"Two Key Misconceptions about the Boston Scandal" by Phil Lawler

Philip F. Lawler, editor emeritus of Catholic World Report, reflects on the tenth anniversary of the first reporting of the Boston scandals:

Ten years have passed since the Boston archdiocese was engulfed in scandal, as the result of investigative reporting by the Boston Globe. Today the faithful in Boston are still struggling to shake off the lingering effects of that scandal. But a full recovery is delayed because of two popular misconceptions, which should be corrected.

First, the scandal exposed by the Globe in January 2002 was not the sexual abuse of young people by Catholic priests. That scandal had already been exposed a full decade earlier, as sickening stories of clerical molesters emerged from Louisiana and from nearby Fall River, Massachusetts. By the turn of the century, anyone who followed the story carefully recognized that these cases were not isolated—that the problem was widespread.

The Globe expose added an entirely new dimension to the story, revealing a second scandal. While some priests abused children, the Globe reporting showed, archdiocesan officials had protected the predators, covered up evidence, and lied to parishioners about their priests' problems. The Globe exposed the corruption within the Boston hierarchy which had allowed the abuse to continue.

Within a few months after the appearance of that shocking investigative coup—during what the late Father Richard Neuhaus called the "long Lent" of 2002—a similar pattern of episcopal corruption was exposed in many other American dioceses. Only a small percentage of the Catholic priests in the US were charged with abusing children, but a very large percentage of the country's bishops (fully two-thirds, according to an exhaustive search through the available evidence by the Dallas Morning News) had been implicated in the cover-up.

Read the entire piece on the Catholic World Report blog. Phil is the editor of Catholic World News (cwnews.com) and author of The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture, the acclaimed book about the priestly scandals in Boston.