The pews of St. Agnes Cathedral in Rockville Centre filled on April 7 with priests, bishops, and laypeople who came to remember Bishop William Murphy, who led the Diocese of Rockville Centre for more than two decades before his death on March 26 at age 85.
The funeral Mass drew clergy from well beyond Long Island. Bishop Robert Brennan of the Diocese of Brooklyn delivered the homily and recalled traveling with Murphy to Jerusalem, where the two priests met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. That kind of access didn’t happen by accident. Murphy had spent years building relationships across the Catholic world, and he used them.
“He was not a simple man, but he was sincere,” Brennan said. “And more importantly, he was a man of the church. He loved Jesus, and he was incredibly happy and proud to serve the Church.”
The Rev. Michael Duffy, rector of St. Agnes Cathedral, put it plainly. “There was no one like him in the sense of serving the church with a world global perspective,” Duffy told Newsday. “He was very active in peace and justice around the world.”
Bishop John Barres, current leader of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, issued a statement calling Murphy “widely respected for his expertise in Vatican diplomacy and international relations.” Barres said Murphy was “deeply committed to ecumenical and interfaith dialogue” and praised his work mentoring priests and bishops across the country. The Diocese of Rockville Centre is among the largest Catholic dioceses in the United States, serving roughly 1.2 million people through 329 priests.
That’s a significant institution. And Murphy shaped it for years.
Still, any honest accounting of his life requires confronting what preceded his arrival on Long Island. Murphy came to Rockville Centre in 2001 after serving as vicar general of the Archdiocese of Boston, which made him second-in-command to Cardinal Bernard Law. He left Boston the same year The Boston Globe published its landmark investigation documenting the systematic concealment of clergy sexual abuse. That reporting shook American Catholicism to its foundation.
A 2003 report from the Massachusetts attorney general found that top archdiocesan officials had known about the clergy abuse problem “for many years before it became known to the public.” Murphy was among those officials during those years. He consistently maintained that he played no role in decisions about accused priests.
“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,” Murphy told Newsday in 2004.
Whether that claim fully held up depended on who you asked. Survivors and their advocates had a different view.
The abuse problem didn’t stay in Boston. Long Island had its own reckoning, and Murphy’s tenure at Rockville Centre included his own battles with survivors seeking accountability. In a 2004 letter about abuse allegations on Long Island, reported by The New York Times, Murphy wrote to survivors with what read as genuine anguish. “To each and every one of them I offer my apologies for what has happened to them, and I seek to be as helpful as I can be, listening to their stories and trying as best I can to be brother and priest to them,” he wrote. “Their stories are heart-wrenching. They all have been so broken by what has been done to them.”
Sincere words. The Times also reported, in the same period, that Murphy’s lawyers were opposing survivor lawsuits and assigning some blame to victims and their families.
That tension, the pastoral language on one side, the legal strategy on the other, is part of Murphy’s record too. You don’t get to keep only the Jerusalem trip and the Vatican diplomacy. It all goes in the file.
Long Island’s Catholic community is enormous, and for many of its members, Murphy was the bishop they knew through confirmations and pastoral letters and parish visits. Barres called him a man who “championed the apostolate of the laity and their vital role in the public square.” Duffy and Brennan spoke of someone who was generous, globally minded, and genuinely committed to his faith.
Those tributes carried weight inside St. Agnes. Reporting on the funeral from Long Island Press captured a congregation that came to mourn a leader they respected.
Murphy was 85. He had a long run. What he built and what he left unresolved are both part of what Long Island’s Catholic community inherits now.