Priest Wrote Pope in ’73 About Problems

BOSTON —  Top Roman Catholic Church officials knew as early as 1964 that a Massachusetts priest was molesting children, newly released documents reveal.

The records of James A. Porter both push back the calendar on an apparent church cover-up of pedophilia in the clergy and link knowledge of the problem all the way to the Vatican.

Included in the newest documents to surface in the vast scandal over clerical sexual abuse is a 17-page letter from Porter to Pope Paul VI in 1973, acknowledging that he had “become homosexually involved with some of the youth” in his parish southeast of Boston.

Porter was laicized, or defrocked, the same year. He married, had children and, in 1993, was convicted of 41 counts of sexual abuse in five Massachusetts parishes. He is scheduled to be released from prison next year.

Hundreds of pages of personnel files obtained under court order by the Boston Herald included a 1964 memo about Porter written by Bishop James Connolly of Fall River, Mass., after a meeting with Humberto Medeiros, then a monsignor and chancellor of the Fall River diocese.

The memo reported that “30 or 40” boys had made allegations against Porter, causing “much concern among parents.”

In 1973, Medeiros rose to become cardinal. Upon his death in 1984, he was succeeded by Bernard Law, who as archbishop of Boston is this country’s senior Catholic prelate.

Law on Monday completed three days of a court-ordered deposition in a civil lawsuit brought by 86 alleged victims of former priest John J. Geoghan--who in January was sentenced to nine to 10 years in prison on a single count of child molestation.

Law has been under fire since documents printed in the Boston Globe showed that church officials here repeatedly moved Geoghan to parish duties involving children despite knowledge of sexual abuse allegations against him.

The new material about Porter “just shows that Law is no aberration whatsoever--in fact his behavior is painfully typical,” said David Clohessy, head of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.

“People who wanted to think Law was some kind of anomaly just can’t believe that anymore,” Clohessy went on. “Anybody who wants to define this as a bad apple problem can’t see that the fault lies with the barrel itself.”

Porter’s letter to the pope recounts how Connolly “decided to send me home to my family for a short while until the scandal of this affair died down.”

Soon, Porter continued in his missive to the pontiff, “Bishop Connolly gave me another chance” and assigned him to another parish in the Fall River diocese.

“I can’t recollect much about my stay there except that after a short time, I again fell into the same situation that plagued me in North Attleboro,” where he was previously posted, Porter wrote.

The new batch of documents shows that at least twice, Porter was sent for treatment of his pedophilia to a church-run facility called the Servants of Paraclete in New Mexico.

His first round of treatment at the facility took place in 1967, the records reveal.