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]