The hierarchy of Boston's most respected institution, the Catholic Church, is being forced to account for its cover-up of clerical sexual abuse via state law. What can we learn from Boston? asks Kevin Cullen.
In the west of Ireland, in places such as Carraroe, Doolin, Belmullet, Dingle and Skibbereen, the old folk sometimes refer to Boston as "the next parish over". It is one of those sayings rooted more in cultural reality than whimsy, because Boston - originally an English and Protestant city, which became Irish and Catholic in the course of a few generations after the Famine - remains to this day the only major American city where the Irish in general, and Catholics in particular, are in the majority and in the ascendancy.
That is why what happens in Boston matters in Dublin, and vice-versa. And that is why what is happening in Dublin and all of Ireland now in relation to the sexual abuse of minors by priests, and especially to the way the Catholic hierarchy is responding to the scandal, resonates so loudly in Boston, and vice-versa.
The appalling abuse by priests in the Dublin archdiocese, and the equally appalling indifference or acquiescence of Church leaders, so compellingly captured in the recent Prime Time programme, is a scenario Bostonians would recognise as unsettlingly familiar. Even the names seem interchangeable. In Dublin, there was Father McCarthy, Father Kearney, Father Walsh; in Boston, there was Monsignor McCarthy, Father Geoghan, Father Welsh.
The public indignation, and the apparent determination of public officials to respond, that was galvanised by the Prime Time programme is similar to the reaction after the Boston Globe began publishing a series of exposés last January, which pushed a scandal that had been kicking around for two decades on to the front pages of newspapers across the world.
The Catholic Church in the US was created largely in the image of the Irish Catholic Church. In the latter half of the 19th century, 90 per cent of US seminarians were Irish, while by 1900 three-quarters of the US hierarchy was Irish. Even today, when those of Irish ancestry account for only 15 per cent of US Catholics, they still make up a third of the country's 47,000 priests and half of its bishops. So the abuse of minors by priests, and the cover-up by bishops, is not just an American story, but an Irish one, with lessons for those on both sides of the Atlantic.
Last January, after the Boston Globe obtained a court order to unseal documents that chronicled abuse - and which the Catholic Church had guarded fiercely for many years - Cardinal Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston, was forced to go public and apologise for not doing enough to protect children from unspeakable crimes. Cardinal Law announced that, from that day forward, any priest accused of abusing minors would be turned over to the civil authorities.
If the cardinal thought he was being magnanimous, the state's highest law enforcement official, attorney-general Thomas F. Reilly, thought otherwise. Reilly, whose mother was from Co Kerry and whose father was from Co Mayo, publicly and forcefully stated that the cardinal had not gone far enough. He said the Church was holding on to secrets that he and other secular authorities needed to know to determine whether priests who abused children, and supervisors who protected them, should face criminal charges.
Kevin M. Burke, the most senior state prosecutor in Massachusetts, and the grandson of Irish immigrants, went public with Reilly, telling Cardinal Law that the days of deference, practised by a secular political power structure dominated by Irish Catholics, were over. At first the cardinal blanched, but then he blinked and handed over the documents, which eventually implicated some 100 priests in the archdiocese.
Reilly pressed on, aided by leading prosecutors in Massachusetts, all of them Catholic, nearly all of them the children or grandchildren of Irish immigrants. Prosecuting most of the priests implicated in the scandal was impossible, because the accusations against them were too old, beyond the statute of limitations under Massachusetts law. But Reilly and other state officials who were determined to hold the Church accountable did not stop there.
Uninvited, Reilly stuck his nose into the archdiocese's efforts to clean its own dirty laundry. When Cardinal Law appointed a commission to recommend changes to Church policy - similar to the commission headed by Judge Hussey - Reilly hounded the commission, privately and publicly, insisting that its duty was to protect children, not the Church's reputation. When the cardinal appeared to be ignoring him, Reilly threatened to invoke the state civil rights law, seeking a court order to force changes to protect a vulnerable class of citizens, in this case children.
Reilly's hectoring produced results, as the cardinal's committee implemented most of the recommendations advocated by the attorney-general's office.
Before the scandal broke, and even after it was in full swing, when asked why he wasn't tougher on abusive priests, Cardinal Law cited canon law, the Church's internal rules which grant certain rights to priests outside those enumerated by the US and Massachusetts constitutions. And each time he did so, Reilly and other state prosecutors would let him have it.
"Canon law means nothing. The law of the state is the only law that applies here," said Reilly, who remains a devout Catholic. "The state cannot tell the Catholic Church or any church how it will internally discipline its members, but the Church cannot cite its own rules to avoid its responsibilities and its accountability as citizens of the state."
Last week, when the Vatican rejected the zero-tolerance, one-strike-you're-out policy adopted by US bishops, again citing canon law, Reilly again rose up with indignation.
"Canon law is irrelevant when it comes to crimes committed against children," he said. "By now everyone should recognise that - the Vatican as well as every bishop in this country."
And by now, it appears it is only a matter of time before the Government establishes an inquiry in Ireland. As State officials make it increasingly clear that they will not defer to the Church any longer, there are signs that members of the hierarchy are getting the message. The Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh, this week acknowledged that wherever there was a conflict between canon law and State law, "the primary obligation is to the law of the land". When Ireland's Constitution was written in 1937, the Catholic Church was afforded a "special position". But constitutions get amended. In Boston, the Catholic Church held a "special position" in the local culture. But cultures change.
Over the 20th century, the Catholic Church became the most powerful institution in Boston, as its mostly Irish members climbed to the pinnacles of power in politics, the police and the business community. For generations, Irish Catholics, both the elite and the working-class, genuflected before the hierarchy, never daring to challenge their bishops publicly, even as they increasingly ignored Church teachings on birth control, abortion and homosexuality. But when these Catholics saw the extent to which Cardinal Law and other Church leaders had coddled and enabled sexual predators while shunning and even shaming their victims, they rose in righteous anger.
"My grandparents and other immigrants respected the Church because it educated them, it gave them a place in the New World. It gave them an identity," said Burke, the prosecutor who dogged Cardinal Law.
"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 behaviour is so at odds with being moral and spiritual."
Reilly, meanwhile, has convened a grand jury to determine whether Cardinal Law and any of his deputies should be charged with a crime for facilitating the abuse of children. Most lawyers say Massachusetts law is too weak in this area, and that the cardinal and his aides will escape indictment.
Forty years ago, when he was a teenager growing up in Springfield, the Massachusetts city that is "little Dingle", Reilly was expected home every night at 7 p.m. to say the Rosary with his family, kneeling on the floor of their modest home. Today, Reilly would give his eye teeth to put his own bishop in jail.
Things change.
As the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, and other Government officials in Ireland consider the future, they could do worse than look west, to the example of Boston, the next parish over.
Kevin Cullen, a former Dublin bureau chief of the Boston Globe and currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, is a member of the Globe investigative staff and co-author of Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church. All profits from book sales go to charity.