The bishop who soothed victims' anger in one of the first big clergy sex abuse scandals to rock the U.S. Catholic Church has been picked by Pope John Paul to succeed the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law as archbishop of Boston, according to a report published on Monday.
Sean Patrick O'Malley, the Roman Catholic bishop of Palm Beach, Florida, will be named the permanent replacement for Law in the coming days, said John Allen Jr., a Rome correspondent for National Catholic Reporter and a CNN consultant.
Boston was the epicenter of a priestly child sex scandal that rocked the church in the United States last year and, if confirmed, O'Malley would bring to the job experience of dealing with sex abuse cases.
Law resigned in December after a scandal in which leaders of his diocese were found to have transferred priests who were known sex abusers from parish to parish instead of defrocking them or reporting them to the civil authorities.
The Vatican had no immediate comment, though Vatican sources said O'Malley, 59, was among those considered for the Boston post, one of the most important in the U.S. church.
Spokesmen at both the Archdiocese of Boston and the Diocese of Palm Beach did not return telephone calls seeking comment.
But Roderick MacLeish, a Boston lawyer representing hundreds of people who have brought sexual abuse lawsuits against the Boston archdiocese, said he has known O'Malley for a decade and called him the best man for the job.
"If this is true, this is extraordinary news. He is extremely humble and very compassionate," MacLeish told Reuters. "I am elated."
SCANDAL EXPERIENCE
O'Malley, a member of the Franciscan order, was bishop of Fall River, Massachusetts, from 1992 to 2002. There, he dealt with the case of James Porter, a former priest jailed on more than three dozen counts of molesting children.
O'Malley set up screening procedures for employees and priests to try to avoid a repeat, and MacLeish praised the bishop for his willingness to communicate openly with victims and their attorneys.
"He handled the largest case at the time -- the Porter case -- and we were able to settle everything quickly," said MacLeish, who also represented Porter's victims.
O'Malley, a native of Lakewood, Ohio, became bishop of Palm Beach after predecessors there had been tainted by their handling of local sex abuse scandals.
Bishops usually take over their new posts several weeks after they are named.
The Boston archdiocese is home to more than two million Catholics, while the Palm Beach diocese has a Catholic population of more than 250,000.
Although Law resigned in December, the effects of the scandal still linger. U.S. Catholic bishops meeting in St. Louis this month confronted accusations of foot dragging and Mafia-like secrecy in dealing with the scandal.
Sex abuse scandals have also hit the Catholic Church in a number of European, African and Asian countries.