Free Betrayal by The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe

that this must stop and never be allowed to happen again.”
    The first public scandal to put Cardinal Law on the defensive was the case of Father Porter, a serial child molester from the neighboring Diocese of Fall River. In 1992 more than one hundred people who claimed they'd been molested by Porter over fourteen years in a string of parishes across southeastern Massachusetts were stepping forward.
    By then Porter had been retired for eighteen years and was living in Minnesota with a wife and four children. But because the statute of limitations is frozen when an alleged criminal leaves the state, he was tried and prosecuted in Massachusetts for the crimes he'd committed decades earlier. Within eighteen months, Porter pleaded guilty to forty-one counts of sexual assault and was sentenced to prison. The Fall River diocese agreed to pay more than $7 million to his victims.
    While the claims against Porter mushroomed, families and friends of the victims were overwhelmed by a single question: How could Porter have molested so many children without getting caught and being punished? Two answers came from the victims themselves: the unquestioning deference of Catholic children to clergy, and a profound reluctance on the part of Church officials to investigate the complaints of the few parishioners courageous enough to question a priest. “We were taught they were Christ's representatives on earth, and that's a direct quote,” said Fred Paine of Altleboro, one of Porter's victims. “A priest would walk in and nuns would bow.”
    Roderick MacLeish Jr., a Boston attorney who represented most of Porter's victims, said several priests in the diocese were told of Porter's crimes against children yet did nothing to stop him. In fact, the lawyer said, at least ten individuals had informed two priests in St. Mary's parish in North Attleboro that Porter, who was their assistant, was molesting young children. In some instances the two priests, Rev. Edward Booth and Rev, Armando Annunziato, had actually witnessed the abuse. In one case, Porter had taken a young boy named Paul Merry into a rectory office and had begun molesting him when Booth, the church pastor, happened to walk in, “Father Booth looked at Father Porter and then back at me, and then at Father Porter, who was zipping his fly,” Merry recalled. “Then Father Booth shook his head and walked out the door. He didn't say a word.” In another case, Porter was once again in the rectory office at St. Mary's, molesting an eleven-year-old named Peter Calderone. This time it was Annunziato who walked in. But like Booth, he merely looked at Porter and said, “It's getting late. It's time for everyone to go home.”
    Still, the complaints against Porter, even at that time, were either too serious or too numerous to be entirely ignored. Church officials responding to the accusations shuffled Porter from parish to parish in an effort to convince his victims that something had been done. Those officials included then-monsignor Medeiros, who would later approve similar reassignments for Father Geoghan after Medeiros had been installed as archbishop of Boston. Even Vatican officials under Pope Paul VI knew of Porter's obsessive sexual compulsion for children. In 1973, when Porter opted to leave the priesthood, he was remarkably candid about his condition when submitting his resignation papers. “I know in the past I used to hide behind a Roman collar, thinking that it would be a shield for me,” he wrote. “Now there is no shield. I know that if I become familiar with children, people would immediately become suspicious…. In the lay life, I find out of necessity that I must cope with the problem or suffer the consequences.” But the document was hidden away in Vatican files. And Porter's victims would keep their dark secret until 1992, when Frank Fitzpatrick, a victim who was also a private detective, located Porter in Minnesota and began the process of having criminal charges