Many people have asked me about how I reacted to the ongoing scandal of priests sexually abusing children in their care. I knew one or two who were dismissed from the priesthood, and one who stood on the right side of history but whose ministry was nonetheless ended..
I was a Catholic seminarian in Boston when the pedophile priest scandal was brewing. I use the term brewing because the whole stinky mess was happening in the dark. I had no inkling that anything was amiss. When I saw Todd McCarthy’s film “Spotlight” 50 years later, I wondered how I could have missed it. The priestly caste loves dark rumors, but the priestly veil of secrecy is also thick. Apparently we all missed it. Of the 2,324 priests who served in Boston during the last half of the 20th century, 162 were credibly accused of abusing more than 800 children and minors. Those numbers are staggering. I remember reading the original stories in the Boston Globe in 2002, and then Cardinal Law’s quick removal to Rome where John Paul II promoted him to the cushy sinecure as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore with a stipend of $12,000 a month, a substantial raise above his salary as the Archbishop of Boston. That seemed like a reward and left a terrible taste in the mouth of everyone who had been incensed by his willful blindness. It inflamed those who had actually been injured by the abuse.
Although I was a Jesuit scholastic, I had strong connections with Boston’s regular clergy. In the summer of 1969, the final year of Cardinal Cushing’s era, I started working for a young diocesan priest. Mike Groden had started The Planning Office for Urban Affairs for the Archdiocese. This was a very unreligious designation for an official arm of the Catholic Church because Mike set it up to do some very innovative work outside ordinary parish life. I liked that.
Father Mike was only a few years older than me. He was boyishly good looking with a great Irish smile. He was very much a priest but also a social activist with sharp political instincts of a Democratic ward boss. After the Boston race riots in the summer of 1967, he became committed to racial equality. He did Saul Alinsky’s training for community organizers.
I had finished my two years as a Jesuit novice, completed an abridged philosophy requirement at Boston College, and had just been accepted into The Graduate School of Design at Harvard for a degree in architecture and planning. My mentors at the Boston Architectural Center told me that a young priest was looking for an intern to work on a low income housing project. I had the summer off. Several other young Jesuits and I had rented a small house on Oak Street off Inman Square. We were all grad students at Harvard. I called Mike and he hired me immediately. This was a great match.
Every morning I rode my bicycle from Cambridge down Massachusetts Avenue to an office in a small older building near The Old State House. Sister Faine McMullen, a sister of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who was also a lawyer whom Mike had met during the Alsinky training and I shared two small rooms in the back. The office administrator was the daughter of one of the wealthiest Jewish developers in Boston. A conscientious objector, Mosik Hagobian, worked under the auspices of the Office although he spent most of his time in a young architectural office on the floor below. Our small team seemed perfect for a liberally educated anti-Vietnam War activist post Vatican 2. It was also a reflection of Father Mike’s instinctive ability to assemble an effective team.
I mentioned that Mike was politically well connected. Lyndon Johnson’s HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) was flush with cash administered by a cohort of bright young people who were convinced that the change promised by the War on Poverty was possible. Mike had secured a promise for a million dollar grant, seed money for a community development corporation with a program that Mike designed. In the 1960's a million dollars was a lot of money. He had identified a low income Italian community in East Boston who were fighting the encroachment of Logan International Airport into their community. I never asked and was never told the way that he had secured the HUD money or picked East Boston whose leader was a fiery Sicilian priest, Monsieur Mimi Pitaro. After one dinner in the rectory of Holy Redeemer Church I had no doubt who was in charge, but I was also very impressed by his careful listening to the needs of his community and commitment to help. I joked with Mike that Mimi seemed like a Don who actually took care of his folk. Mike agreed that I was not far off.
In my role as Mike’s deputy community organizer, I told Mimi that the development corporation could engage in a variety of businesses to alleviate the impact of the airport’s rapid expansion. Mimi was insistent: Thank you very much but we need housing. This single mindedness was to shape the future of the East Boston Community Development Corporation as well as The Office for Urban Planning for years beyond that first summer. My job was to write the proposal tor HUD. In real terms, dollar and sense terms, I’ve ever had a more productive 2 or 3 months. I didn’t write the founding documents for a community development organization but my proposal did secure seed money for an agency that would develop 600 units of low income housing over the years. It also set Mike on course to develop three thousand units of low income housing working with parishes of the archdiocese over the next decades.
We secured the money within weeks of submitting our proposal, and The Planning Office had an MOU with HUD to establish the agency. We immediately began looking for an Executive DIrector. Mike told me that if I wanted to submit my name, I would get “favorable consideration.” I loved the work and I considered it. Briefly. This was the summer of 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King followed by that of Bobby Kennedy, the disruption and protest against the War in Vietnam had radicalized me, and rather than disrupt the long course of Jesuit studies, I decided that I would apply to begin the last part of a Jesuit’s training before ordination.
I moved to Woodstock College in New York City for my first year of theology and then onto the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley California, but I would call Mike from time to time. The work of the Planning Office was thriving; he loved being a priest and sometime in the 1980’s he was made pastor of a church in Boston’s Back Bay, Saint Cecila, a cavernous building whose old time parishioners had mostly feld downtown Boston. Mike set about reviving the parish through music. Of course he could raise funds to restore its three organs, organize choirs and hire choirmasters, but knowing Mike, it was also an opportunity to engage a community in conversation about the things that mattered. He reached out to the LGBT community in a way that circumvented the official stance of the Church. Back Bay was one of Boston’s gay neighborhoods. Mike himself was also gay. He succeeded brilliantly.
Then came the investigation of the Boston Globe's “Spotlight” and calls for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Francis Law. Of the hundreds of priests and religious in Boston, only about 70 signed the petition demanding that Law be fired for the coverup. And Mike’s name was there, the highest ranking priest on the list. He was on the right side of history.
Richard Gerard Lennon, Law’s auxiliary bishop and the placeholder after public pressure forced Law out of Boston, put the screws to Mike. Apparently doing two jobs does not allow a priest to collect two salaries that amount to not much more than $40,000 together. Mike had not collected any salary as pastor of Saint Celia, but for two years after the church could afford to pay him, he was still compensated for his work as the director of the Planning Office. There was some barrier in Canon Law prohibiting priests from being excessively paid. In 2003 Mike resigned rather than fight. It was clearly retribution. He moved to his family home in Scituate Massachusetts where he lived out the rest of his life. I have no idea how much money he had for retirement, but certainly Cardinal Law's $144,000 per year was considerably more. In about 2010 I called for the last time and we had a long conversation. I could not find a trace of resentment in the hour that we spent looking over the years.
Cardinal Law died in 2017 in the embrace of one of the oldest of Rome’s churches dedicated to the memory of the Virgin Mary. Though he had been removed from the Archdiocese of Boston, people who had petitioned for his removal did not see any real progress in addressing the scandal. The Church of Benedict had shielded him. Father Mike died in 2018 on the shores of a windswept beach town south of Boston. His supporters and admirers who had protested his removal gathered in Saint Cecilia to say goodbye. They felt no satisfaction either.
If there was any regret on Mike’s part, it might have been that the church he loved and served had taken away the possibility of official ministry, but I am sure that he found a way. He always did.
Mike was certainly not involved in any sexual abuse, but his life as a priest was deeply effected by it.
Mimi Pitaro became the first priest elected to the Massachusetts Assembly shortly after we set up the East Boston Community Development Corporation. https://archivesspace.library.northeastern.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/307157
Sister Faine McMullen RSCJ spent her long life working and advocating for the poor and disenfranchised. She lived to be 101 years old.
https://www.cny.org/stories/sister-faine-moira-mcmullen-rscj,13533?
East Boston Community Development
https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2003_01_06/2003_05_15_Paulson_PriestWho.htm
Msgr. Michael F. Groden
https://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.php?ID=181182
