Replies

After putting up with Pilla for so many years, Cleveland deserved better than this:

http://www.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse/stories4/020503_lennon.htm

Armed with opinions from the Rev. Richard G. Lennon, the Boston Archdiocese decided in the 1990s that it was powerless to punish a priest who had admitted raping another man, and that the priest was entitled to a hearing on whether he should be restored to full ministry.

Because of those decisions, and despite allegations of inappropriate contact with minors, the Rev. John M. Picardi was allowed to return to parish work as a priest on loan to the Diocese of Phoenix, where he had moved.

Yesterday, the Phoenix diocese suspended Picardi from the Flagstaff, Ariz., parish where he was an associate pastor. A spokeswoman for the Phoenix diocese and the Rev. Christopher J. Coyne, a spokesman for Lennon, said the earlier decisions allowing Picardi's transfer will be reviewed. If they are reversed, it would be done by Lennon, the bishop and canon law expert who became temporary leader of the Boston Archdiocese after Cardinal Bernard F. Law resigned in December.

Lennon told the Globe on Dec. 18 of last year that he never had any documents detailing the offenses of any accused priests. But in a Sept. 26, 1995 memo, Lennon wrote that he had reviewed Picardi's file. A memo the following month noted: ''Our files indicate that Father Picardi raped the 27-year-old man and admitted that fact.'' The word ''raped'' was underlined in the memo.

Lennon also told the Globe in December that he knew ''zero . . . nothing'' about the extent of sexual abuse among archdiocesan priests. The Picardi transfer represents the second known case in which Lennon played a knowledgeable, if only supporting, role.

Well...there ya go! Additionally, it's highly unlikely that his work as seminary rector didn't clue him into some of this; certainly he had to know about the large proportion of gay seminarians in his charge. And this, in turn, should have made him at least a "little" familiar with the cases of pedophilia and ephebophilia that the homosexuals churned out from the seminary were piling up. Before *we* knew what was going on, the archdiocese had been quietly settling some of these cases for years.