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 dismissed from the priesthood and one who stood on the right side of history but whose ministry ended nonetheless.
I was a Catholic seminarian in Boston when the pedophile priest scandal was brewing. I use the term brewing because the 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. 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 incensed by his willful blindness. It inflamed those who the abuse had actually injured.
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 the 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, 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 also reflected 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 and administered by a cohort of bright young people 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 1960s, a million dollars was a lot of money. He had identified a low-income Italian community in East Boston that was fighting the encroachment of Logan International Airport into their community. I never asked and was never told how 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 cared for 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 various 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 for HUD. I’ve never had a more productive two or three months in real terms, dollar and sense terms. I didn’t write the founding documents for a community development organization but my proposal secured 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, and the disruption and protest against the War in Vietnam had radicalized me. Rather than disrupt the long course of Jesuit studies, I decided to 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 occasionally. The work of the Planning Office was thriving; he loved being a priest, and sometime in the 1980s, he was made pastor of a church in Boston’s Back Bay, Saint Cecilia, 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. Doing two jobs does not allow a priest to collect two salaries, even if that amounts to not much more than $40,000. 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 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 Cardinal Law's $144,000 per year was certainly considerably more. 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 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 he found a way. He always did.
Mike was certainly not involved in any sexual abuse, but his life as a priest was deeply affected by it.
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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/307157Sister 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.ebcdc.com/Priest Who Spoke against Law Resigns
https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2003_01_06/2003_05_15_Paulson_PriestWho.htm
