THE US: Bishop Thomas Daily, leader of the Brooklyn and Queens diocese in New York, has acknowledged helping to promote a priest now accused of raping children, despite considering him a "troubled priest" who endorsed sex between men and boys.
In a sworn deposition made in August and published on Monday, Bishop Daily admitted: "I think I would have done much better if I hadn't made the appointment." The deposition arose from civil lawsuits filed by three men who claimed they were abused as boys by Father Paul Shanley.
The priest, now 71, was indicted in June on 10 counts of child rape and six counts of indecent assault and battery for allegedly sexually abusing boys from 1979 to 1989, and has pleaded not guilty. In 1984, when he was a senior official of the Boston archdiocese, Bishop Daily selected Father Shanley to be administrator and acting pastor at St Jean's parish in Newton, Massachusetts, where he allegedly went on to molest and rape boys.
Bishop Daily acknowledged in the deposition that he knew at the time Father Shanley had attended a meeting of the North American Man-Boy Love Association and had spoken in favour of the group, but said he had not received any reports that the priest actually engaged in such activities. "But having said that, I would have very great regrets," he said.
Bishop Daily was in charge of investigating allegations of clerical sexual misconduct in the Boston archdiocese from 1977 to 1984. Father Shanley's behaviour was revealed after a lawsuit in February forced the release of confidential files from the Boston archdiocese that precipitated calls for the resignation of Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law. They showed among other things that the archdiocese "reacted casually" to repeated complaints that Father Shanley had publicly endorsed sexual relations between men and boys, according to Betrayal, a book on the scandal that has rocked the Boston archdiocese, by the staff of the Boston Globe.
At a talk in Rochester, New York, in 1977, Father Shanley asserted publicly that the child is often the seducer in sexual acts between men and boys, and that incest and bestiality caused no psychological damage to children.
Father Shanley's public advocacy of sex with boys was the subject of a query from a Vatican official to Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston, now deceased, in 1979. He was removed from his street ministry and sent to Newton, where he was later promoted to full pastor by Cardinal Law, despite a growing number of complaints about his sexual behaviour with boys. After leaving Newton in 1990, the priest, armed with a letter from Cardinal Law's deputy, Bishop Robert Banks, asserting he was in "good standing" in Boston, went to a parish in California, where he spent weekends running the Cabana Club, a clothing-optional gay motel in Palm Springs.
Bishop Daily, whose Brooklyn and Queens diocese is the fifth largest in the United States, referred questions about the deposition to the Boston archdiocese and its lawyers, who had no comment.
In March Bishop Daily expressed regret for decisions he made in Boston while supervising former priest and convicted paedophile John Geoghan.
The moving of Geoghan from parish to parish after complaints he was abusing boys sparked the crisis over clerical sexual abuse in the Boston archdiocese almost a year ago.