Church in
Crisis
Protesters target Manchester’s Bishop McCormack
By CHUCK COLBERT
Manchester, N.H.
The Sunday Boston Globe’s front-page story Jan. 26
couldn’t have been more timely. The newspaper’s “Spotlight
Team,” in a follow-up report, wrote: “An examination of thousands of
pages of internal church records make clear that [Bishop John B.] McCormack,
now bishop of the Manchester, N.H., diocese, [and a key adviser to Cardinal
Bernard F. Law], was an administrator whose first sympathies frequently lay
with his brother priests. With him, their words often carried greater weight
than those of their victims.”
The day that Globe story greeted New Englanders, dozens of
protesters in New Hampshire were joined by friends and advocates imported from
the greater Boston area for a march of protest and solidarity at
Manchester’s St. Joseph Cathedral. They were a mix of ages and
backgrounds: church reformers and victim-survivors, joined by their families
and friends. Nearly 250 people braved the morning’s bitter temperatures to
show support for victims of sexual abuse by priests and to urge
McCormack’s resignation.
Their message came across loud and clear -- in speeches, through
placards, with strains of classical music in the background: Support survivors.
Bishop McCormack must go. Speak Truth to Power -- STTOP McCormack.
“I’m here because I have to stand with the victims and
survivors, and I don’t hear much at all about them at our local
parish,” said Maggie Fogarty of St. Thomas More Parish in Durham, N.H.
“If I don’t physically align myself with the victims, then I
don’t know what to do with the pain of their stories.” The mother of
two small children, Fogarty said, “It all feels very personal when I look
at them.”
Fogarty, like many other protesters, also came to voice opposition
to McCormack’s staying on as the spiritual leader of the diocese. The
jurisdiction of the diocese includes the entire state, with a total Catholic
population of nearly 326,000. In other words, approximately 28 percent of the
state’s population is Catholic.
“Absolutely, he has to go. I can’t be a part of the
solution here until he is gone.” Fogarty added. “His behavior is
appalling. He has no moral credibility at all because over and over and over
again he took the word of priests over the cries of victims and their
mothers.”
Other protesters, members of New Hampshire Voice of the Faithful,
sounded similar sentiments:
“His name appears way too often” in the church
documents, said Lynn Holmes of Durham.
“He can be forgiven but he must be held accountable. And that
means losing his job,” said Barbara Troxell.
“He’s still in denial,” said Peg Boucher.
“I’ve written to him four times. In the last letter he said ‘I
always supported children.’ ” But, she added, “The children came
after the clergy.”
“Something systemically, surgically needs to be corrected
here, maybe Vatican III,” said Lynn Holmes’ husband, David
Holmes.
Yet another protester, Joan Barrett of Man-chester, said,
“Bishop McCormack had a lot to do with this [situation here in New
Hampshire] continuing so long. He has not admitted guilt except under pressure,
starting and mounting to get rid of him.”
Like Fogarty, Barrett is also a mother; one of her two daughters
attends the diocese’s Trinity High School. “It’s been very
difficult,” she said. “[McCormack] came to speak at my
daughter’s school, and some of the things he said were not very
truthful.”
She added: “I first came three weeks ago [to a protest] when
I read in one of our papers that a monsignor in a big parish in town said the
[the Massachusetts protesters] had no right to cross the state border. As far
as I am concerned, we are all Christians together. I thank them for coming here
and being a catalyst to get New Hampshire people moving,” she said.
At least one speaker picked up on Barrett’s point. “I
know that many of you who call New Hampshire home really don’t want us
here today,” said John Vellante of North Andover, Mass. But “clergy
sexual abuse has no state boundaries. It happened here just as it happened in
Massachusetts and in so many other states across the land,” he added.
Vellante alleges he was abused not only in Massachusetts, but also once in
Concord, N.H., by a former priest.
The Jan. 26 march, cosponsored by the Coalition of Catholics and
Survivors and the New Hampshire Voice of the Faithful -- representing eight
chapters statewide -- was organized to demonstrate “grief and support for
victims and survivors of sexual abuse by the clergy,” according to a flier
distributed by the two organizations.
“Marking the first anniversary of the exposure of this
crisis, the march enables us to show our unabated support for untold numbers of
people who were sexually abused as children by priests,” said Anne Barrett
Doyle, a spokesperson for the Coalition of Catholics and Survivors. “Their
cries for justice remain unanswered.”
The march also garnered support from other local church-reform and
victims-advocacy groups, including the New England chapter of the Survivors
Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP; Survivors First; and Speak Truth
to Power, or STTOP.
National leaders from SNAP, including executive director David
Clohessy, and Susan Archibald, president of The Linkup, a 3,000-member
victim-survivors’ organization, also attended and spoke to the crowd
attending the event, the largest in New Hampshire to date.
Dominican Fr. Thomas Doyle, the winner of this year’s Isaac
Hecker Award for Social Justice, also addressed the crowd. “Looking into
the faces, listening to the stories, and sensing and feeling the pain of the
men and women, boys and girls who were brutalized and soul-raped” has
changed his life, Doyle said. “For a long time, the four most painful
words that I often had to say was, ‘I am a priest.’ ” Yet, he
said, “Being with you and walking with you is a great privilege in my
life.”
The Manchester march was similar to one held last summer in Boston
(NCR, July 5). Outside St. Joseph’s Cathedral protesters unveiled
placards, bearing names and photographs of children at the approximate age of
their sexual abuse. Holding the signs overhead, one by one, protesters stepped
up to a small platform to identify the victims and speak, some through
tears:
“John, abused at age 12, 1958–1959, while studying for
the priesthood.”
“Six years old, still innocent when the abuse
began.”
“Mary abused as a child, as were two of her
children.”
“Denise, abuse began at 10 years of age, the same age as my
daughter.”
All told, 83 names of alleged victims rang out from the somber
stillness among the protesters. The strains of “Adagio for Strings”
by Samuel Barber captured the mood and set the tone for the hour and half
recitation, and subsequent silent march around the red brick cathedral, now a
new focal point for the national crisis in the Catholic church.
“It’s very moving,” said Tom Blanchette, of
Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., himself a survivor of clergy sex abuse, abuse
that started at age 11. “This is much more effective than
shouting.”
McCormack did not celebrate Mass inside St. Joseph Cathedral that
day. His spokesperson, Patrick McGee, declined to give McCormack’s exact
location. “We are not putting that out,” he told the local media.
“We don’t want [the smaller parishes] to become part of the
story,” he told a Boston Globe reporter.
The Manchester Union Leader reported next day that the
bishop celebrated Mass in northern New Hampshire. McGee also told a Union
Leader reporter, “The [church here] does stand in solidarity with all
victims of abuse.”
McCormack has no plans to resign, McGee said. He was quoted in The
Union Leader as saying, McCormack “plans to continue to work to move the
church forward in its mission in New Hampshire and to continue to make sure the
actions of abuse never happens again.”
Still, for one survivor, Kathy Dwyer of Braintree, Mass. -- and
any number of protesters --McCormack has a tough sell. “I grew up in a
poor, working class Irish family, and being Catholic was more of our identity
than even being Irish,” Dwyer told the solidarity protest and march
attendees.
In Manchester and in Boston, for increasing numbers of the laity,
maintaining that Catholic identity presents a constant challenge. “I
haven’t lost my faith,” said Maggie Fogarty. Perhaps a “profound
renewal” is underway, she suggested. Just maybe “God can work good
through something as chaotic and disastrous as this.”
Free-lance journalist Chuck Colbert writes from Cambridge,
Mass.
National Catholic Reporter, February 7,
2003
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