Church Leaders Should Leave

Jimmy Breslin

March 19, 2002

A priest I know for some time is married and has two children. His life in his parish is spent on the slow, the troubled and the ill and those around them. However, he has disregarded the Catholic Church's rule on celibacy from the day he was ordained, "I believe in love, not a cold life, he says.

At home, which is a short trip from his parish, he is a great husband and father. His daughters are in parochial school in the neighborhood where the priest and family live. One day, the parish pastor visited the religion class in the grammar school and my friend's daughter was up to answer a question and doing it with a thoroughness that caught the pastor's attention.

"How do you know that? he asked, mildly.

"My father told me that. My father is a priest. The pastor now stood at attention as be took a hand in running the class, He maneuvered a question to my friend's daughter, who answered with great confidence.

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"How do you know this? the pastor asked again. And again, she said, "My father told me. He knows. My father is a priest.

The pastor looked up some parish records, asked a few questions and then, in the shameless tradition of the stool pigeon, went to the archbishop's office on First Avenue and reported this horrid transgression. My friend was summoned to the archbishop's office where one of the lackeys asked him if this terrible report was true.

"Of course. I'm married. That was my daughter. They set him down. They took him off the schedule for offering masses at his parish church and said that he should phase out as a priest and step into retirement. They took the only case of normal sex and threw it away, apparently to make room for the 5,000 reports of pedophiles that were coming in.

Today, before this priest departs with his family, he should be brought out and cheered as the symbol of a great religion. He is the only sure way out for the Catholic church: the overthrow of an ancient and insane doctrine of celibacy. This priest with two children can begin to teach the faithful how to live normally. He can inspire all the priests who have wives or girl friends to stop living their back door lives and turn out into the sun.

We all know what pedophile priests did and that they must be removed before they do it again. There is no cure.

But all the trouble comes from the top. They are leaders from Palm Beach to Boston, all with Irish names, all utter disgraces, who have lied casually and permitted the acts of pedophiles.

They are Cardinal Law of Boston, Archbisbhop Egan of New York, Bishop Daily of Brooklyn, Bishop Murphy of Rockville Centre, Bishop O'Connell of Palm Beach, who replaced another Bishop with an Irish name who had to retire because of covering up.

So far they have cost the decent working people who put money into the basket on Sunday at least $200 million in payments to victims of sexual abuse by priests.

Beyond the money, these bishops have no right to stand in front of decent people and tell them what to do. They have misled the people for so long that now the best thing they can do is to get out.

They are unworthy. The Archbishop of New York does not speak. Let him take his still tongue and go. And they are going to hear this from more and more people in more and more places, and hear it louder, because this catastrophe is only at its inception.

The Irish bishops have allowed pedoophiles to roam parishes and harm children. And that is the name of all this trouble, harming a child.

"They toss the reputation of the church to the wind to protect themselves, Stephen Rubino was saying yesterday. He is the lawyer in Margate, N.J., who has had 200 sex abuses and thinks it is just starting. He loves the Catholic bishops, "They are afraid that decent people wouldn't understand it if they told the truth. This has been going on a long time. Let me tell you. In 1988, I am sitting on the beach at Margate when my wife's best friend from second grade comes to see me. It is about her nephew. She sat down and told me that he had been abused by a priest. I said, Mary, what's wrong? Priests are celibate.' Then I got over that and began to think as a lawyer. We didn't know about the church. We made an offer. They said, Fine.' I learned what that word meant. We didn't stop.

The priest's name was Jack McElroy. He roamed through Jersey parishes and moved in on a family of six McCrackens. He abused one. The mother's story got to Rubino on the beach. The church tried stalling and the district attorney tried Father McElroy. He was sentenced to 5 years.

That was in 1988 and people would rather turn away than acknowledge the case and it would take almost 15 years before people in places like New York and Boston discovered the sinister, arrogance of those people supposed to be leading their church and children.

Mrs. McCracken, mother of the abused young man, wrote in a diary, "I am from a hard-working, middle-class family who depended on the church for support and understanding. We volunteered our time and money to help spread our Christian beliefs. We trusted our parish priests and sometimes thought of them as family. We no longer trust.