Kevin Burke, the district attorney in Essex County, which covers Massachusetts's North Shore, also played a key role in forcing the Archdiocese of Boston to take the issue of sexual abuse by priests more seriously. And like the other prosecutors who dogged the cardinal, Burke was raised in a devoutly Catholic home. He grew up in Malden, a blue-collar city just north of Boston, then moved to Beverly, on the North Shore, when he was ten. His grandparents were Irish immigrants, and his grandmother was a daily communicant.
“My grandfather was in the old IRA, and he was anticlerical because the Church was against the rebels, so while I came from a fairly typical Irish Catholic family, where there was great deference shown to the Church and to priests, my grandfather's anticlericalism was also something I was aware of growing up,” he said. For example, his grandfather pulled one of Burke's uncles out of parochial school after a nun belted the boy. “That wasn't done back then, openly challenging the Church's authority. The nuns could belt you all they wanted and the vast majority of Catholics didn't dare object, but my grandfather did,” he said.
Burke's father made his children attend Mass every day during Lent. As a child, Burke looked upon priests “as separate from the rest of us, as special people, as holy people deserving our respect. But as you get older, you realize that priests have all the shortcomings of other people. I can't tell you exactly when it struck me, but at some point as a kid I realized that there were priests who were unkind, who would humiliate other kids, and that changed me.”
Burke also recalled being irked by a growing realization of inequity. “All the nuns I knew were poor as church mice. And I'd see priests driving around in Cadillacs. I remember reading a story about how nuns didn't have full health insurance and was just infuriated by the injustice in that.”
After he was first elected district attorney in 1978, Burke went to meet with a local monsignor to discuss a case of abuse. “He was a nice man,” Burke recalled. “He invited me to lunch, and the setting in the rectory was stunning. We sat down to a fully set table, with fine china and crisp, white linen. Whenever the monsignor wanted anything, he would ring a little silver bell and this old housekeeper would come shuffling in, like a servant. Every time I tried to engage the monsignor in some serious discussion, he would pick up that bell and ring it, and the little old woman would come in to deal with his every whim. And so I'm sitting there, not only stunned at the level, the position in life, that they held themselves at, but how we in the Church allowed them to do this, that no one was saying, ‘Hey, this is wrong. These guys shouldn't be living like this while the nuns don't have health insurance.’ But what I realized that day, as the monsignor kept ringing that bell, was how distant, how aloof, how detached the hierarchy of the Church had become. They lived separate lives, completely disconnected from the lives of the laity, and we had allowed it to happen.”
Eventually, Burke's office began negotiating with the archdiocese when allegations against priests surfaced. He wasn't impressed. “The archdiocese was probably the most arrogant crowd our office ever dealt with,” Burke said. “If you were Catholic, as I am and many of my assistants are, it was implied that you were somehow threatening or being disrespectful to the faith by going after sexual abuse.”
When, in 2000, Burke's office brought charges against Christopher Reardon, a Church lay worker who eventually pleaded guilty to raping and molesting more than twenty children, “the Church was less than forthcoming, to put it mildly,” said Burke. “But what really struck me, in communications with the archdiocese, was that there was never any concern shown for the victims. Not the slightest nod of concern for these young people whose lives were turned upside down by this abuse. In hindsight, it's striking and shocking that Church leaders failed to meet their moral responsibility. We have an archdiocese that is now cooperative. But they were feeling out the public opinion effects of what they were doing. They weren't sorry for what happened to those kids. They were sorry that they got caught. I don't think the cardinal and the rest of the hierarchy ever really got that they were dealing with kids here. I don't think they even see that today. They see them as adults coming forward, not as the kids to whom this despicable stuff was done.”
The failure, or inability, of the Church's hierarchy to sincerely sympathize with the victims of sexual abuse was evidence to Burke that the bishops — like the bell-ringing monsignor — were completely out of touch. Attorney General Reilly came to the same conclusion as he read Cardinal Law's fawning “God bless you, Jack” letter to Geoghan. “The cardinal didn't send letters like that to the victims,” Reilly said bitterly.
Indeed, Reilly said he was left profoundly shaken by the extent to which Law and the archdiocese coddled abusive priests while treating victims as a nuisance. “What really offended me was knowing how the Church had been harsh on and intolerant of people who had done things which, by comparison, paled in significance. Look at the way the Church treats divorced Catholics, like pariahs, not allowed to remarry in the Church. Look how intolerant and tough they were on gay people.” Reilly remembered reading two years earlier about Sister Jeannette Normandin, a seventy-two-year-old nun who was ousted from the Jesuit Urban Center at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston's South End because she had baptized two boys. Canon law says that only priests or ordained deacons — always and only men — can perform baptisms, and there was no second chance for Sister Normandin. “This was a nun who gave her life to the Church,” Reilly said. “And then look how they treated priests who raped children. We throw this word
abuse
around, and it's a nice, inoffensive word. In many of these cases, it wasn't abuse. It was rape. They were raping children. Where's the indignation? Where's the moral outrage? The intolerance and the hypocrisy of the Church lies at the heart of a lot of this. All of this came to a slow boil for me. To be covering up for those who rape children while being so judgmental of others, the hypocrisy is just breathtaking.”
Reilly did more than get mad. He fired legal shots across the Church's bow, forcing the cardinal and the archdiocese to dramatically and repeatedly alter course. After the initial
Globe
reports, the cardinal held a televised press conference at which he apologized for his past mistakes and promised to report any future allegations against priests to the authorities. Reilly and Burke shook their head as they watched.
“No way, that's not enough,” Burke said to himself, and Reilly said the cardinal's response reminded him of what he had said in 1992 in response to the Porter case. “He was basically saying, ‘Trust us, give us the benefit of the doubt, we'll create a commission to make sure this doesn't happen again.’ Well, we tried that. It didn't work. My attitude changed dramatically. It became, ‘That's enough. You had your chance. You didn't do what you said you'd do. You allowed predators to prey on children.’
“Everybody was on notice after Father Porter. And I trusted them after Father Manning. But I don't feel that way now. They have to be changed. They can't change themselves.”
A week after the cardinal insisted that there were no sexually abusive priests still working, Reilly and Burke went public in the
Globe,
saying the cardinal's postdated zero-tolerance policy wasn't sufficient. They said prosecutors, elected and accountable to the public, should be deciding the culpability of sexually abusive priests — not the cardinal, not the Church. They said retroactive reporting of sexual abuse might allow them to bring criminal cases against more priests.
“When it comes to any evidence, they should report any priest or member of the Church. Let prosecutors make decisions on whether they are actionable,” said Reilly. “Given what's happened here, the Church should err on the side of complete disclosure on the issue of the abuse of children. There shouldn't be a free pass on anything when it comes to the sexual abuse of children.”
Within a week, Cardinal Law held a second press conference and said, in light of Reilly's and Burke's comments, he had changed his mind and would turn over to the authorities the names of priests against whom credible allegations of sexual abuse had been made.
“I'd like to take credit for creating some profound, pivotal moment in holding the Church accountable, but really it was just a reaction created by life experience and moral outrage,” said Burke. “I've seen so many kids abused over the years. I've watched videotapes of kids who were abused, and you see the pain, you see the anguish. The paradigm of child sexual abuse changed in the 1980s. It wasn't until we had a videotape of a police officer sexually abusing his own daughter that people would believe a cop could do something like that. The next step, in believing anyone is capable of this stuff, was with priests.
“The Geoghan documents were the most stunning set of documents, when it comes to secondary responsibility, I have ever read. They showed that if someone had met their moral responsibility, let alone whether they had a legal responsibility, hundreds of people would not be suffering today. I wouldn't say Tom and I speaking out made us profiles in courage as much as a reflection of the deference in society that has been eroded.”
“Almost every day, somebody comes up to me and says, ‘Keep doing what you're doing,’” said Reilly. “I was out one day and a guy came up to me, asked me if I'm the attorney general. He said, ‘I'm about the same age as you. A priest abused me, and I never told anyone about it. It ate me up inside all these years. Things have got to change. Keep it up. Make them change.’ It was very moving. You wonder how many victims are out there, and what it's been like for them all these years, suffering in silence.”
The Geoghan documents also convinced Reilly and other prosecutors that the Church could not be trusted when Cardinal Law initially announced that as far as he knew, there were no active priests against whom there were credible allegations. In fact, Law later removed eleven priests, five of them pastors, because of accusations of sexual abuse.
Acting on the cardinal's orders, the archdiocese's lawyers turned over to Boston-area prosecutors the names of every living priest accused of sexual abuse. But as soon as the prosecutors got the names, they realized that the records were effectively useless. Without the names of the victims, and without the full case files on the priests, including witness statements, prosecutors could not evaluate whether any of the priests should be subject to prosecution. For nearly a month, however, the archdiocese ignored prosecutors’ requests for more information.
Finally, Reilly and the five district attorneys whose jurisdictions cover the archdiocese decided to play hardball. They sent a letter to the archdiocese's lawyer that contained a thinly veiled threat to haul Church leaders before a grand jury if they didn't voluntarily turn over more information. The letter also called on the archdiocese to release victims from the terms of the confidentiality agreements the Church has used as a condition of settling private claims and civil lawsuits against abusive priests.
Less than twenty-four hours after Law's lawyer received the letter, the cardinal authorized turning over the names of victims and waiving the confidentiality agreements. Of the allegations leveled at hundreds of living priests across the country, only a handful were liable for prosecution because the statute of limitations had expired in so many cases. But the inability of prosecutors to bring charges was hardly a vindication of the Church.
Norfolk County District Attorney William R. Keating and Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz convened grand juries to try to pry more information out of the Church. It was a tough slog. Keating was frustrated that the statute of limitations had prevented him from mounting prosecutions against priests. Because of the Church's secrecy, he said, “the lives of many innocent victims were ruined, and people who are nothing more than common criminals cannot be brought to justice.”
It wasn't just prosecutors who had decided that the old world order had become obsolete. The deference shown the Church by politicians had also done much to create a system whereby serial predators such as Geoghan could rape dozens of children with impunity, shielded by an archdiocese that had a strong incentive, and was completely within its legal rights, to hide the abuse from public view.
Reilly said the refusal of Massachusetts lawmakers — nearly three-quarters of whom were Catholics — to include clergy in a bill (which became law in 1983) requiring police officers, teachers, doctors, social workers, and other caregivers to report suspected child abuse was a disastrous mistake. As late as August 2001, the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, the public policy arm of the Boston archdiocese, was arguing that any bill that would include clergy as mandatory reporters of abuse would destroy the relationship between priest and parishioner.
“That is an example of deference creating a system that put children at risk,” said Reilly. The legislature, he said, simply didn't want to take the heat for passing a law that implicitly suggested the Catholic Church needed the threat of criminal sanctions to do the right thing when confronted with allegations about child abuse.
“The policy the Church had, in terms of hushing things up, was completely consistent with a secret, authoritarian institution. As things were reported, they were dealt with secretly. I think it was a very conscious decision by the Church to handle things the way they did. It was not an oversight, not a lapse in judgment. It was consistent with the institution…. You're talking about changing a culture, and that is never easy, But if we had included clergy in mandatory reporting, it would have saved the Church from what it's going through now,” Reilly added.
On May 3 Acting Governor lane Swift, a Catholic, signed into law a bill requiring clergy to report any suspected cases of child abuse.
“Hopefully, this legislation will prevent this tragedy from happening to others. Our responsibility and our loyalty are to our children above all else,” Swift said at the State House.