Faith In Their Father?

He's trying to save his a__," the Rev. D. George Spagnolia told me. He was speaking of Bernard Cardinal Law and the Boston prelate's crackdown on priests who stand accused of child abuse. Cardinal Law had turned over 90 names of area clerics to the district attorney's office; 10 of the clerics were still active in the priesthood but were quickly put on administrative leave. Father Spagnolia, the 10th to be suspended, had become the first to proclaim his innocence, loudly, insisting that he would fight the charges "all the way to Rome."

His defiance had electrified Lowell, Mass., the Catholic city from which my Catholic family hails. Lowell was America's first planned industrial city in the 19th century. It collapsed when the mills closed, then was brought back to life again in the 1970s when high-tech Wang Laboratories came to town, along with many low-wage Asian immigrants. Now it is wrestling with its identity; it has landed a minor league ball club and a new park, but nothing yet has rescued its old working class. Throughout its upheavals, Lowell has often been steered by the church and, in at least one neighborhood, by Father Spagnolia. He arrived at St. Patrick's parish in 1998 and was quickly regarded as a savior as he revived the city's most famous church by raising money, renovating the Gothic building, reaching out to the Asian community, bolstering the food-voucher program and comforting the poor.

So "Father Spags" was already a hero in Lowell, but never more so than early last week when he took on Cardinal Law's plan for solving a child-abuse crisis that was gruesomely revealed during the recent trial and conviction of defrocked priest John Geoghan, who was accused of molesting scores of boys in the 1980s. The week in Lowell started on a high but ended on a heartbreak. By Friday, Father Spagnolia was forced to admit that he had lied about parts of his sexual past. And his supporters were forced to reckon with a new sense of abandonment.

As he sat for our interview, Father Spagnolia, 64, a small man, was tired both by the media swirl and a fast he was maintaining to protest Cardinal Law's handling of the Geoghan case. (The Cardinal, he says, has still not begged the flock's forgiveness for protecting Geoghan.) He answered my questions quietly but surprised me often with his scatological language, which I surmised he used to show indignation. He said that while the Cardinal's new zero-tolerance policy may seem a good thing, the swiftness and size of the roundup were tantamount to a witch hunt. Father Spagnolia was not convinced that he would win in the end--"I think I'm screwed"--but he was heartened by the support of Lowell and of his fellow priests. "A lot have called saying they're glad I have the balls to fight this," he said.