Priests says no persecution

Priests says no persecution

A few days ago, the Boston Herald ran the first story claiming that there’s an ochestrated campaign against dissenting priests in Boston. They even made a list of how many among the 58 priests who signed the letter calling for Cardinal Law’s removal were supposedly being oppressed. I examined the claims already.

Now, one of the priests supposedly oppressed has written a letter to the newspaper, which appears today (they don’t put letters on their web site):

The Herald suggest that my parish was suppressed and that I was reassigned as the result of my having signed the letter calling for Bernard Cardinal Law’s resignation….

Although my parish in West Concord and the parish in Concord Center were suppressed, I do not believe that the suppressions had any connection to my signing the letter. I applied for and was appointed pastor of the new, merged parish in Concords that archdiocese representatives have asserted that the recent actions taken against Father Cuenin and other priests are the result of an agreement with this office,” Jamie Katz, chief of the public charities division in Reilly’s office, wrote in a letter to Wilson D. Rogers Jr., an attorney for the archdiocese. ‘‘These reports suggest that the Archdiocese is scrutinizing the financial affairs of priests and parishes at the direction of this office, and that certain priests have been fired based upon an agreement with this office. These misrepresentations must stop.”

And from whom is the AG receiving these reports? Could it be from the Globe and certain handful of priests with axes to grind against the archdiocese?

I don’t have a direct line to the chancery, but my guess is that if the archdiocese said anything, it said that if, in the course of parish audits, they found evidence of violations of archdiocesan regulations, then ecclesiastical penalties would apply, and if they found evidence of criminal wrongdoing, then that would be turned over to the attorney general.

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