Bishop John B. McCormack admitted in a deposition that as a licensed social worker in Massachusetts in the 1980s he was obliged to report cases of child abuse, but claimed that in his personnel role in the archdiocese of Boston, he ``was acting as a delegate or as administrator for the archdiocese in its administration, so that I wasn't acting as a social worker.''
``I still carried the license of the commonwealth, but (allegations) came to me not as a social worker but as a priest. . . . I had no responsibility to (report),'' he said.
Apparently he didn't even have a responsibility to avoid lying to parents about Fr. Joseph Birmingham, a classmate of Bp. McCormack's, now accused of molesting 50 children.
McCormack acknowledged that in 1987, when the father of a 13-year-old altar boy serving with Birmingham wrote a letter asking whether Birmingham was the same priest who had previously been removed from another parish because of a sexual abuse allegation, McCormack replied, ''There is absolutely no factual basis to your concern.'' [Globe]
