June 7, 2009
PRESS RELEASE
He's Bishop Richard Malone's best friend and he won't say he's sorry to clergy sex abuse victims.
From 1994 to 2001, Rev. Paul E. Miceli worked for Cardinal Bernard Law as Director of Ministerial Personnel for the Archdiocese of Boston. In this capacity, Miceli participated in the cover-up and transfer of priests who abused children and young people.
Miceli and Bishop Richard Malone own a home together on Cape Cod in South Dennis, Massachusetts.
In 2004, abuse victims and their supporters demonstrated outside the Immaculate Conception Church in Weymouth, MA on Sunday mornings. Miceli was the pastor.
The advocates wanted Miceli to tell the truth and be responsible and accountable for his role in the cover up and transfer of criminal priests who abused children.
Weeks later, Miceli suddenly resigned from the parish, leaving word that he was on “sabbatical.”
During the summer of 2005, Miceli was quietly reassigned to the faculty of Blessed John XXIII National Seminary in Weston, MA, where Bishop Malone serves as a trustee (ironically, Bishop Malone is currently a member of the Bishops’ Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People, sponsored by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops).
In 2002, it was discovered that Malone (Auxiliary Bishop of Boston's South Region) had three priests working for him in parishes who had previously been accused of molesting children.
Miceli is listed as the National Seminary's Spiritual Director, overseeing the spiritual lives of seminarians, including those from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland.
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The Rev. John K. Connell, a freshman religion teacher and chaplain, was removed from his job at St. John’s Preparatory School near Boston on April 12, 1995, after accusations he had molested several boys in the 1970s at a vacation home on Cape Cod. The archdiocese found the allegations credible, church records show. But two years later, Murphy was playing a role in the church’s attempts to return the priest to active ministry, records show.
“At my most recent meeting with Bishop Murphy, he expressed a desire that we bring to resolution some kind of job description for Jack Connell and that he receive a letter of appointment to this position from the Cardinal,” said a May 1997 Boston memo from the Rev. Paul Miceli, the archdiocese secretary for ministerial support. “I apprised Bishop Murphy of our conversation with Jack.”
The archdiocese’s reasoning, outlined in several memos, was that Connell could safely remain in the priesthood because, though he likely did sexually molest at least one boy in the 1970s, he did so because he had been an alcoholic. Church officials said Connell had been sober for 12 years.
Connell initially admitted to an investigator that he’d shared a bed with an accuser on Cape Cod , but after hiring a lawyer, he recanted several days later.
The archdiocese at first hoped to return Connell to the all-boy high school, but after it learned in 1997 of further allegations against him, church officials started looking for another job for him.
In June 1998, the archdiocese paid a $45,000 settlement to one of Connell’s alleged victims.
Archdiocese records show Connell had once before been accused of sexual abuse, in 1983. He was removed May 23, 1983, as associate pastor of a Newton , Mass. , parish, and was sent away for treatment. By Oct. 1, 1984, Connell was back working as an active priest, as a chaplain and teacher at St. John Preparatory’s 175-acre campus north of Boston .
Connell remained a priest on active duty, as a consultant to the Priest Recovery Program, until Nov. 30, 2001, when, at 61, he was given retirement status.
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