Text size:

The Hierarchy Of Decency

Jimmy Breslin

May 19, 2002

One day in my past, I was in the hallway at a book publisher, Viking Press, and a new editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was asking for help in getting her first book as an editor. I had just been in Chicago, where I had been with Eugene Kennedy, a priest who was at Loyola University Chicago. He wanted to write and he talked about a book on Mayor Richard J. Daley.

I told this to Onassis and she went into her office and started it off. She was a working woman. He was a working priest, professor and, given the chance here, he became a working writer.

This was perhaps 30 years ago. He has since left the priesthood and is married to a doctor. He also helps run his family's sprawling business, King Kullen Supermarkets. He continues writing. His book, "The Unhealed Wound," about sexuality in the church, is the best work so far on church homosexuals.

And now the other afternoon, Gene Kennedy, my old friend, came into a second-floor room in the student union building at Queens College to talk to an extraordinary gathering of about 100 priests and former priests about the grisly condition in too much of their church. The meeting was put together by Msgr. John Powis of St. Barbara's church in Bushwick, the Rev. James Kelly of St. Brigid's in Bushwick and a couple of former priests who left for marriage.

It was held without the approval of the bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn, Thomas Daily. It was also held at Queens College, rather than a Catholic setting where it could be under the hierarchy of their church. At a glance, it seemed like nothing. Older men in daytime civilian clothes at a meeting. But it could have been the most important expression of decency demanding its way that has been seen in this religion in memory. Eugene Kennedy said that he had suggested a meeting of all the hierarchy with the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh. "He would give credibility that they couldn't," Kennedy said. "They wouldn't do it." Hesburgh is the president emeritus of Notre Dame and without question the most impressive Catholic in America.

The days of the old distant, bitter men appointed by Rome are gone, Kennedy said. All appeared to agree.

"I received a call from a reporter who wasn't familiar with us," Powis said, "and he said to me, 'Are you a mon-seen-yore? Is that between a priest and a bishop?'"

"I told him, 'It's one of the things that must go.'"

The priests and ex-priests laughed in agreement.

Powis has gone through hundreds of funerals of young who died of crack and AIDS and gunfire in his parish. He organized opposition in churches to drug criminals. It was dangerous, but he cleaned out neighborhoods and he is a legend for doing it. That he called this meeting made it plain that he feels betrayed by his church, but he has made no statements.

Kennedy did. "We stepped on a land mine. And our leaders give up scapegoats. When we have learned one thing out of this, that you cannot divide people into higher and lower parts. There is an evil to force such distinctions on people."

He talked about the church hierarchy forcing its will on all below them. And when this pressing reached the bottom, it could become a stumbling priest intimidating the young and vulnerable and causing the vilest of crimes.

A nun rose and said she was counseling a man who was the victim of an attack by a priest 25 years ago. "A good night's sleep means he gets up 10 times. That is not, as Otto Garcia says, a transgression. It is a mortal sin, a crime," she said.

Garcia is the bishop of Brooklyn's rug man. He sweeps as much as he can under the rug, so much that now you can break your ankle walking across the room.

Kennedy said the American hierarchy consisted of Cardinal Law in Boston, who has been allowed by the pope to name practically every bishop in the country. Now, because of an enormous scandal in Boston, there can be no way for Law to last. He lives in a palace next door to Boston College, but cannot attend the graduation tomorrow because the students and crowd of parents would run him out.

"You don't have to pull the walls down, they are falling down by themselves," Eugene Kennedy said at the meeting.

The Vatican yesterday released a completely insane paper by a priest named Ghirlanda, who wrote that American bishops should not turn over charges or records on sexual abuse cases to law enforcement. He ought to come over here and try that once.

With Law going, the three men around here, Cardinal Egan in Manhattan, Bishop Daily in Brooklyn and Bishop Murphy in Rockville Centre, should get plane tickets. Daily and Murphy were in Boston with Law at the time that pedophiles were transferred from one parish to the other. Egan was in Bridgeport where in a deposition over the pedophile cases, he established the North American record for arrogance.

Yesterday, there was another report from Bridgeport about Egan paying money to an accused priest and doing nothing for victims except to infuriate them.

In New York, Egan's arrogance has suffered no decrease.

At Queens College, Kennedy reminded that St. Augustine had no idea of becoming a priest until the people of his town actually drafted him. It has to happen that way this time in so many places, he was saying, and the result would be an awful lot of women running this church. One thing during the afternoon seemed sure. No woman could run a place into the trouble that the pope of Rome and his old men have done.