Segue of the day: Kevin Cullen

I've knocked Globe metro columnist Kevin Cullen in the past, but his column today--on the journalistic efforts of  Manchester, NH Bishop John B. McCormack, who played a shameful role in the Boston Archdiocese's priest-abuse scandal--is great stuff. Here's an excerpt"

McCormack became a bishop and got lucky when prosecutors decided they didn’t have the laws to go after him for putting so many kids in harms’ way. Instead of jail, he gets to reside in the bishop’s residence in Manchester, N.H.

And he gets to write, without a hint of irony, a column with lines like this: “Do you remember someone who left a great impression on you?’’

The person who left a great impression on Jeff Thomas was a priest named Brendan Smyth, because Smyth raped him when he was a second grader at Our Lady of Mercy School in East Greenwich, R.I. Smyth operated in the Providence diocese in the 1960s.

The bishop of Providence, Thomas Tobin, will not give communion to congressman Patrick Kennedy. Nor will he give Thomas and Helen McGonigle, Thomas’s childhood neighbor also attacked by Smyth, the names of diocesan priests credibly accused of abuse.

But Tobin will give McCormack some prime real estate in his diocese’s paper.

That "great impression" transition captures the shamelessness of abuse-enabling clergy as well as anything I've read. Kudos.