McCormack became a bishop and got
lucky when prosecutors decided they didn’t have the laws to go after
him for putting so many kids in harms’ way. Instead of jail, he gets to
reside in the bishop’s residence in Manchester, N.H.
And
he gets to write, without a hint of irony, a column with lines like
this: “Do you remember someone who left a great impression on you?’’
The
person who left a great impression on Jeff Thomas was a priest named
Brendan Smyth, because Smyth raped him when he was a second grader at
Our Lady of Mercy School in East Greenwich, R.I. Smyth operated in the
Providence diocese in the 1960s.
The
bishop of Providence, Thomas Tobin, will not give communion to
congressman Patrick Kennedy. Nor will he give Thomas and Helen
McGonigle, Thomas’s childhood neighbor also attacked by Smyth, the
names of diocesan priests credibly accused of abuse.
But Tobin will give McCormack some prime real estate in his diocese’s paper.