Betrayal by The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe

Author:The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe [BOSTON GLOBE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000
ISBN: 9780316055697
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2008-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

“I remember reading the first Spotlight reports and just getting furious,” recalled Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, the state's top prosecutor. “I found myself yelling out loud, ‘My God, this is about children!’”

Reilly's parents had come from Ireland and were deeply devoted to the Church. Like many Irish immigrants who settled in Springfield, the third-largest city in Massachusetts, one hundred miles west of Boston, his mother hailed from Dingle, a picturesque harbor town in County Kerry. His father worked for the Springfield Department of Public Works but had grown up in a small village in County Mayo, where the priest was the most important person. Reilly's parents set a devout tone for his three brothers and two sisters. Even when he was teenager, Reilly was expected to be home at 7 P.M. “We knelt down and said the Rosary, as a family, every night,” the attorney general recalled.

Reilly said his experiences with the nuns who taught him and with the priests who counseled him were only positive. The Sisters of St. Joseph who were his teachers at Cathedral High School had more confidence in him than he had in himself. His mother and a parish priest collaborated to get Reilly into St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

When, as a young prosecutor, Reilly found himself building a case against a priest who had sexually abused a child in a Boston suburb, he looked at it as an aberration. “I guess I thought about it in the context of it being representative of all segments of society, that occasionally you'd find someone who would engage in that kind of behavior,” he said. When the extent of the abuse committed by James Porter became known in 1992, Reilly said he was shocked but “gave the Church the benefit of the doubt. Cardinal Law said he had created a new policy so that allegations like this would be aggressively dealt with. At the time, I believed him. I had no reason not to.”

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