Any Catholic who has not been comatose for the past forty years is aware that something is rotten in the Vatican. The Church could not possibly have degenerated into her current condition without a catastrophic failure at the top.

        For the wrong reasons, but with good effect, the mass media have been busily exposing the failure of the North American hierarchy to prevent the homosexual infiltration of the Church or to punish the sexual crimes of predators like Shanley and Geoghan. And now we read in The Boston Herald (May 16, 2002) that "previously sealed records in the case of defrocked pedophile priest James A. Porter show Catholic church officials - including Pope Paul VI, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros and top aides to Richard Cardinal Cushing - knew of and took part in the coverup of cleric sexual abuse as far back as 1964."

        The Herald notes that these records demonstrate that "Vatican officials were aware as long as 30 years ago that priests were molesting children and bishops were shuffling the pedophiles around the country and covering up their acts. It also is the first time involvement by the Boston archdiocese under Cushing has been documented."

        The Herald article quotes Rev. Thomas Doyle, who worked at the Vatican on the matter of sexual predation by priests some 20 years ago: "There was even more coverup in days past than there has been in the past 15 to 17 years . . . What we're seeing now with Bernard (Cardinal) Law, (New York's Edward Cardinal) Egan and others is not isolated and not uncommon. It is something that has been going on for decades."

        The documents in question, obtained from the Archdiocese of Boston through a court order, reveal that "diocesan officials are required by canon law to maintain ‘secret archives’ that have over the years become a hidden repository for sexual abuse allegations." The documents include hundreds of pages of Porter's personnel file, detailing efforts to "treat" him and reassign him despite repeated sexual assaults on young boys. There is even a letter from Porter to Pope Paul VI, which was sent to the Vatican "when Porter petitioned for laicization in 1973 after being caught in Minnesota with a young boy." In this letter Porter tells Paul VI that when "it became known and reported to (Fall River) Bishop (James) Connolly that I had become homosexually involved with some of the youth of the parish, Bishop Connolly decided to send me home to my family for a short while until the scandal of this affair died down . . . A short time later Bishop Connolly gave me another chance and assigned me to Sacred Heart Parish in Fall River. 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."

       Also included in the records is a memo from 1964 wherein then Archbishop Medeiros said there were "‘30 or 40 (boys) involved’ in the molestation allegations against Porter and there was ‘much concern among parents.’" But Medeiros did nothing. On the contrary, when James D. Bono, an associate pastor of Immaculate Conception Church reported to Medeiros that Porter had just admitted to him another sexual assault of a young boy, Medeiros responded, "Yes, we know." No disciplinary action followed.

               In 1973, reports the Herald, "Vatican officials received Porter's file that graphically detailed Medeiros’ complicity in covering up Porter's case." The Vatican’s response? Pope Paul VI made Medeiros a Cardinal.

               In other words, what we see in the Archdiocese of Boston and elsewhere under the glare of recent media scrutiny is the ugly truth that a largely corrupted hierarchy has been trying to hide: for more than 30 years the men who govern the Church, from the Vatican on down, have been protecting the wolves from the sheep. This diabolical inversion is only one of innumerable signs of the great ecclesial crisis foretold by the Virgin of Fatima.