Bishop Joseph McFadden watches from afar as the latest chapter of the clergy sexual abuse crisis engulfs his former home, the Philadelphia Archdiocese.
McFadden, head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg, said he is saddened and hurt by allegations that 21 of his former colleagues in Philadelphia molested children for years, and that church superiors knew about the abuse, even tolerated and hid it.
An educator who spent nearly 30 years in the archdiocese, McFadden told The Patriot-News he had no knowledge of the alleged abuse.
“Absolutely not,” he said on Monday, the day four accused Philadelphia priests and one teacher appeared in court.
“I’m very sad to know that that transpired, was transpiring,” McFadden said about the alleged abuse. “I would say the average priest in Philadelphia didn’t know their brother priests were doing some of these things.”
A judge will decide on March 25 whether the defendants should have a preliminary hearing that would lay out evidence against them.
Grand jury reports do not name McFadden, who in 2004 was appointed auxiliary bishop, a top administrative post in the Philadelphia Archdiocese.
McFadden held that position until he was installed as Harrisburg’s bishop in June.
The 21 implicated priests have been suspended following the scathing grand jury report that they sexually assaulted boys for decades, “accelerating in the 1990s [with nearly 100 allegations in that decade] and exploding after 2001.”
For the first time in the U.S., officials have accused a high-ranking church official of shielding abusive priests and endangering minors.
Monsignor William Lynn, the former secretary of clergy for the archdiocese, faces felony endangerment charges. He is accused of concealing the abuse and putting the priests in place to do it again.
‘People are very hurt’
The grand jury faults leaders of the Philadelphia Archdiocese — including Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua and the late Cardinal John Krol — with failing to protect children.
According to the grand jury report, “Cardinals Bevilacqua and Krol, and their aides, were aware that priests in the diocese were perpetrating massive amounts of child molestation and sexual assaults.”
As auxiliary bishop, McFadden oversaw the secretariat for Catholic education, the office for development and information technology services.
During his nearly 30-year career in the archdiocese, he spent 11 years as secretary to Krol, which is why The Patriot-News asked him if he had any knowledge of the alleged abuse.
McFadden said his duties in the cardinal’s office were strictly administrative.
“What that meant was I was his scheduler for his calendar,” McFadden said. “I would go around and be his master of ceremony. I had nothing to do with running the diocese.”
McFadden said he did not attend high-level meetings.
“My job was simply somebody needed an appointment with the cardinal, I check his schedule,” he said. “The cardinal had to go to Rome. I made the arrangements. He had to go to Washington, I drove him to Washington. He had Mass at so and so, I went out to make sure the stuff was there.”
McFadden said the grand jury report does not take into account the hierarchy of the archdiocese.
“The problem is this is what is being portrayed, as though there are all these aides running around that had all this knowledge ... in a diocese such as Philadelphia, which is very big,” he said.
The Philadelphia Diocese has 1.4 million parishioners across the city and Delaware, Chester, Bucks and Montgomery counties. The Harrisburg Diocese spans 15 counties and boasts 244,000 parishioners.
“I think people are very hurt, very upset,” McFadden said. “And it’s hurtful to me as bishop. It’s hurtful to the whole church. It’s hurtful it happened in the church.”
He said he never saw the “secret files” that the grand jury reports were kept on abusive priests. McFadden said they likely were confidential personnel files, typically not shared with administrative staff.
“If somebody does something wrong, the church doesn’t blast that around to everybody,” McFadden said. “You don’t destroy people’s reputation. We are also a church that believes in sin and forgiveness. People sin and they can repent.”
Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer who has served as a consultant and expert witness on several hundred Catholic clergy sexual abuse cases, including the two Philadelphia grand juries, said he would be surprised that an auxiliary bishop — in the inner circle of the archdiocese — would not have known about the alleged abuse.
A priest of the Dominican Order, Doyle has distanced himself from the church amid, observers widely believe, retaliation by church hierarchy for his outspokenness for clergy sexual abuse victims.
Doyle said Lynn’s indictment sets Philadelphia apart from all other clergy sexual abuse cases in this country, including Boston, New Hampshire and Los Angeles.
“The magnitude of it is that it’s the first time in the U.S. that a top official has been called to accountability not for the abuse but for allowing the abuse to happen,” Doyle said. “It’s what the bishops have been doing for decades.”
McFadden knows Lynn, whom he calls “an outstanding priest.”
In June 2004, Lynn was transferred to St. Joseph’s, one of the largest parishes in the archdiocese, succeeding McFadden, who served three years there as pastor.
McFadden said the grand jury report mistakenly portrays Lynn as a decision maker who transferred abusive priests as he saw fit. McFadden said Lynn would’ve been responsible for looking into allegations and writing reports on his findings for his superiors.
“Monsignor Lynn was, I think, in a thankless job,” McFadden said. “Monsignor Lynn is in my mind an outstanding priest who is in a bad job. He was not aiding and abetting priests. He was trying to get to the bottom of what took place there.”
Tasha Jamerson, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, said no additional church officials will be charged as a result of the latest two-year grand jury report, which was released in February.
“Now if new allegations come forward and they are not limited by the statute of limitations, we will investigate them,” she said.
Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivor’s Network of those Abused by Priests, said Philadelphia underscores a troubling Vatican policy.
“The bottom line is, we’ve seen church officials in diocese after diocese engage in the same modus operandi,” said Blaine, an abuse survivor who for years has pressed for accountability from the church. “Their goal is to protect their assets and reputation and the predators.”
Church officials respond to victims when they are forced to by publicity, lawsuits or prosecutors, she said.
“That is what has exposed the truth,” Blaine said.
BishopAccountability.org, a Massachusetts-based online watchdog, reports that only a few hundred of the estimated 5,700 to 10,000 Catholic priests who have been accused of sexual abuse have been tried, convicted or sentenced because of restrictive statutes of limitations.
“We plead with bishops and church officials,” Blaine said. “If they would stop hiding and assisting them, we think a lot more predators would be prosecuted.”
‘We made big mistakes’
McFadden, 63, a high school teacher and basketball coach, graduated from St. Joseph’s University. He entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary and, in 1981, was ordained at the age of 33.
In 2004, Cardinal Justin Rigali appointed McFadden auxiliary bishop, one of four who formed a corps of “super administrators.”
A member of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, he served on the Committee on Catholic Education. Under his direction, a capital campaign in Philadelphia raised $175 million of its $200 million goal.
McFadden succeeded Bishop Kevin Rhoades, who served in Harrisburg for five years and left in 2009 to become bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind.
McFadden’s 2010 installation as bishop was swiftly criticized by SNAP, claiming he likely knew of ongoing sex abuse and cover-ups.
“The fact that he was moved on to the Diocese of Harrisburg as bishop means the cardinal must’ve had a great deal of confidence in him,” Doyle said.
In his eight months in Harrisburg, McFadden has made it a priority to visit parishes and get to know parishioners. He celebrates Mass daily at one of the diocese churches, the cathedral or his residence.
Empathetic toward victims of abuse, McFadden has invited some of them to the diocese in a gesture of reconciliation.
The diocese has launched an aggressive abuse awareness program and immediately turns any reports of allegations of abuse over to law enforcement authorities, he said.
In February, Catholic Witness, a church newspaper, ran a report written by the Harrisburg Diocese detailing its efforts to prevent the sexual abuse of minors and assist victims. According to that report, the diocese last year received three allegations of sexual abuse of a minor. All took place 20 to 50 years ago.
The diocese reported that two allegations were substantiated; they involved a diocesan priest who was deceased, and a priest belonging to a religious order. The report was turned over to that order. The diocese said an unsubstantiated allegation involved a priest who has retired.
In 2004, then-Bishop Nicholas Dattilo reported that “unequivocally ... in our diocese never has a credibly accused priest been sent for treatment and then placed back into the ministry.”
McFadden said one of the church’s failings has been handling clergy sex abuse as if it were a moral failing — not a sickness. He said it has saddened no one as much as the church’s leadership.
“Looking back, yes, we made big mistakes, and we are sorry,” McFadden said. “Can we erase the past ? No. But we are committed to doing everything we can going forward in the future to make sure this doesn’t happen, especially by those who are called to minister the church.”
In his Lenten Pastoral Letter for 2011, McFadden invites parishioners to “give up your guilt.”
Too many people carry an unnecessary burden that stifles their relationship with God, he writes.
“Sometimes something happened long ago,” he said. “We can’t speak it, and we’re not sure if God has forgiven us or not. It’s the devil that says, ‘You are evil, God could never love you.’ It’s the Lord that says, ‘It doesn’t matter what you have done. I forgive you, but I want you to turn away from your sins and live in fullness of life and put that behind you.’ ”
McFadden is confident the church will emerge out of the present crisis stronger.
“The church has survived 2,000 years not because of the leadership of human beings but because we believe it’s guided by Jesus Christ. He will not abandon us now.” Read more at www.pennlive.com |
