See now, here's what I'm talking about.In the aftermath of the Porter Horrors, the Archdioces of Boston implemented new policies for dealing with clerical sexual abusers, policies that were generally praised. Guess what? The people in charge of the archdiocese didn't always feel obligated to follow the policies.
Included in the more than 950 pages were documents showing:
-- the archdiocese had heard numerous, graphic complaints against the Rev. Ronald Paquin when it recommended he return to public ministry in 1997.
-- complaints about Rev. Paul J. Mahan poured into the archdiocese throughout the 1990s, including one from someone who twice attempted suicide and a letter from a lawyer claiming one boy was so scared of Mahan he jumped off Mahan's sail boat in the ocean to swim more than 100 yards to shore.
Mahan had been removed from parish duty in Boston in August 1993 but was reassigned to a Cambridge church the following year. The church later pressured him to laicize and threatened him with negative publicity as part of a bid to coax him out of the priesthood.
-- the archdiocese knew as early as 1964 of allegations against Rev. Eugene O'Sullivan, who in 1984 became the first Massachusetts priest convicted of sexual abuse. A woman wrote in 1964 to Cardinal Richard Cushing that O'Sullivan had reached into her 12-year-old son's bathing trunks and "touched him repeatedly in the private area." She said she reported the incident to her local pastor who told her "not to discuss the matter with a soul."
MacLeish said the documents also showed that even after the archdiocese imposed stricter policies following 1992 scandal with the former Rev. James R. Porter, it applied them haphazardly.
"There was apparently in the Archdiocese of Boston a pre-Father Porter policy and a post-Father Porter policy," MacLeish said.
For instance, the documents show the church vacillating over more than a decade in the case of Rev. Daniel Graham, who in 1988 was accused by one person of sexual abuse over several years in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The accuser wrote to Graham demanding that he enroll in a self-help group, avoid contact with children, and begin a program for sex abuse victims in his parish. The letter claimed Graham was continuing to abuse others but offered no evidence.
Graham wrote back acknowledging past mistakes and said he had met the conditions and long since stopped his behavior. In 1990, according to a later memorandum, the archdiocese's supervisor of priests, Bishop Robert J. Banks, said the problem was stress-related he had 'no problem' with assigning Graham a new parish.
However, after another allegation surfaced in 1992, the archdiocese reopened the case. Graham denied the allegation but Law forbade him from involvement in parish ministry in light of a new policy under which no one who had engaged in sexual abuse with a minor from working with minors.
Banks was reported in one document to have remarked that "1990 was pre-Porter and a more forgiving time."
But in 1996, officials decided to consider the case as having been addressed before the new policy and Graham was again cleared to work without restrictions. Graham was suspended from his parish in Quincy this February after Law said all priests who had been accused of abuse would be removed