Mayor Thomas P. Koch of Quincy came under fire this week for comments he made linking the clergy sex abuse scandal to homosexuality.
Koch, who is Catholic, made the comments Monday during an interview with Dan Rea on WBZ News Radio.
When Rea at one point criticized the Catholic church over its response to the abuse crisis, chronicled extensively in a 2002 Boston Globe Spotlight team investigation, Koch said, “That was mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia.” After Rea mentioned adolescent victims, Koch said pedophilia is defined as attraction to “a younger age” than a teenager.
Koch’s comments were swiftly condemned by Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney who has long represented victims of clergy sex abuse.
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“For the Mayor of Quincy to blame mostly homosexual issues for the Catholic Church scandal is baseless, ill-advised, and harmful to victims or survivors,” he said in a statement. “After my review over the decades of thousands of Catholic Church documents involving childhood clergy sexual abuse, I have discovered no evidence to support the Mayor’s assertion.”
Such comments contradict “the evidence and [are] disrespectful to courageous clergy sexual abuse victims,” he said.
Koch told the Quincy-based Patriot Ledger that he was “inartful” in his comments, while also citing studies that he said showed most abuse victims were teenage boys.
“Having said that, I don’t believe that homosexual abuse is higher than heterosexual,” Koch said, adding that “if I offended anybody, I apologize. That was never the intent. … I have gay friends and relatives and all. I treat everybody the same.”
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Koch could not immediately be reached for comment.
He was also criticized by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, which said Wednesday that it was “appalled” by his comments.
“The conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia has been repeatedly refuted by medical and scientific experts,” the group said in a statement. “Mayor Koch’s comments serve to scapegoat gay men, imply that middle-school and high-school boys are not actually victims of abuse, and completely dismiss every girl or woman who has been assaulted in the Catholic Church.”
During the interview with Rea, Koch said he believes the church has been unfairly singled out in the press for its abuse issues, which have also arisen in areas such as youth sports and schools.
“The church was not very popular with the secular media,“ Koch told Rea. ”They took a beating. … You don’t read about it every day when it happens around the country in other circumstances.”
Koch had come onto Rea’s show mainly to discuss a lawsuit filed by a group of Quincy residents seeking to block the installation of two Catholic statues outside the public safety building. The suit remains pending.
Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report.
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.