Faith In Their Father?

By Robert Sullivan/Lowell

He's trying to save his a__," the Rev. D. George Spagnolia told me. He was speaking of Bernard Cardinal Law and the Boston prelate's crackdown on priests who stand accused of child abuse. Cardinal Law had turned over 90 names of area clerics to the district attorney's office; 10 of the clerics were still active in the priesthood but were quickly put on administrative leave. Father Spagnolia, the 10th to be suspended, had become the first to proclaim his innocence, loudly, insisting that he would fight the charges "all the way to Rome."

His defiance had electrified Lowell, Mass., the Catholic city from which my Catholic family hails. Lowell was America's first planned industrial city in the 19th century. It collapsed when the mills closed, then was brought back to life again in the 1970s when high-tech Wang Laboratories came to town, along with many low-wage Asian immigrants. Now it is wrestling with its identity; it has landed a minor league ball club and a new park, but nothing yet has rescued its old working class. Throughout its upheavals, Lowell has often been steered by the church and, in at least one neighborhood, by Father Spagnolia. He arrived at St. Patrick's parish in 1998 and was quickly regarded as a savior as he revived the city's most famous church by raising money, renovating the Gothic building, reaching out to the Asian community, bolstering the food-voucher program and comforting the poor.

So "Father Spags" was already a hero in Lowell, but never more so than early last week when he took on Cardinal Law's plan for solving a child-abuse crisis that was gruesomely revealed during the recent trial and conviction of defrocked priest John Geoghan, who was accused of molesting scores of boys in the 1980s. The week in Lowell started on a high but ended on a heartbreak. By Friday, Father Spagnolia was forced to admit that he had lied about parts of his sexual past. And his supporters were forced to reckon with a new sense of abandonment.

As he sat for our interview, Father Spagnolia, 64, a small man, was tired both by the media swirl and a fast he was maintaining to protest Cardinal Law's handling of the Geoghan case. (The Cardinal, he says, has still not begged the flock's forgiveness for protecting Geoghan.) He answered my questions quietly but surprised me often with his scatological language, which I surmised he used to show indignation. He said that while the Cardinal's new zero-tolerance policy may seem a good thing, the swiftness and size of the roundup were tantamount to a witch hunt. Father Spagnolia was not convinced that he would win in the end--"I think I'm screwed"--but he was heartened by the support of Lowell and of his fellow priests. "A lot have called saying they're glad I have the balls to fight this," he said.

Every now and again, Father Spagnolia said something that really took me aback. He said that Cardinal Law, whom he had been criticizing from the pulpit for weeks, was not a Christian. He said that when Law's delegate, Father Charles J. Higgins, confronted him on Feb. 20 with the allegation that 31 years ago he had twice sexually molested a 14-year-old boy, "I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. My reaction was, I think, 'You're s____ing me.'" When we discussed his 19-year hiatus from the active priesthood, a time when he lived in Boston and in Cape Cod's Yarmouthport, where he ran a bed-and-breakfast inn, he volunteered answers to questions I had not asked. "I maintained my celibacy because I believe in that, for me," he told me. "I remained loyal to the Lord, to my faith."

I left the rectory feeling that I had never had such a candid and intimate conversation with a priest. Did I believe Father Spagnolia? The fact that he was extremely well thought of in Lowell carried weight with me. I grew up in Lowell's principal suburb, Chelmsford, mowing the local church lawn in summer for extra money, going on Catholic Youth Organization ski trips with Father Coughlin in winter. I knew of famous St. Patrick's, which rises like a beacon in the city's poorest section, a tenement-filled neighborhood called the Acre. On the cold but sunny Thursday when I visited Father Spagnolia, the front doors of St. Patrick's were decorated with multicolored and multilingual posters: INNOCENT UNTIL PROVED GUILTY UNLESS ORDAINED IN BOSTON and CHUNG CON LUON O BEN CHA (Vietnamese for WE SUPPORT YOU, FATHER).

I found myself, during my visit, fighting an instinct to join in Lowell's boosterism of Father Spagnolia and his crusade. When he held his press conference last Monday to announce that "I have done nothing" and "I demand due process," hundreds of children and adults filled the church pews. The city's mayor, Rita Mercier, a St. Patrick's parishioner, stood by her pastor: "He reminds me of myself. He's a fighter too." "Do you believe him?" my brother Kevin asked me an hour after my two-hour sit-down with Father Spagnolia. "I don't know," I said. "He offered so many things that are easily checked; he must be telling the truth. He said he was celibate when he was down on the Cape cooking and running an inn. I can just call Yarmouthport in the morning and get the buzz."

I didn't have to. Father Spagnolia had given the same account of his years outside the priesthood to Thomas Farragher of the Boston Globe. When Farragher's story appeared, the reporter began receiving e-mails about Spagnolia's long-term relationship with Winston F. Reed of Boston. When Farragher put the question to Father Spagnolia last Thursday night, he was given another untruth: Yes, Father Spagnolia told him, he had had a five-year sexual relationship with Reed, but no other partners. At a frantic Friday noon press conference at St. Patrick's, Father Spagnolia admitted there had in fact been two sexual affairs. His lawyer, Eileen Donaghue, took pains to point out that being homosexual doesn't mean being a pedophile and that Father Spagnolia would continue his fight over that allegation. But, she added, he would now acquiesce to Cardinal Law's order to vacate the parish house while review of his case continues.

"I don't want to put these people here through having to defend me on this issue," Father Spagnolia told me later Friday afternoon. Did he think Lowell would continue to support him? "I really don't know." Was his credibility ruined? "We will find out." Why had he told me what he told me? "The only way I can respond to that is my overall attitude..." He paused. "I wanted to cut off the private aspect of those four or five years. I wanted it kept to itself. I found myself saying those kinds of things. That does not mean I'm a liar kind of thing."

The week's events threatened to overshadow the far more consequential questions of child abuse. Wendy Murphy is a lawyer and the founder and director of the Victim Advocacy & Research Group in Boston, and it was her client, who she says is now a 45-year-old father and "a very respectable, responsible, highly regarded citizen," who brought the allegation against Father Spagnolia. She feels the Lowell priest's campaign has, if anything, damaged the search for justice. "By making himself the poster boy for false accusations, he did a great disservice to the very course he professed to be forwarding," she said Friday after Father Spagnolia's lie was revealed in the Globe.

On Friday, Father Spagnolia said he would persevere, and much of Lowell said the same. I talked with a friend of mine, Dave Perry, a reporter for the Lowell Sun, who said, "Lowell's such a huge fan of the underdog, and we do love our own. Even now, he's not down and out here. Of course, if it turns out there's truth to the allegation..." Dave trailed off.

"I think he's done wonderful things for that parish, and what he did during the years he wasn't a priest is his own personal business," said Mike Donahue, another friend of mine. Donahue, from an old, prominent Lowell family, still lives in the city and manages a local country club. "Why he lied about being gay--he's probably embarrassed about it. Lowell's a blue-collar mill city, and that stuff still doesn't go down well with some people here. As for whether the allegation's true, I'm with Spags. Geoghan had 60 kids going, 'This happened to me too.' Spags had one guy coming at him in 31 years."

What if it is true? I asked Mike. How will the city, which put itself on the line for Father Spags, take it? "We'll get over it," said Donahue. "This city's taken a lot of lumps over the years, so what the hell."