Four thousand miles away, the O’Malley effect on fighting abuse is felt

ROME — A depressingly familiar story has been playing out here in Italy over recent days, with the arrest of a trusted priest and veteran leader in Catholic education for the alleged abuse of a former altar boy beginning when the young man was just 12 years old, and stretching over a period of years.

While the arrest order is focused on that one accusation, the priest, 60-year-old Father Andrea Melis, a member of the Piarist Fathers in the northern Italian region around the city of Genoa, is also reportedly under investigation for the alleged grooming of at least seven other potential victims.

According to investigators, Melis, who’s currently in domestic confinement, pressured his targets for acts such as kisses, cuddles, and other sexual favors, in exchange for gifts including electronic cigarettes, brand-name clothing, and videogames.

To make matters worse, it’s emerged that Melis is HIV-positive, due to an infection he contracted 12 years ago during a missionary trip to Africa. His lawyers insist he’s been under treatment for a decade and that his medications have rendered the virus unable to be transmitted, and a test of his alleged victim for HIV came back negative.

So far, Melis himself has exercised his right under Italian criminal procedure not to respond to the charges, neither claiming innocence nor confessing guilt. 

While it’s an appalling story, there are a few other details worth mentioning.

First of all, absolutely no one in church leadership has tried to suggest that Melis is the target of a media frenzy or a lawyer-driven shakedown, as one often heard just a decade or so ago.

Instead, Bishop Calogero Marino of Savona-Noli, where Melis’ current parish assignment is located, had a letter read at Masses last Sunday expressing sorrow and closeness to victims and adding, “Abuses are even more grave if they’re committed by a minister of God.”

Neither has there been any effort at cover-up.

When reports about Melis first surfaced, the Archdiocese of Genoa, where he’d served for years in the Catholic schools system, immediately began canonical proceedings and informed the Vatican. In keeping with new protocols, Melis was swiftly suspended from all his offices in the Genoa Archdiocese, his current diocese and in his order, and officials in those venues are cooperating in the investigation by civil authorities.

The federation of Catholic schools over which Melis presided also released a statement expressing sorrow over what’s happened, closeness to the victims, and full confidence in the civil justice system, and also revealing that when the charges emerged, Melis was stripped of all his roles in the organization.

I mention all this because while more than 4,000 miles separate Genoa from Boston, there’s nevertheless a straight line that connects Beantown and its retiring shepherd, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, with the events in the capital of Italy’s Liguria region.

Had there never been a clerical sexual abuse scandal in Catholicism, O’Malley, whose resignation was accepted by Pope Francis Aug. 5, would still have been one of the more remarkable Church leaders of the early 21st century. He would have stood out for his robust pro-life advocacy despite serving in one of the most politically liberal and pro-choice cities in the country, not to mention his impassioned defense of immigrants based on a whole lifetime of pastoral care for migrants and refugees.

Perhaps most basically, he would have been striking for the way he incarnates the Catholic middle in a deeply polarized age, when things seem to be falling apart and the center cannot hold. He alternately irritates both right and left, the classic test of balance.

But, of course, there is a sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, and the lead paragraph of O’Malley’s obituary, whenever that day may come for the now octogenarian prelate, will undoubtedly feature his role as a pioneer of reform.

Let’s be crystal clear.

The fact that it’s no longer regarded as acceptable for bishops to circle the wagons, at least in public, when charges of abuse arise; the fact that bishops now generally cooperate with civil investigations, rather than testily invoking the Church’s autonomy; the fact that bishops are expected to reach out to victims, to invite others to come forward, and not to make the due process rights of accused clerics their top note; all those transitions, in some measure, are due to the example and leadership of O’Malley, who was thrown into the inferno in Boston in 2003 and has had to keep putting out fires for the last 20 years.

Though no one keeps statistics on this sort of thing, I’d be willing to bet that few Catholic prelates have spent more time over the last two decades meeting with survivors of clerical abuse, listening to their stories, praying with those who want it, and crying with those who need it. 

O’Malley has done so not only as the archbishop of one of the epicenters of the crisis, but also as president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, the body Pope Francis launched in 2014 to advise him on reform.

Granted, O’Malley’s record is not uncontested.

Indeed, shortly after his resignation was announced, the reform group BishopAccountability.org released a statement referring to what it called O’Malley’s “legacy of failure,” citing several omissions in a list of accused Boston clerics he released in 2011 which, according to the group, were never remedied.

The statement also alluded to question marks about O’Malley’s leadership of the pontifical commission, and in all honesty, it is easier to cite former members who’ve left either in protest or frustration (Peter Saunders, Marie Collins, Father Hans Zollner, SJ) than to identify any bright shining success the panel has had.

Many observers still find it difficult to articulate exactly what the mission of the commission is, or how its new setting as part of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is supposed to work. While that may not all be O’Malley’s fault, he’s nonetheless the president and the buck stops on his desk.

Still, here’s the bottom line: While it remains a work in progress, and while there are still too many instances in which rhetoric and reality don’t align — witness, for instance, the recent handling of the Father Marko Rupnik case, which hasn’t been exactly an object lesson in either transparency or sensitivity — it’s nonetheless indisputable that the Catholicism of 2024 vis-à-vis the tragedy of sexual abuse is far removed from the automatic defensiveness, denial, and deflection of 20 years ago.

For that alone, Catholics everywhere owe O’Malley a debt of gratitude. That includes, right now, the good people of Genoa.