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O'Malley,
Sean Patrick
Date of Birth:
1944
Profession:
Archbishops; Bishops; Clergy; Religious figures
On September 7, 2003
Sean Patrick O'Malley, the archbishop of Boston, reached a landmark
settlement with 550 people who claimed to have been sexually abused by
priests. The settlement was a crucial step in helping the U.S.
Catholic Church confront what many regard as the worst scandal in its
history. The archdiocese of Boston had been rocked in 2002, when it
was revealed that the city's archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law, had
covered up for priests accused of sexually abusing children by moving
them to new parishes and failing to report the accusations to the
proper authorities. Under intense criticism from both clergy and
laity, Cardinal Law resigned in disgrace in December 2002. (He
remained a cardinal, thus retaining the right to assume another church
post as well as vote in a papal election.) O'Malley was appointed six
months later to lead the country's fourth largest diocese out of the
crisis and begin the process of rebuilding the laity's confidence in
the Church.
O'Malley began handling abuse cases during the 1990s, when he
served as archbishop of the Fall River, Massachusetts, diocese, where,
in the biggest abuse scandal of the decade, a priest was accused of
molesting more than 100 children. While there he implemented a
zero-tolerance policy toward priests accused of sexual abuse,
established abuse-education classes, and reached settlements with most
of the victims. O'Malley did the same with the Palm Beach, Florida,
diocese, where he served as archbishop from 2002 until his appointment
in Boston. Many saw his installation in Boston as a sign that the
Vatican had finally begun to take the crisis seriously. "It's really a
watershed moment for a diocese to receive a new bishop," Reverend
James A. Field, the pastor of the Parish of the Incarnation of Our
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in Melrose, Massachusetts, told Michael
Paulson for the Boston Globe (July 30, 2003). "The installation is a
way of symbolizing that a new day has begun and that we have a new
shepherd."
The Catholic Church in the U.S. is at a turning point in its
history. In addition to the abuse crisis, the Church faces the closing
of numerous schools and parishes due to declining numbers of students
and parishioners, a shrinking pool of young priests, and low funds.
Further, the ethnic makeup of the Church is changing in the U.S., as
most new parishioners are immigrants who come from predominately
Catholic countries. According to Monica Rhor in the Boston Globe (July
3, 2003), whites make up only half of all Catholic teenagers in
America; within a few years, Latinos will make up the majority of
Roman Catholics in the country. Many experts therefore believe that
the future of the Catholic Church rests on the shoulders of
immigrants. O'Malley, who holds a doctorate from the Catholic
University of America, in Washington, D.C., and speaks six languages,
has spent most of his career ministering to immigrant populations in
the D.C. area, as well as in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Mario J.
Paredes, one of O'Malley's co-workers at Centro Catolico Hispano, told
Monica Rhor, "Rome made his appointment with all sorts of messages and
meanings. He is being sent to a church that is no longer Irish, no
longer the old boys. It is a church that is heavily Hispanic, heavily
Portuguese, diverse, multicultural, and multilingual."
O'Malley's work with immigrants is part of his ministry as a
Capuchin-Franciscan Friar. The Capuchin religious order is dedicated
to following the teachings of the 13th-century Catholic mystic St.
Francis of Assisi, an ascetic whose life was said to be characterized
by humility, poverty, devotion, and joy. Members of the order live
together in a community and take vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience; in addition to contemplation and prayer, they perform
duties in accordance with the teachings of the New Testament. O'Malley
was professed in the order at the age of 21 and ordained as a priest
at 26. As a Capuchin, he wears sandals and a simple brown frock with a
pointed hood, an outfit he wore even at his installation ceremony in
Boston in 2003. He also insists on living in humble settings and
refused to move into the archbishop's mansion, preferring instead a
small apartment in an unfashionable section of the city. His views on
Catholic life are orthodox; staunchly against abortion, he
participates in the Church's annual rally in Washington, D.C. Above
all else, O'Malley, who prefers to be called "Archbishop Sean," is
known for his love of and commitment to the poor, his joyful demeanor,
and his absolute devotion to others. As quoted by Linda Kulman, Jeff
Glasser, Angela Marek, and Nancy L. Bentrup in U.S. News & World
Report (July 14, 2003), Mary Ann Glendon, a member of the Pontifical
Council for the Laity and a professor at the Harvard Law School,
remarked after O'Malley's first press conference as archbishop, "[He]
spoke words of great simplicity and power. This is really a case of
what you see is what you get. The man radiates a certain kind of
Franciscan personality that is going to be very, very good for wounded
Boston."
The younger of the two sons of Theodore and Mary Louise O'Malley,
Sean Patrick O'Malley was born on June 29, 1944 in Lakewood, Ohio, and
raised in Herman, Pennsylvania. His family was devoutly Catholic and
often participated in religious retreats. It was on one such occasion
that O'Malley had a formative encounter with a friar: returning home
from a visit to a Franciscan retreat in Pennsylvania, the 10-year-old
and his father met a mendicant dressed in a tattered robe and wearing
a rosary around his neck. Afterward Theodore O'Malley commented to his
son, "You know, that's the happiest man in the world," as Sean
O'Malley recalled to Eric Convey for the Boston Herald (July 28,
2003). The encounter left a deep impression on O'Malley, who had
already expressed a profound interest in matters of faith. He began to
seriously consider entering the religious life and, two years later,
enrolled at St. Fidelis Seminary, in Herman (other sources say
Butler), Pennsylvania. A boarding school for teenagers wishing to
enter the Capuchin order, St. Fidelis required its students to undergo
rigorous training in the foreign languages: six years of Latin, four
years of German, two of Spanish, two of Greek, and one of Hebrew.
While other students spent much of their time playing sports, O'Malley
preferred to participate in the school's theatrical productions and
help out in the kitchen, where German nuns prepared meals for students
and their teachers. "He's always been very unusual, really," Jack
Healey, a human-rights worker and fellow student at St. Fidelis, told
Convey. "Most of us were ballplayers hoping to be priests one day.
Sean was a little priest the whole way through . . . he was a little
Franciscan the whole way through. He was the real thing from day one."
O'Malley was professed in the Capuchin order in 1965 and ordained
as a priest in 1970. After graduating from St. Fidelis, he continued
his studies at Capuchin College, in Washington, D.C. At the Catholic
University of America, O'Malley earned a master's degree in religious
education and a doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese literature.
Between 1969 and 1973 he taught at Catholic University and planned to
eventually pursue missionary work oversees. That plan changed in 1973,
when the archbishop of D.C. asked the Capuchins to help minister to
the city's growing Latino population. O'Malley subsequently founded
Centro Catolico Hispano, which provided immigrants and others with
legal advice, employment referrals, English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL)
and GED classes, and medical and dental services. He also confronted
foreign ambassadors serving in D.C. about the way they treated
domestic help, transported medical supplies to Central American
countries, doled out food and medicine to those in need, opened a
Spanish-language bookstore, and founded the first Spanish newspaper in
the area. This work, coupled with O'Malley's Sunday Masses in English,
Spanish, Portuguese, and French, cemented his connection to immigrant
communities, a connection that would become the hallmark of his
career.
O'Malley's commitment to immigrants was particularly manifest in
his work at the Kenesaw, a dilapidated apartment building located in
Adams Morgan, then one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the
nation's capital. For decades the building's owner, the Antioch Law
School, had refused to provide tenants with even the most basic
services, such as heat, hot water, and pest control. Nevertheless, the
school continued to collect rent from tenants. In addition, drug
dealers worked out of several of the apartments, and prostitutes
routinely brought customers to unoccupied rooms there. In 1977
Antioch, which was in financial trouble and hoped to renovate and sell
the building, served the tenants with eviction notices. When he heard
about the plight of the tenants, O'Malley himself moved into the
Kenesaw, taking two rooms--one in which he slept on the floor and one
that he turned into a chapel. "It was a dangerous place to live,
believe me," the lawyer and Kenesaw community activist Silverio Coy
told Alan Cooperman and Pamela Ferdinand for the Washington Post (July
2, 3002). "He wanted to make a statement that not only was he going to
help these people, he was going to share their needs and anxieties
every single day." O'Malley helped the tenants renovate the building
and fight the eviction. Refusing to pay rent to Antioch, the tenants
repaired, cleaned, and painted the Kenesaw. They also took turns using
a baseball bat to patrol the area for rats and drug dealers.
Eventually, O'Malley helped the tenants organize themselves into a
cooperative, which allowed them to secure enough funding from public
agencies and banks to buy the building themselves. "A lot of good
people lived there, but they didn't coordinate anything before Father
O'Malley came," Coy said. "He transformed their lives."
O'Malley's work in the Washington, D.C., diocese prompted his
installation as an Episcopal vicar for the Hispanic, Portuguese, and
Haitian communities, and as executive director of the archdiocesan
Office of Social Ministry in 1978. Six years later the Vatican granted
his wish to serve in a foreign mission by appointing him coadjutor
bishop of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands; a year later he was made
full bishop. While there he built shelters for the homeless,
established an AIDS hospice, and helped islanders rebuild after
Hurricane Hugo, in 1989. One parishioner, Charlene Kehoe, said that
attending a midnight Mass held by O'Malley inspired her to return to
the Catholic Church after an absence of several decades. "I would
never have come back to the church except for him," she told Thomas
Farragher for the Boston Globe (July 27, 2003). "I thought I had found
something better than the church. It wasn't until [the midnight Mass]
that I saw that, aha, the church can be really spiritual--to really
have truth within it. He has the ability to connect emotionally with
people and to really hear them--to let them say their piece and to
figure out what the next step would be with a deep spiritual
understanding."
The U.S. Catholic Church was first confronted with a major sexual
scandal in 1985, when a Louisiana priest, Gilbert Gauthe, was
sentenced to 20 years in prison for molesting children. In 1992
Reverend James Porter of the Fall River diocese was accused of
sexually abusing dozens of boys in five different states during the
1960s and 1970s. (He later pled guilty to 28 counts of abuse and was
sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison.) The Vatican subsequently sent
O'Malley there to serve as bishop of the diocese and to help the
largely Latino and Portuguese population heal. He helped settle 101
cases that had been brought against the diocese, instructing the
church's lawyers that "it was the right thing to do." The bishop then
initiated a zero-tolerance policy against sexual abuse (a policy that
included running background checks on all clergy and church personnel)
and provided sexual-abuse training to priests and lay volunteers
alike. In addition, O'Malley set up the diocese's first Latino parish,
Nuestro Senora de Guadalupe.
Ten years later, in 2002, the Vatican called on O'Malley to
restore order to another diocese in crisis. This time he was sent to
Palm Beach, Florida, where two consecutive bishops had left after
sex-abuse scandals. Bishop J. Keith Symons had resigned in 1998, after
admitting that he had molested five boys in three parishes; his
replacement, Reverend Anthony J. O'Connell, resigned four years later,
after admitting that he had repeatedly molested an underage student at
a Missouri seminary where he had served as rector. As bishop, O'Malley
promised to report all allegations of abuse to the proper authorities
and to remove all guilty priests from service. He also issued a public
apology to the victims and appointed a sheriff and a rabbi to an
independent review board that had earlier been formed to handle
sex-abuse accusations.
O'Malley's work in Palm Beach was stopped short, however, when the
Vatican called on him to take over the archdiocese of Boston, the city
that was at the center of the Church's sex-abuse crisis. After the
Massachusetts priest John Geoghan was convicted, in January 2002, of
molesting a 10-year-old boy, Cardinal Bernard Law, who was then
archbishop of Boston, insisted that, while the case was an isolated
incident, he would act decisively on all future charges of pedophilia
brought against priests. Soon thereafter, documents were released
showing that over the years Geoghan had been accused of molesting boys
at several different parishes--yet instead of removing him from
office, Cardinal Law had repeatedly reassigned him. Upon further
investigation, a pattern of deception began to emerge: Law had
regularly failed to report sex-abuse allegations to the proper
authorities, had moved accused priests to new parishes (where many
continued to molest children), and had either ignored or paid off
victims. Amid calls for his resignation from both lay people and
clergy, Cardinal Law stepped down as archbishop of Boston on December
13, 2002.
On July 1, 2003, Pope John Paul II appointed O'Malley to the
position. The Capuchin priest was characteristically humble upon
hearing the news, remarking, as quoted on CNN (July 2, 2003, on-line),
"I feel acutely aware of my own deficiencies in the face of the task
at hand, and I ask for everyone's prayers and collaboration as I
embark on this ministry." During his installation ceremony, a sober
affair devoid of the usual pomp and finery, O'Malley asked for
forgiveness from those who had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of
Catholic priests: "The whole Catholic community is ashamed and
anguished because of the pain and damage inflicted on so many young
people and because of our inability or unwillingness to deal with the
crime of sexual abuse of minors," he said, as quoted on the CBS News
Web site (July 31, 2003). "To those victims and to their families, we
beg forgiveness and assure them that the Catholic church is working to
create a safe environment for young people."
O'Malley's first act as archbishop was to replace the church's
lead council working on the hundreds of civil lawsuits facing the
Boston diocese, sending a signal to the city's Catholics that settling
the cases was his top priority. O'Malley chose Thomas Hannigan, the
attorney who had helped him settle abuse claims in Fall River, to
replace Wilson Rogers Jr., who had been criticized for using hardball
tactics against the plaintiffs. Within nine days of being installed,
O'Malley offered a $55 million settlement to be divided among the
victims, nearly twice the amount any diocese or archdiocese had paid
at one time to settle claims of abuse. Although the settlement was
rejected, both lawyers and victims were impressed by O'Malley's speedy
offer, particularly considering that Cardinal Law and his lawyers had
stalled negotiations for 18 months. "Any negotiation has to start in a
certain place, and this is a good place," Roderick MacLeish Jr., a
lawyer representing 260 victims, told Ralph Ranalli and Stephen
Kurkjian for the Boston Globe (August 9, 2003, on-line). "We believe
that there is a lot of good faith being shown by the archdiocese.
There are still a lot of obstacles, but we are finally having a
worthwhile and constructive dialogue." Negotiations continued, with
O'Malley personally attending the bargaining sessions. He also met
with many of the victims in private.
On September 7, 2003, barely a month after O'Malley became
archbishop, the Boston archdiocese reached a settlement with 550
people who claimed to have been sexually abused by members of the
church. The victims received an $85 million compensation package to be
divided among them according to the severity and duration of the
abuse, the largest amount ever in a clergy sexual-abuse case. The
settlement also stipulated that victims would be included on all
boards governing abuse, that the church would offer the victims
mental-health counseling regardless of whether they accepted the
settlement or not, and that the details of all such counseling would
be kept confidential. Many credit O'Malley with persuading the victims
to accept the offer. In addition to changing lawyers and participating
in the negotiating sessions, he won over many of the bitter victims
through his attention, his patience, and his sensitivity. Many have
said that they came to believe he truly cared about them. One example
of O'Malley's personal attention to the victims was his response to
the mental breakdown of a 25-year-old man who claimed he had been
raped by a priest when he was five. After the breakdown, in September
2003, O'Malley immediately met with the man's parents and promised to
do whatever was necessary to help their son, including paying for a
residential treatment. A year earlier, Cardinal Law had sent a letter
to the family in response to their lawsuit, suggesting that the
parents' negligence had allowed the rape to occur. "It was a major
change," the father told Kevin Cullen for the Boston Globe (September
10, 2003). "They reached out to my son at a time of need, no questions
asked. This guy [O'Malley] has done everything he can since he got
here to change the way things were done before, and he should get
credit when he does the right thing." "Sean O'Malley has always struck
people here as someone who puts people first, and there's no doubt in
my mind that he will do so," Fall River mayor Edward M. Lambert told
Alan Cooperman and Pamela Ferdinand. "I don't think it's the safe
choice for the church. But I certainly think it's the right one."
O'Malley is an active member of the United States Catholic
Conference of Catholic Bishops. He is the chairman of the conference's
Committee on Consecrated Life and serves on the Committee on Shrines
and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
Suggested Reading: Boston Globe
(on-line) July 27, 2003; Boston Herald p1+ July 28, 2003, with photos;
Providence Journal-Bulletin A p1+ May 5, 2000, with photos; U.S. News
& World Report p36+ July 14, 2003, with photos; Washington Post A p3+
July 2, 2003
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