Bishop William F. Murphy, who led the Diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y., home to more than 1.5 million Roman Catholics on Long Island, and who was earlier the No. 2 church official in Boston — a tenure that came under scrutiny as a searing scandal about clergy sex abuse unfolded — died on March 26. He was 85.
His death was announced by the diocese, which did not say where he died or state a cause.
Bishop Murphy, who retired in 2017, came to Long Island to lead the Rockville Centre diocese, one of the nation’s largest, in 2001, just months before The Boston Globe began publishing articles about decades of sexual abuse by priests in the Archdiocese of Boston and a coverup by high church officials. The series won a Pulitzer Prize and inspired the Academy Award-winning 2015 movie “Spotlight.”
Never charged with criminal wrongdoing, Bishop Murphy long denied protecting abusive priests in Boston. But he weathered years of controversy as the clergy scandals reached into dioceses around the country, including on Long Island. A group of lay Catholics there called for his resignation, citing what they said was evidence that he had protected pedophile priests in Boston, even as he instituted reforms on Long Island to prevent such abuse.
And in December 2003, 50 priests on Long Island signed a letter expressing a lack of confidence in Bishop Murphy’s leadership as donations dropped amid the Catholic Church’s widening abuse scandals.
In response, he agreed to an extraordinary meeting with critical priests that lasted five hours and included an outside mediator.
“It is to his credit,” one of his critics, the Rev. Christopher Aridas, told The New York Times afterward. “You really have to applaud the man because other bishops apparently have not done that when asked.”
The Boston abuse scandal led Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the local archbishop, to resign and to ask forgiveness for allowing pedophile priests to remain in ministries, shuffled from parish to parish. From 1993 to 2001, Bishop Murphy was Cardinal Law’s vicar general, or second in command, which immediately led to questions about whether he had played any role in protecting priests accused of abuse.
“I was not involved in the handling of priests who had been accused of the abuse of minors, in any part of their being removed from parish ministry or being reassigned to parish ministry,” Bishop Murphy told the Long Island newspaper Newsday in 2004.
Yet Newsday told a different story after its reporters reviewed the confidential personnel files of priests in court records of civil lawsuits filed against the Boston archdiocese.
“Overall, the public records show that Murphy, as Cardinal Bernard Law’s top deputy in Boston for almost eight years, was involved in almost one-third of the priest sexual abuse cases at the heart of the scandal there,” the Long Island newspaper reported.
A scathing 2003 report by the Massachusetts Attorney General found that members of the clergy had abused hundreds of children over decades in the Archdiocese of Boston. And it castigated the church hierarchy, saying it had looked the other way in “a massive and pervasive failure of leadership.”
No criminal charges were brought against the archdiocese. Church leaders were not required to report suspected sex abuse of children to the civil authorities until 2002.
But Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly found that Bishop Murphy had been responsible for handling the cases of many abusive priests, including one of the most notorious, the Rev. John J. Geoghan, who was accused of abusing more than 100 children. He and other serial pedophiles were shifted from job to job within the archdiocese, their abuse never reported to law enforcement.
“Even with undeniable information available to him on the risk of recidivism,” the attorney general wrote, “Bishop Murphy continued to place a higher priority on preventing scandal and providing support of alleged abusers than on protecting children from sexual abuse.”
After the report’s release, the Long Island chapter of Voice of the Faithful, a national group of Catholic laity formed in reaction to the abuse scandals, called on Bishop Murphy to resign in July 2003.
That same year, the clergy abuse scandal reached Long Island when a Suffolk County grand jury found that the Rockville Centre diocese also had a history of burying allegations of sexual abuse of children by priests.
Though the cases dated to the years before his arrival, Bishop Murphy publicly apologized for “the horrific reality” of abuse and the church’s past failures to address the issue. He pointed to reforms he had instituted since his arrival in September 2001.
“The work is not over,” he wrote in a column published in the newspaper The Long Island Catholic. “We are, however, doing all that we know how to do in order to act rightly.”
William Francis Murphy was born on May 14, 1940, in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, one of six children of Cornelius J. and Norma (Duggan) Murphy.
He attended the Boston Latin School, a prestigious public school, where his father taught history, and entered Harvard College.
He left Harvard to prepare for the priesthood at St. John’s Seminary in Boston, followed by study at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, from which he received a doctorate in sacred theology. He was ordained a priest in Rome in 1964 and returned to Boston to serve in a series of parishes as an assistant pastor.
He returned to Rome in the 1970s for a role on the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace and to lecture in theology. He was given the elevated title of monsignor in 1979.
He returned to the Boston archdiocese in 1987 to serve in a succession of administrative roles, eventually becoming vicar general in 1993. He was named auxiliary bishop of Boston in 1995, six years before Pope John Paul II appointed him to lead the Diocese of Rockville Centre.
He served on the board of directors of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as well as in various interfaith groups.
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
Bishop Murphy presided over Long Island’s 134 parishes during a time of declining Mass attendance, when he was forced to close some Catholic schools and to exact financial discipline from parishes. Admirers were pleased with his defense of conservative Catholic values, including his opposition to same-sex marriage. Conversant in Italian, French and Spanish, he traveled with John Paul II on a visit to Cuba in 1998.
But the bishop was best known for his proximity to the church’s sex abuse scandals and his efforts to foster healing. He issued a series of apologies to victims, none more direct than a letter he posted on the diocesan website in February 2004. It followed a church report that 132 people had filed sex abuse complaints against 66 priests since the Rockville Centre diocese was created in 1957.
“For all this I have apologized many times before,” he wrote. “I apologize again because I know that, as a Catholic bishop in the United States, I will go to my grave with the knowledge that I can never make up or restore to the victims the innocence lost and suffering experienced day in and day out by those who were victimized as well as their families.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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