By 1964, Birmingham was gone from Sudbury — whisked to his next parish in Salem after parents of some of his other victims went to the archdiocese to complain. Blanchette went on to a Catholic high school in Framingham, another Boston suburb, and attended college before joining the army in 1967.
Through it all, he never spoke of Birmingham's attacks. But in 1971, while home from the army, he was tossing back fifty-cent beers with some old buddies when Birmingham's name came up. ‘He queered me,” one of Blanchette's boyhood friends declared. Blanchette was stunned. He told his friends that he too had been assaulted by Birmingham. And then, one by one, every young man at the table described abuse at the hands of their former parish priest. When Blanchette got home that evening, he called what amounted to an emergency family council. He revealed Birmingham's abuse. Four of his brothers said they too had been attacked. Blanchette's mother rushed for the telephone to report the assaults. But his father put a stop to it. “I think he was afraid if he got involved he would have gone up, got his 22, and killed the bastard,” Blanchette said.
Tom Blanchette moved on with his life. He climbed the Matterhorn in Switzerland. In 1975, he crewed in a sailboat race from Newport to Bermuda. He went skydiving, sought out the thrills of white-water rafting, and skied down the faces of steep and icy mountains. In 1986 he was the number one salesman in the country for Monroe shock absorbers. After a long absence from church, he found religion again, this time as an Episcopalian. Yet he wondered about the effects of his years of abuse in Father Birmingham's bedroom.
“One of the things that I found was that I was short-fused. My cup was always ninety-five percent filled with anger,” explained Blanchette. When anyone in authority — including a New Jersey state trooper who once pulled him over — used their power in a manner he thought excessive, Blanchette erupted. And like three of his four brothers who were also Birmingham victims, Blanchette, now fifty-four, has never married. He is in a relationship with a woman now and says he is happy. And he says lie is no longer haunted by the memories of Father Birmingham. Like so few other victims, Blanchette confronted his tormentor.
In 1988, the year before the priest died, Blanchette made an unannounced visit to the rectory at St. Brigid's Church in Lexington, where he found Birmingham getting out of his car. Even as he wondered whether the priest ever worried about being punched or shot or stabbed by one of his victims, and despite all the abuse Blanchette had endured, he found himself shaking Birmingham's hand. The priest—heavier and his hair gone gray — reacted coolly.
“He was not physically intimidating anymore. I just walked up to him, and I said, ‘Hi, I'm Tom Blanchette from Sudbury.’ He said, ‘Hi! How are ya?’ And I said, ‘I've been thinking about you, and I've been having some problems and I realize that some of those problems are a result of my relationship with you and I'd like to talk to you about that.’ “
The priest put Blanchette off. He said he was leaving again for an appointment. He asked him to make an appointment, and Blanchette promised to call back. But he didn't. Six months later, Blanchette knocked on the rectory door at St. Brigid's. Birmingham answered the door, and soon the two men were seated in overstuffed chairs in a meeting room on the rectory's first floor. Blanchette remembers a German shepherd dozing nearby on the carpet.
“I said, ‘You know, I realize that I'm responsible for being angry, but I think that has something to do with the abuse I got from you. You sexually abused me, my lour brothers, and a litany of other guys.’” The priest, then in his mid-fifties, said he too had had a difficult life. His parents had died. He said he'd been very sick with a mysterious illness that defied diagnosis. But Blanchette pressed on. “With a sense of genuine righteousness I told him, ‘What you did to us — and to me specifically — was wrong, and you had no right to do that.’” The priest stared unblinkingly into Blanchette's eyes, waiting but unprepared for what came next.
‘”Having said that, it brings me to the real reason I've come here. The real reason I've come here is to ask you to forgive me for the hatred and resentment that I have felt toward you for the last twenty-five years.’ When I said that, he stood up, and in what I would describe as a demonic voice, he said, ‘Why are you asking me to forgive you?’ And through tears I said, ‘Because the Bible tells me to love my enemies and to pray for those who persecute me.”’
Blanchette said Birmingham collapsed as if he'd been punched in the chest. The priest dissolved into tears, and soon Blanchette too was crying. Blanchette began to take his leave but asked Birmingham if he could visit again. The priest explained that he was under tight restrictions at the rectory. He said he had been to a residential treatment center in Connecticut, and he returned there once a month. He was not allowed to leave the grounds except in the company of an adult.
Blanchette would not see the priest again until Tuesday, April 18, 1989, just hours before his death. Blanchette found his molester at Symmes Hospital in Arlington and discovered the priest — once robust and 215 pounds — was now an eighty-pound skeleton with skin. Morphine dripped into an IV in his arm. Oxygen was fed by a tube into his nostrils. His hair had been claimed by chemotherapy. The priest sat in a padded chair by his bed. His breathing was labored.
“I knelt down next to him and held his hand and began to pray. And as I did, he opened his eyes. I said, ‘Father Birmingham, it's Tommy Blanchette from Sudbury.’”
He greeted Blanchette with a raspy and barely audible, “Hi. How are ya?”
“I said, ‘Is it all right if I pray for you?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I began to pray, ‘Dear Father, in the name of jesus Christ, I ask you to heal Father Birmingham's body, mind, and soul.’ I put my hand over his heart and said, ‘Father, forgive him all his sins.’” Blanchette helped Birmingham into bed. It was about 10
P.M
. He died the next morning.
The following Monday, Cardinal Law said Birmingham's funeral Mass. Blanchette sat in a pew midway down the church on the right side. He listened as a young man from another of Birmingham's parishes recalled him fondly in a eulogy.
It was at a reception in St. Brigid's basement immediately after the funeral that Blanchette saw the cardinal standing alone, eating a tiny sandwich and cradling a paper cup of hot coffee. “He had his back to me, and I went up to him and I told him I knew Father Birmingham. And he said, ‘Very good. Very good. And you've maintained a friendship with him all these years?’ And I said, ‘No. But a few months ago I sought him out and had a long discussion.’ The cardinal said, ‘Wonderful. Wonderful.’ I told him I prayed for him the night before he died, and he said, ‘Wonderful. Wonderful.’ And then I said, ‘There's a lot of young men in the diocese who will be in need of counseling in the wake of their relationship with Father Birmingham.’”
“What are you driving at?” Law asked him, according to Blanchette.
Blanchette said he tried to be discreet because there were mourners close by. “I said Father Birmingham sexually molested me, my four brothers, and many, many boys in our parish. His facial expression dropped. He took me by the arm and said, ‘Come with me.’ And we walked into the middle of the hall so no one was within twenty feet.”
When Blanchette was finished describing the abuse and his recent meeting with Birmingham, he said Law told him, “ ‘We need men like you in the Church, and you should come back to the Church.’ He said, ‘Bishop Banks is handling this, and I want you to make an appointment.’”
At one point, Blanchette said Law asked for permission to pray for him. “He laid his hands on my head for two or three minutes. And then he said this: ‘I bind you by the power of the confessional never to speak about this to anyone else.’ And that just burned me big time…. I didn't ask him to hear my confession. I went there to inform him.”
When the
Globe
asked in 2002 about the discussion between the cardinal and Blanchette, Law said through a spokeswoman that he vaguely remembered it, but not with any precision. In any case, Law said in his statement to the
Globe
that he would be happy to meet with Blanchette. When Blanchette read Law's comments in the newspaper, he went to the chancery the next day, March 25.
Blanchette said he was shuttled around and finally got to speak briefly with Rev. John J. Connolly Jr., the cardinal's chief secretary. “He said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And I told him, I read in the paper that the cardinal would be happy to meet with me and I said I'd be happy to meet with him.” Connolly said he would call him at his home on Martha's Vineyard that evening, Blanchette said. But he did not. And, a month later, he still hadn't. During that time, the archdiocese announced on several occasions that the cardinal was “continuing to meet” with victims. But not with Blanchette.
Explosion
F
or more than a decade, the Roman Catholic Church argued that serial predators such as John Geoghan and James Porter — both defrocked and imprisoned — were rotten apples, just like those anyone could find if they looked carefully among all accountants, postal workers, lawyers, or physicians.
That was the Church's reasoning.
And even as the
Boston Globe
reported in early January 2002 on the Church's detailed knowledge of Geoghan's horrific, persistent attacks, and how leaders of the Boston archdiocese worked vigorously to conceal them, officials insisted that Geoghan's conduct was an aberration. It was, they said, confined to a slender minority of men who wear Roman collars. But on January 31, 2002, the newspaper raised the stakes by reporting that the Boston archdiocese had secretly settled sexual abuse claims against at least seventy other priests over the past decade. The breadth of the problem was becoming startlingly, and publicly, apparent. In the next two months, the archdiocese would give to prosecutors the names of more than ninety priests who had been accused of abuse.
As dioceses across the country began to reexamine their policies concerning sexual misconduct by the clergy, new fissures were exposed. A chasm began to open between the faithful and those they had trusted to lead their Church.
As the scandal spread and gained momentum, Cardinal Law found himself on the cover of
Newsweek,
and the Church in crisis became grist for the echo chamber of talk radio and all-news cable stations. The image of TV reporters doing live shots from outside klieg-lit churches and rectories became a staple of the eleven o'clock news. Confidentiality deals, designed to contain the Church's scandal and maintain privacy for embarrassed victims, began to evaporate as those who had been attacked learned that the priests who had assaulted them had been put in positions where they could attack others too. There were stories about clergy sex abuse in virtually every state in the Union. The scandal reached Ireland, Mexico, Austria, France, Chile, Australia, and Poland, the homeland of the Pope.
A poll done for the
Washington Post,
ABC News, and Beliefnet.com showed that a growing majority of Catholics were critical of the way their Church was handling the crisis. Seven in ten called it a major problem that demanded immediate attention.
Hidden for so long, the financial price of the Church's negligence was astonishing. At least two dioceses said they had been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy after being abandoned by their insurance companies. In the past twenty years, according to some estimates, the cost to pay legal settlements to those victimized by the clergy was as much as $1.3 billion. Now the meter was running faster. Hundreds of people with fresh charges of abuse began to contact lawyers.
By April 2002, Cardinal Law was under siege and in seclusion in his mansion in Boston, where he was heckled by protesters, satirized by cartoonists, lampooned by late-night comics, and marginalized by a wide majority of his congregation that simply wanted him out. In mid-April, Law secretly flew to Rome, where he discussed resigning with the Pope.
Some Church leaders said the intense scrutiny of the practices of a highly secretive Church was a welcome salve. “A boil has been lanced, and I do feel strongly that this is a time of grace for us, as painful and difficult as this moment is,” said Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Washington, vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “The fact is that the pain and the hurt were there, under the surface, for those who have been carrying this around for years, and opening this up helps us to minister to that situation as best we can, and begin the process of healing and reconciliation.”
By late April, 176 priests from twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia had resigned or been removed in cases of sexual abuse, according to a survey by the Associated Press. The Vatican, which at first seemed to minimize the crisis as a peculiarly American problem, had heard enough. In a historic step, Pope John Paul II summoned all American cardinals to the Vatican to discuss the crisis that had shaken the two-thousand-year-old Church. The scandal that began in Boston had spread so fast and so far that even the frail Pope, who had consigned the happenings to oblique references tucked deep into lengthy papal messages, was forced to make it the focus of his attention.
The
Boston Globe's
report on January 31, 2002, was a watershed.
It laid bare the depth of the scandal. It badly damaged the few-bad-apples theory. And it accelerated the wave of stories building around the country that would crash fiercely against the Church's ancient foundation.
“Under an extraordinary cloak of secrecy, the Archdiocese of Boston in the last 10 years has quietly settled child molestation claims against at least 70 priests,” the story began. “In the public arena alone, the
Globe
found court records and other documents that identify 19 present and former priests as accused pedophiles. Four have been convicted of criminal charges of sex abuse, including former priest John J. Geoghan, Two others face criminal charges. But those public cases represent just a fraction of the priests whose cases have been disposed of in private negotiations that never brought the parties near a courthouse, according to interviews with many of the attorneys involved.”