“I know how surprised people were, starting with me, when a scruffy, bearded, barefoot capuchin was not exactly what people suspected,” O’Malley said at a fundraiser for archdiocesan priests in September.

O’Malley, 80, is now retiring, with his last day as a cardinal being Thursday. Beyond the abuse crisis, his two-decade tenure was tested by other daunting threats: The archdiocese’s finances were in the red and declining congregations forced the closure of numerous parishes and schools. The church in this strongly Catholic city was shrinking.

And while much of O’Malley’s listening skills were devoted to trying to heal the deep wounds caused by the priest scandal, that work continues to this day.

In 2003, O’Malley’s official car was equipped with tinted windows, hiding it from the view of disgruntled church members. And on Thursday, protesters are expected outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End for the inauguration of O’Malley’s successor, Archbishop Richard Henning.

The ancient ceremony will take place two days after O’Malley faced backlash over a new report of clergy sexual abuse. released by a Vatican commission he leads.

The echoes are a reminder that the pain of the crisis endures. In 2011, O’Malley came under fire after revealing the names of 159 clergy who had been accused of abuse, but withholding the names of 91 others, many of whom had died and could not answer the allegations.

O’Malley, speaking at the Vatican on Tuesday, described the recent report from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors as a “snapshot of the path” toward “a transparent and accountable ministry.” There is “a lot to do,” he said.

“Nothing we do will be enough to fully atone for what happened,” said O’Malley, who also sits on the small, powerful Council of Cardinals. “But we hope that this report and those to come, compiled with the help of the center’s victims and survivors, will help ensure a firm commitment that these events never happen again in the church.”

Critics said more needs to be done.

“The report is praiseworthy in some respects,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a Waltham-based watchdog group. “It calls for victims to have access to information about their cases, for example, and emphasizes the moral imperative to make reparations to victims. But fundamentally, it is an evaluation of the showcase. “It doesn’t give us any idea of ​​the reality on the ground.”

The enormity of the challenge is unlike anything this Capuchin Franciscan, committed to simplicity and poverty, had faced before his appointment as sixth archbishop of Boston by Pope John Paul II.

“In the history of the Catholic Church in the United States, no one has inherited an archdiocese that was in worse shape,” said Michael Sean Winters, author and political columnist for the National Catholic Reporter.

O’Malley had been known as a problem-solver before coming to Boston, a pragmatic cleric and problem-solver who the Vatican could call upon in times of crisis, beginning with his 1992 appointment to the Diocese of Fall River during a scandal. sexual abuse. . A decade later, he was sent to Palm Beach, Florida, to deal with a similar crisis.

Within a year, O’Malley was in Boston, opting to live in the cathedral’s modest downtown rectory rather than the four-story cardinal’s mansion in Brighton.

In 2003, the archdiocese agreed to pay $85 million to 552 victims and parents who had filed civil lawsuits. That sum, a record at the time, was in addition to the $10 million the archdiocese had paid to the victims of former priest John Geoghan, who had been transferred between several parishes even though the archdiocese knew he had sexually abused them. young children.

To date, the archdiocese has paid more than $175 million in settlements since 2002, according to Terrence Donilon, a spokesman for O’Malley. By comparison, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed this month to pay $880 million to 1,353 people who said they were sexually abused. In 2007, that archdiocese paid an additional $660 million to 508 victims.

For Terence McKiernan, founder and president of BishopAccountability.org, O’Malley’s record falls short.

“For us, his legacy is really the list” of 2011, McKiernan said. “When people look back at what the Archdiocese of Boston was under Cardinal O’Malley, they see a list full of holes. Publish the names.”

The global ramifications of the crisis and the damage that persists locally may mean that O’Malley’s work in other areas is overshadowed. But since 2003, Winters said, the cardinal has transformed the archdiocese “in every way that an archdiocese can be transformed.”

The finances of the country’s fourth-largest archdiocese are now in the black; This year 11 priests were ordained, the second most since 1997; parishes have been consolidated for savings and efficiency; and Catholic school enrollment of 32,370 students in fall 2022, although well below 2003, appears to have stabilized, according to the archdiocese.

O’Malley has also prioritized reaching out to urban parishes with large congregations of people of color, said the Rev. Carlos Flor, pastor of a collaboration that includes St. Thomas Aquinas and Our Lady of Lourdes in Jamaica Plain, and St. Mary of the Angels in Roxbury.

“My parishes are mostly Hispanic, and their efforts to make sure everyone is cared for and ministered to at all levels are not just words. “It rings true,” Flor said.

The archdiocese also supports a strong network of social services for the marginalized.

“Homelessness, deep trauma, poverty. These issues have always been close to the cardinal’s internal mission, where his heart has been,” said Alexis Steel, president of St. Mary’s Center for Women and Children, a Boston multi-service organization that helps more than 500 families annually. “He has had a long-standing relationship with our agency. In times of crisis, we receive the support we need.”

Gov. Maura Healey echoed that assessment.

“When I think of Cardinal Sean, I think of his deep faith, his empathy and compassion. “Throughout his two decades of leadership, he has demonstrated this time and time again.” Healey said. “Although he was not elected, he is a leader.”

Healey said she occasionally contacts the cardinal for advice, and that he reached out to her before she traveled to the Vatican in May to meet with Pope Francis and address a climate change summit.

O’Malley told the governor what to expect at the Vatican, she said, adding that Francis would not want her to kiss his ring. “He’s not that kind of pope,” Healey recalled the cardinal saying.

Despite being a low-key, introspective person, O’Malley radiates affection, warmth, humor and broad interests in one-on-one conversations, according to several people who know him.

The National Catholic Reporter’s Winters recalled that O’Malley has always asked him about his young great-nephew, whose mother died two years ago from an overdose.

Franceso Cesareo, former president of Assumption College in Worcester, said he and his family once met O’Malley by chance at the San Diego airport, where Cesareo and the cardinal had arrived for a bishops’ conference. Cesareo also chaired the National Review Board, which works with American bishops to help protect children from abuse.

“He came and talked to the kids and talked to my wife. He was really attentive to them and thanked them for their willingness to dedicate my time to this important work,” Cesareo said. “I could have walked by there. “He showed that he is a very simple, humble and personal man, despite being a cardinal.”

Flor, a pastor from Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, recalled that O’Malley called him about a decade ago to ask if he knew the family of a little boy who had been accidentally shot and killed.

“I was doing the funeral and he came to the wake. He personally came to meet the mother, who was Hispanic,” Flor said. “I saw there not only a leader who sought to be the center of attention, but truly a father and a pastor who sought to comfort.”

Thomas Groome, a theologian at Boston College, said O’Malley set a new tone for the archdiocese immediately upon his arrival, a change symbolized by his decision to live in the South End.

“He took one look at the cardinal’s residence and said, ‘I can’t live here.’ It was contrary to his vows of poverty and his identity as a Capuchin Franciscan,” Groome said. That choice was “in many ways a harbinger of what was to come, the kind of values, attitude and spirituality that he was bringing to his work.”

Through upheaval, soul-searching, restructuring and outreach, the past two decades have been a tumultuous journey for the Archdiocese of Boston. For Winters, who considers the cardinal a friend, O’Malley “reminded Boston Catholics why they could be proud to be Catholic again.”

You can contact Brian MacQuarrie at [email protected].