A few weeks ago I mentioned that a friend told me that Archbishop Sean O’Malley was meeting with the young priests of Boston (those ordained less than 5 years) to support and encourage them. Apparently, he’s also meeting with them to receive the straight scoop on what’s going on in the archdiocese.
Another friend tells me that at one of those meetings recently the priests asked the archbishop what he would do if a priest of the archdiocese testified before the Legislature on behalf of gay marriage. The archbishop reportedly replied that he would call in the priest and ask him to publicly recant, and if the priest refused to do so, he would remove him from ministry.
That’s when the young priests filled in Archbishop O’Malley on the Boston Priests Forum and Fr. Walter Cuenin, who is that hypothetical priest. The archbishop said he didn’t know about any of this.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt since he was in Florida most of last year and this year, but as my friend says, it doesn’t say much about the archbishop’s inner circle of advisers if he’s only learning about all this now. I hope this means that we’re going to be seeing some changes real soon.
