After the bishop of the nation's largest Episcopal diocese committed suicide, church officials waited to mourn his death before revealing that he had been having extramarital affairs for more than a decade.
"We needed to go through the funeral, and then we needed to go through this," said Bishop Thomas Shaw, David Johnson's successor.Shaw said he knew about some of the allegations when he spoke at Johnson's funeral on Jan. 19. He said another reason they weren't revealed was because the information was still sketchy.
On Thursday, 11 days after Johnson's body was found, church leaders said the bishop had engaged in a pattern of extramarital affairs and "sexual exploitation" for more than a decade.
"At least some of these relationships appear to have been of the character of sexual exploitation," said a statement by the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
The church defines sexual exploitation as someone having sex with a person under his or her authority, which could include parishioners and co-workers, according to the Rev. Edward Miller, a diocese official who signed the statement.
Neither Miller nor diocese spokesman Jay Cormier would say how many women were involved. They said the relationships only involved adult women.
Johnson was ordained in 1962 and named bishop in 1986. He began having affairs before 1985, when he came to Boston from St. Boniface Church in Sarasota, Fla., Cormier said.
He shot himself to death and was found in the Framingham apartment.