EDWARD Cardinal Egan’s motto is “In the Holiness of Truth.” Fine words, but alas, only words.
Bombshell revelations in Sunday’s Hartford Courant, however, make a strong case that when it comes to the pastoral care of children sexually abused by priests, neither holiness nor truth matters much to the man. And that’s a big problem for us Catholics in New York.
Before he came here as archbishop in 2000, Egan served a 12-year term as bishop of Bridgeport, Conn. Not long after he arrived there in 1988, a major clergy sex-abuse scandal that his predecessor, the now-deceased Walter Curtis, had allowed to fester erupted into lawsuits.
How did the new bishop respond? According to secret court documents cited by the Courant, he allowed several accused priests to keep working in parishes, including a cleric who admitted biting a teenager during oral sex.
Said the Courant: “Egan failed to investigate aggressively some abuse allegations, did not refer complaints to criminal authorities and, during closed testimony in 1999, suggested that a dozen people who made complaints of rape, molestation and beatings against the same priest may have all been lying, the documents show.”
After eight years of brutal litigation, Egan finally settled the lawsuits, but victims and their families were left seething over the legal tactics deployed against them. As a lawyer who has handled hundreds of cases like this told me, “In all my years with clergy sex abuse litigation, I never saw anything like the hardball way Bishop Egan treated the victims.”
What does this have to do with New York? Plenty.
Egan’s tarnished reputation in Bridgeport wasn’t exactly a secret when he came to New York, but the media didn’t play it up, no doubt eager to give the new guy a fresh start. But now we’ve endured the Father Geoghan revelations in Boston, which some are calling the Catholic Church’s 9/11 – an event so catastrophic that the Church can no longer look at the world in the same way again.
In that spirit, New Yorkers have not only the right, but the obligation to ask hard questions of Egan. New York Catholics expect our cardinal to protect our children from predatory priests. His record in Bridgeport is not encouraging, to say the very least, and neither is his short record here.
Egan allowed a Staten Island priest who had been accused in a sex-abuse lawsuit to remain in his parish, only removing him after the Post made the lawsuit public last year. An accusation is in no way proof, but Egan had no business allowing this priest to continue serving with a lawsuit accusing him of molesting a minor hanging over his head. Catholics should be able to count on their leaders to act responsibly without having to be prompted by the media and the courts.
Furthermore, Catholics have a right to know how much of our money has been paid out to settle sex-abuse claims against the Church. This is particularly true given the disastrous condition of the archdiocese’s finances, which was a legacy of John Cardinal O’Connor’s mismanagement. Egan didn’t make this financial crisis, but he has to solve it.
By what right does the cardinal ask Catholics here to bail out the archdiocese without leveling with us about what role payouts to child victims of priest-molesters have played in the revenue shortfall? More seriously, how many priest-molesters have there been in recent decades? What was done with them? Are any still in place? Were any actions taken within O’Connor’s chancery to conceal or destroy evidence of priestly sexual misconduct?
Ordinary Catholics have little leverage over their leadership save for the collection plate, which is an acutely powerful method of accountability in this cash-strapped archdiocese. The laity will quite rightly consider withholding contributions until the cardinal comes clean about the scope of the crisis here, as his Boston colleague Bernard Cardinal Law has been forced to do.
Last week, Egan’s spokesman said the archdiocese will not be releasing details on the number of priests substantially accused of sex abuse here, nor the money paid out to settle claims. After Boston, this kind of stonewalling is intolerable – and if it takes district attorneys to make the Church do right by the faithful, so be it.
The Catholic Church in America is going through an agonizing purification now, owing to the corruption of some of its priests and bishops. The day of reckoning is at hand, the time for authentic reform has arrived. If the Church is to emerge renewed in holiness, its leaders have no choice but to accept their duty to the truth. And those of us who love the Church – our Church – have no choice but to demand it.
Rod Dreher is a senior writer at
National Review. E-mail: rdreher@nationalreview.com