The Bishop, The Thief, His Sister & The Whistleblower, Part 2
Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre: Who is John O. Barres? Who was William Murphy?
I don’t worship in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, but because like so many others who live and worship in Brooklyn and Queens, I tend to pay attention to what happens one diocese over, and have been tracking the Diocese of Rockville Centre bishop for a while now, due to my special interest in the Catholic Church clergy sex abuse/child rape crisis and coverup. I happened to be renting a little off-season house in Suffolk County just before COVID hit a little over a year ago. The last Roman Catholic liturgy I attended was a lovely Ash Wednesday Mass in a church in the Diocese of Rockville Centre. I cringed, however, even then, when John O. Barres, the bishop in charge of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, was mentioned, in the Eucharistic prayer, because he was already on my prelate-watch radar. I had been tracking Barres’s conduct in the context of Child Victims Act cases brought by survivors of clergy sex abuse and child rape in Nassau County Supreme Court long before I read the March 15th National Catholic Reporter story about the Rockville Centre Diocese celebrity priest.
Who is John O. Barres? He was reared in Larchmont, New York, a prosperous New York suburb. He was graduated from Princeton University, studied at the Pontifical College of the Holy Cross in Rome and earned a Master’s degree in Business Administration at New York University (Stern School of Business). Like USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) president Archbishop Jose H. Gomez (Archbishop of Los Angeles), my own bishop Nicholas DiMarzio in Brooklyn, and an increasing number of Catholic bishops, Barres is an Opus Dei adherent. Opus Dei is a prelature (religious cult, in my view) that came into prominence under fascism in Spain during the long reign of Hitler’s ally, Francisco Franco.
The big tell, re: John O. Barres’ Opus Dei leanings is the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce credential. Santa Croce is the Opus Dei college in Rome — but not all Opus Dei clerics study at the Opus Dei college. Today, schools like New York University, Harvard, and Yale, and most, if not all of the, Catholic university campuses have a strong Opus Dei presence. There still tends to be a great deal of secrecy around Opus Dei recruitment but it is widespread. I spent two years as a full-time student at Harvard University quite recently, and I was shocked to see how entrenched Opus Dei was there at and around Harvard.
Having sharp business skills makes sense for persons of the cloth who run parishes, but in the case of Opus Dei, the goal of obtaining financial credentials goes well beyond parish management, and possession of an MBA, is of late, seeming to be one of several signs that a priest is either an Opus Dei adherent, or engaged in furthering the aims of the prelature which is to bring secular law and mores into line with Catholic laws and moral theology.
Before becoming the bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, John Barres served as the bishop of the Diocese of Allentown, which, according to the 2018 Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report on sex abuse in the Catholic Church was a clergy sex abuse / child rape hotspot. Barres challenged the report’s content relating to his handling of two predators, claiming that a decision he made not to push for laicization of two predators priests was due to his desire to continue to monitor them. (I won't digress into a study of Barres and the eeport here, but this Newsday article offers a full discussion of the controversy. https://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/barres-pennsylvania-priest-sexual-abuse-1.20490481) I would suggest that even if one believes these particular protestations, it is almost impossible to read the report in its entirety and not believe that Barres, who was the Bishop of Allentown from 2009 to 2016, was culpable in covering up sexual misconduct in Allentown. The Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report implicated 35 Allentown priests! Some of them are alleged to have assaulted multiple victims on multiple occasions. Moreover, according the Newsday article, the Diocese of Rockville Centre’s spokesperson, Sean Dolan, could not even name the facility wherein the predators who were supposedly being monitored by the diocese were housed.
John O. Barres replaced William Francis Murphy in 2017 about a year before the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report was made public. It’s not clear whether this transfer happened in response to warnings that the report was in the making, but it is interesting that Barres’s predecessor William Francis Murphy was moved to Rockville Centre in 2001, just one year ahead of the Boston Globe “Spotlight Investigation” in which Murphy and his former superior Cardinal Bernard Law, one of the most notorious clergy sex abuse/child rape culprits, were implicated. Law headed the Archdiocese of Boston from 1984 through 2002.
Murphy started out as a “liberal” do-gooder of sorts, but between 1993 and 2001 he served as s Vicar General (principal assistant) under Law. Murphy left Boston and was appointed to lead the Diocese Rockville Centre in 2001. In 2002, Bernard Law resigned in disgrace, and with help from the “pope saint,” John Paul II, Law fled the United States, a fugitive from (secular/civil) justice, and lived out the rest of his life in Rome where he served as an “archpriest” of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. (Pope Francis offered the Prayer of Commendation at the end of his Requiem Mass, by the way.) In 2003, the Massachusetts Attorney General concluded that Murphy was complicit in Bernard Law’s misconduct. Murphy should have resigned then, along with his boss, but instead, the Vatican sent him to Rockville Centre.
Murphy, who had a well-documented record of supporting predator-shuffling and doing nothing to address clergy sex abuse/child rape in his midst in Boston, refused to allow VOTF (Voice of the Faithful) to convene on diocesan property, and went on to conduct himself like a royal spendthrift in the Diocese. Murphy is one of those guys who causes me (a Dante fan) to pause, and ponder: In which ring of hell would Dante put him, who belongs in so many?
Legendary journalist Jimmy Breslin wrote an opinion piece in 2002 Newsday (reproduced here, courtesy of Bishop Accountability. (I remember reading this on the day it appeared!) in which he capture William Murphy so well:
The amount of money that Murphy is spending on rooms for himself is an embarrassment. One thing he doesn't have to worry about is feeling ashamed. He is devoid of that. The renovation work the bishop has ordered will cost over $5 million, including the $1.6 million for placing gold plating on the brass pipes of the church organ.
You've got to be crazy to give the place any money. When you go past St. Agnes, clutch your purse or keep your hands in your pockets.
One Rockville Centre Catholic said the following when I asked about the relationship between Murphy and the crooner cleric, Charles Mangano: “Murphy made him.”
It is easy to see how the telegenic former pastor of St. Joseph Church in Babylon, Charles Mangano, a guy who ousted a few ministries and situated them in a dilapidated convent so he could run his Mater Dei Music Ministry out of the rectory/parish house, might have appealed to Murphy, a guy who evicted a bunch of nuns so he could dwell in a $5 million house of the Lord. There’s no honor among these thieves.
I think Barres was sent to Rockville Centre because he had never been accused of raping any children, because he was not so profoundly smeared by the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report as, say, Donald Wuerl was; and because he was a serious, more ascetic man than Murphy was. Low bar, perhaps, but read a few of these clergy sex abuse/child rape reports, remember how few bishops (ordinaries) there actually are in the United States, and you quickly come to see how “slim” the “pickins” are.
Dioceses named in clergy sex abuse/child rape cases following the passage of the Child Victims Act take an immense financial hit. Murphy left the Diocese of Rockville Centre with hundreds of clergy sex abuse/child rape cases pending. In the wake of Murphy’s departure, what better candidate could there be than a “no scruples” Opus Dei bishop, born and educated in privilege, with a more conservative style, to clean up the mess William Murphy left behind?
Knowing a reckoning was headed their way, Rome sent John O. Barres who is so serious-minded (I am told), he does not even like to see photos of priests with cocktails in their hands. Barres is not telegenic, not much of a preacher, and not a schmoozer, but like most Opus Dei adherents, he believes the ends almost always justify the means when it comes to the institutional Catholic Church and that’s what counts most when there’s a spill down the center (Centre) aisle.
My guess is that John O. Barres does not much like “the Donny and Marie of Long Island,” and that the idea of keeping a grifter priest in ministry holds little appeal. Almost any Catholic diocese will tolerate a grifter priest if he brings enough cash into the diocese, but I would be surprised to learn that don’t Mangano does. There’s no way to know — this is just a hunch — but it seems to me that Mangano’s star has been fading for awhile, and that he is not getting rich off of those CDs he sells on Amazon and via his Mater Dei Music Ministries. I’d bet that most of his Mater Dei income does not come from his merch.
Barres knows it’s wrong to permit Mangano to raid St. Joseph’s investment account for his vanity projects. Barres knows it’s wrong to laicize former deacon Stephen Yusko for trying to stop the pilfering. Charles Mangano may be a grifter, but those sticky fingers are attached to the “hands of a priest.” A deacon is not a priest. Under clericalism, it is better to deep-six the deacon than to scandalize even the most reprehensible of priests. Barres knows his decision to strip that deacon of his vocation for telling the truth is wrong, but Barres won’t lose any sleep over it.
Barres has already committed far more egregious transgressions in the interest of his protecting the institutional Catholic Church from scandal. Barres held the silence in Allentown in the context of the clergy sex abuse/child rape crisis. Barres allowed clergy sex abuse/child rape to take place under his watch. More recently Barres authorized lawyers for the Diocese of Rockville Centre to challenge the lawfulness of the Child Victims Act itself. Barres authorized attorneys representing his diocese to force clergy sex abuse/child rape survivors bringing cases against his dioceses to file, in public proceedings, under their real, legal names (despite that aliases in sexual assault cases in most United States jurisdictions is an established norm). This sadistic, disuasive measure, Barres hopes, will result in scaring off clergy sex abuse/child rape plaintiffs by retraumatizing them. Barres has authorized the use of bankruptcy filing to impede clergy sex abuse/child rape investigations.
Once a person crosses lines such as Barres has already crossed, perhaps sin no longer exists for him. Maybe allowing a dishonest, out-of-control cleric to remain in ministry, or stripping an honest whistleblower of his vocation no longer register as transgressions. Maybe a guy like John Barres can just do anything and trust turnstyle Absolution to clean his soul and cover his ass. Yes, maybe. But people who follow Christ know, they know, there is zero Christ in demeanor like Barres’s. It’s Church of No Jesus behavior. Furthermore, when it comes to protecting Mother Church from scandal — well, she is perfectly capable of standing up for herself.
Michele Somerville
April 9, 2021
Read Part 1, The Thief, His Sister, The Bishop and The Whistleblower
Read Part 2, The Thief, His Sister, The Bishop and The Whistleblower
Read Part 3, The Thief, His Sister, The Bishop and The Whistleblower
Read Part 4, The Thief, His Sister, The Bishop and The Whistleblower