aggressively forced the Church to cooperate with their investigations, some of their New York counterparts were initially more deferential to Church leaders.
Enter Jeanine Pirro, the district attorney of Westchester County. Now in her third term, the fifty-year-old Pirro had initially established her reputation as a prosecutor by going after those who sexually abuse children. Her office became the first in the nation to proactively pursue pedophiles with Internet stings, in which police officers pose as children and arrange to meet with child molesters who seek them out in chat rooms. When the clergy sexual abuse scandal erupted, Pirro took it as a personal failing that she hadn't seen it coming. “I mean, this is what I pride myself most on, protecting children from sexual abuse. I can't think of a more important thing we can do in law enforcement. But I had no idea. No one called us. No victims, none of their lawyers. And the Church did an incredible job in covering this up,” she said.
But if Pirro missed anything in the past, she was determined to make up for it now, and she didn't care whose toes she stepped on in the process. In April 2002 she assembled a group of seven other district attorneys whose Jurisdictions cover the New York archdiocese, and she summoned five lawyers who represent the archdiocese to her fifth-floor office in White Plains, New York. Pirro opened the meeting by saying she was a devout Catholic, but she quickly cut to the chase: the archdiocese had information that she and the other prosecutors needed to see in order to determine whether the Church was shielding sexual predators. Egan's announcement that the archdiocese would turn over evidence to prosecutors only if Church officials concluded there was probable cause didn't cut it. She wouldn't lecture the Church on theology, and she didn't expect the Church to tell prosecutors how to do their jobs. They could do it the easy way, she said, or they could do it the hard way. If the Church didn't want to turn over the records, she said, there was always the grand jury route. Then she stared at the Church lawyers as if to say, “What's it going to be, boys, yes or no?”
The Church lawyers exchanged glances. One of them, a friend of Pirro's, looked at her with something approaching disbelief. And then the lawyers blinked. They agreed to turn over the information and to waive the confidentiality agreements that had bound victims to silence.
The archdiocese isn't happy with her, but Pirro said she could not care less. “I was raised in the Church. It was a big part of my family's life, and it continues to be,” she said. “I'm still deferential to a point, but I draw the line when they harbor criminals. With all due respect, the Church and its leaders don't have the world experience that I and other prosecutors have. Maybe to them, the victims are nameless and faceless. The victims are real to me.”
Years ago, when she was a young prosecutor, when cases involving sexually abused children were farmed out to women because most men didn't want to handle them, Jeanine Pirro opened a file about a brother and sister. He was five, she was six. The children's baby-sitter and the baby-sitter's boyfriend had repeatedly raped and sodomized them. The baby-sitter and her boyfriend put knives in the girl's vagina and in the boy's rectum.
“I worked with those kids for a year, building the case,” she recalled. “This was before there was a lot known about this kind of sexual abuse, and how to prosecute it. The kids didn't have the vocabulary to say what had been done to them. I got some guys I know in the [carpenter's] union to build me an anatomically correct doll, and the kids were able to tell the jury what had happened.” The baby-sitter testified against her boyfriend, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to probation and psychiatric treatment. Appalled by the evidence, the judge sentenced the boyfriend to seventy-five years in prison, only to realize later that thirty years was the maximum allowed under the law.
Ten years later, after Pirro had been made a judge, she was presiding over a family court session when a “child in need of services” case came before her. A teenage girl had tried to kill herself, and the state was trying to figure out what to do with the troubled girl. Pirro looked up at the teenager before her. It was the little girl she thought she had saved a decade earlier.
“As soon as I looked into her eyes, I knew it was her, even before I saw her name. She still had that sweet face, and the blond hair. And the eyes, She still had the eyes,” Pirro said. Disturbed, Pirro decided to find out what had happened to the girl's brother. He was on the streets, selling his body as a prostitute.
“Now remember,” said Pirro, “these were two children who were taken under the wing of the state, who were believed, who were comforted, who were able to see that a jury had vindicated them, and know that the people who did this horrible stuff to them had been sent to prison for a long, long time. And still, look what became of them. It made me realize the enormous impact of sexual abuse on children, the lingering effects, the long-term ramifications. And it made me think — what about all the children who aren't believed, who aren't comforted, who don't see those who harm them held accountable?
“This is where the Church leaders were blind. They didn't make that human connection, They just wanted to protect the Church's reputation at the expense of children.”
Pirro said the stories that continue to emerge about the extent to which Church leaders covered up the sexual abuse of children disturb her greatly, but she has not lost her faith. “I've raised my kids in the Catholic faith, and I will continue to raise them in the Catholic faith. There are many good things that the Church has done, and continues to do, for poor people. I'm just determined to make sure the Church learns from what they didn't do to protect the children. I will hold them accountable.”
Pirro was dismissive of the archdioceses idea of a commission to review cases of priests accused of sexual abuse. So were the other prosecutors who met with archdiocese officials at her office. After a Church lawyer sang the praises of potential commission members, including former judges and prosecutors, one prosecutor interrupted and said, “With all due respect, I don't care if Jesus Christ is on the commission.”
“It was a great line,” said Pirro. “I wish I'd said it.”
Kevin Burke, the Essex County D.A., believes the sudden decline of the deference shown the Church by so many in society could lead to a “mini Reformation.” “There's no Martin Luther here,” he said, “and whether the Vatican pays attention, who knows?” It wouldn't be easy. “We're dealing with a medieval organization, an organization that represented authority to my grandparents and other immigrants. It was an organization that was respected because it educated them, it gave them a place in the New World, it gave them an identity. But with assimilation, with the educational and financial success of successive generations, the average Catholic's need of the Church is not social or political, it's moral and spiritual. And this behavior of the Church is so at odds with being moral and spiritual. The Church's leaders should be worried about a lot of things, but they should be most afraid of the lack of deference now shown them. They should not think that once this scandal fades, people will come running back to them. I know I won't.”
His Eminence
I
n 1984, when he took over as archbishop of what was then the third-largest diocese in the United States, Bernard Law said, “After Boston, there's only heaven.”
He could not have imagined that what were supposed to be his golden years in Boston would become something of a living hell.
Law's ambitious ascent in the Church was a fast and steady climb, from parish priest in the Deep South, to bishop in the Ozarks, where Catholics are few and far between, to Boston, which with New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia is one of the original great sees of the Catholic Church in America.
He rose from the buckle of the Bible Belt to preside over one of the Church's crown jewels. When his peer Cardinal John O'Connor of New York died in 2000, Law became indisputably the most influential American Catholic prelate and, more important, was seen as such in the Vatican. He was kingmaker of other bishops and cardinals. At the White House, presidents took his calls and valued his opinion. But Law's handling of the sexual abuse scandal that exploded on his watch ended all of that. Now the buzz about Cardinal Law revolved around how long he could weather the demands for his resignation.