PORTLAND – Bishop Joseph Gerry’s three-page letter sent this week to Maine’s 234,000 Roman Catholics outlines numbers about the devastating scandal of clergy sexual abuse of minors – and it offers an apology.

The bishop, who is retiring next month, said he wanted to apologize to:

. People who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of priests.

. Parishioners in the diocese for the scandalous behavior of some priests.

He also wanted to explain what the diocese has done and is continuing to do to prevent such abuse.

“Many of you who have not been closely connected with either a complainant or an accused have also been affected,” wrote Gerry in the letter to his flock. “You love Christ and you love His Church. But awareness of what has happened over these past 52 years has caused you embarrassment, shame and bitter disappointment because of the actions of some of the Church’s representatives.

“I am deeply sorry you had to endure this pain. Please keep in your prayers the survivors who live with the anguish of this horrible trauma. Also, remember the offenders. Healing prayer is essential for both.”

The priest sexual abuse scandal dogged Gerry during almost all his 15 years as bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland.

He said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News that handling accusations was the most challenging and painful issue he faced.

“As painful as it is, it was necessary that it surface and come out and be confronted,” he said. “I’m using that word necessary in a biblical sense of the word that it was necessary if we’re really going to be able to proclaim the Gospel values. As a result of this, we’re going to be a stronger church, I am convinced of that.”

Reports of the sexual abuse of minors by diocesan priests became public in 1993, 1998 and 2002.

The first accusation of sexual abuse of a minor by a priest became public during the Lenten season of 1993, just four years after Gerry’s installation in 1989. Three men accused the Rev. James P. Vallely, a retired diocesan priest, of molesting them when they were boys.

The priest was associate pastor at St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in Portland from 1956 to 1967 and served at least five other parishes throughout the state.

Nine months later, in the midst of Advent, a Massachusetts man who said he was abused by Vallely during the priest’s three-year stint at St. John’s Catholic Church in Bangor, criticized the way Gerry and the diocese reported it. Joseph Kenney told the Bangor Daily News in December 1993 that he was not after money.

“I didn’t want anything except a public apology” from Vallely and the diocese, he said. Kenney asked the diocese to set up a meeting with his abuser, but after one meeting with the bishop, another with the two co-chancellors, several letters and many phone calls, he was told the meeting probably wasn’t going to happen.

Kenney said that he “honestly felt” the bishop’s concern, but said in 1993 that the legal concerns appeared to have taken precedence. Dealing with his abuse was difficult for Kenney and his family, he said more than a decade ago, but “the abuse and insensitive approach by the Diocese of Portland was more destructive.”

Gerry and the diocese again were criticized in April 1998 when the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Steven Simard, then 26, required the bishop to publicly admit past sexual wrongdoing by some priests and advertise free counseling for victims. Those were two of the things Kenney was seeking when he went to the diocese about his abuse five years earlier.

Simard said then that he was sexually abused as a child by the Rev. Raymond Lauzon during the late 1970s and early 1980s in Portland. The incidents allegedly occurred in a church rectory and at a church-run thrift shop in the Old Port area. Six other men, including Simard’s older brother David, also lodged similar allegations.

Gerry’s 1998 statement, published in state newspapers, did not mention Simard’s or any other cases that had been settled that year. Instead, it credited Pope John Paul II’s challenge for the church to acknowledge its failures as the motivation behind the document, critics charged at the time. “Certainly, the sexual abuse of minors in the past by some priests in this diocese, as well as elsewhere in the country, which we acknowledge here today, stands out as one of the gravest moral failings of the church,” the statement said.

“Such misconduct by clergy runs counter to everything Jesus stands for and is reprehensible to all Christians … To any individuals who have suffered from sexual abuse by clergy of the Diocese of Portland and elsewhere, the bishop expresses his deep regret.”

Simard’s attorney, Peter Marchesi of Waterville, criticized the statement in 1998.

“We provided them with a golden opportunity to make a very forthright and candid acknowledgement and apology,” he said. “Rather than seizing that opportunity, they essentially did the bare minimum to live up to the agreement.”

Four years later, as the ripples from the scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston spread across the country, Gerry in February 2002 removed two priests accused of sexual abuse of minors from their parishes – the Rev. Michael Doucette, whose alleged abuse was reported to the diocese in 1991, and the Rev. John Audibert, whose abuse was reported to the diocese in 1993. Both men were returned to ministry after treatment and an independent board made up of clergy and lay Catholics had reviewed their cases, said Gerry in March 2002.

Two months later, Gerry removed the Rev. Leo James Michaud after the priest was accused of having had a relationship with a teenage boy 25 years earlier.

In the wake of the growing national clergy scandal, Gerry supported a new zero tolerance policy about allegations of sexual abuse passed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He stripped all living priests against whom a credible claim of abuse had been made of their power to celebrate Mass in public, represent themselves as priests or wear clerical vestments or collars. He also moved retired priests who had been accused of abuse in years past out of diocesan-owned housing, but stopped short of revoking their pensions and health care benefits.

Under Gerry’s leadership, the diocese also implemented in 2002 a program called “Protecting God’s Children” that called for background checks on all employees and volunteers. The diocese also put in place other reform measures adopted by U.S. Catholic bishops in June 2002. An audit of how those provisions are being implemented was released last month. It stated that the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland is in compliance with the provisions of the mandatory policy.

It is highly unlikely that any of the priests still living accused of sexually abusing minors will go to jail. In May 2002, the diocese turned over to the Maine Attorney General’s Office the files of 51 priests, including 18 who are dead, against whom claims of sexual abuse of a minor had been made over the previous 75 years. Prosecutors determined in September 2002 that the allegations were too old to prosecute.

Maine Superior Court Justice Kirk Studstrup in October ordered Attorney General Steven Rowe to release details of the allegations and the names of the alleged perpetrators and victims contained in the files. Rowe has appealed the decision to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Arguments have not been scheduled.

Gerry has advocated that the names of the priests accused of sexual abuse not be made public. He said that none of the accusations were proven to be true and it is impossible for the dead priests to defend themselves.

Gerry said last year that the public way in which the sex abuse scandal has been dealt with over the past two years could help Americans address the prevalence of all forms of physical and sexual abuse in society.

“I feel as a result of what has surfaced in church we are going to be a catalyst for society for addressing this issue that it has ignored for years and years,” he said. “I think that’s one of the graces that’s going to come from this scandal. People now realize it happens and that they should bring it forward and have it addressed.”