Wow. The Vatican finally dismisses the slime-sucking buggerer.

Eugene O'Sullivan, believed to be the first Massachusetts priest convicted of sexual abuse more than two decades ago, has been dismissed from the priesthood by the Vatican, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston said yesterday.

  Boston.com article

Two decades. That didn't take long.

Of course, the real issue here, I suppose, is how many others the Vatican is still sheltering.

O'Sullivan, who served at a number of parishes in the area, including St. Agnes Church in Arlington, was sentenced to probation in 1984 after he admitted sodomizing a 13-year-old altar boy at St. Ann's Parish in Marshfield. One condition of his probation was that he not be allowed to work with children, but church officials, who had pleaded with a judge for leniency on his behalf, later assigned him priestly duties at four New Jersey parishes.

[...]

The Vatican has dismissed another priest, Paul E. McDonald, who had served in parishes in Hyde Park and Marlborough, Donilon said.

McDonald was accused of raping boys when he was a priest at St. Joseph Church in Hyde Park in the 1960s. He eventually left the priesthood voluntarily in 1976 after getting a woman pregnant.

And I'm not sure how that goes. If you leave voluntarily, you're still a priest until the Vatican dismisses you?

Documents from O'Sullivan's personnel file, made public in 2002, show that the archdiocese was alerted as early as the 1960s about allegations against him.

[...]

In a 2003 deposition Law gave in lawsuits filed against the archdiocese, he defended his decision to allow O'Sullivan to transfer from St. Agnes to the Diocese of Metuchen, N.J., less than a year after he pleaded guilty to sodomizing the 13-year-old boy. Law said he wanted to give O'Sullivan a chance at ''redemption."

''Obviously, if someone is going to start out fresh, it would be advantageous for that to be in a new place," Law said in the deposition.

Like somewhere they didn't know he'd been raping little boys for 40 years?

"Start out fresh."

With a new batch of boys.

O'Sullivan's case was cited in Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly's scathing 2003 report on the clergy sex abuse crisis that showed how, for many years, former cardinal Bernard F. Law and his senior managers knew that substantial numbers of children in the archdiocese had been sexually abused by substantial numbers of its priests.

Using previously unreleased church documents obtained through grand jury subpoenas, Reilly's report asserted that then-Bishop Robert J. Banks urged prosecutors and a judge to be lenient toward O'Sullivan, even though Banks knew that O'Sullivan had other victims. Banks later became bishop of the Diocese of Green Bay, Wis.

Promote the evil doers. Let's see....where else do we see that tendency?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.