Betrayal (19 page)

Reilly said his experiences with the nuns who taught him and with the priests who counseled him were only positive. The Sisters of St. Joseph who were his teachers at Cathedral High School had more confidence in him than he had in himself. His mother and a parish priest collaborated to get Reilly into St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

When, as a young prosecutor, Reilly found himself building a case against a priest who had sexually abused a child in a Boston suburb, he looked at it as an aberration. “I guess I thought about it in the context of it being representative of all segments of society, that occasionally you'd find someone who would engage in that kind of behavior,” he said. When the extent of the abuse committed by James Porter became known in 1992, Reilly said he was shocked but “gave the Church the benefit of the doubt. Cardinal Law said he had created a new policy so that allegations like this would be aggressively dealt with. At the time, I believed him. I had no reason not to.”

Martha Coakley, who succeeded Reilly as the district attorney in Middlesex County after he was elected attorney general, was less inclined to give the Church the benefit of the doubt. From an early age, she saw inequity in her Church, especially in the way it treated the half of the faithful who were female. She noticed at a young age that women weren't on the altar. There were no sports for girls at her Catholic school, either.

Coakley grew up in North Adams, an old mill town tucked into the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. In North Adams, parishes were laid out along ethnic lines: St. Joseph's was the Irish parish, Notre Darne was French, St. Anthony's was Italian. Coakley went to Mass at St. Joseph's Church and to class at St. Joseph's School. Her father was a daily communicant and a leader of the local St. Vincent de Paul Society, which helped the poor. Her two sisters went to Catholic colleges. She sang in the choir. “In general, I have fond memories of my growing up in the Church,” Coakley said.

The idea of priests sexually abusing children didn't even enter her consciousness until she was in her thirties. By that time, in the early 1990s, Coakley was a prosecutor and had been transferred, “kicking and screaming,” to head a child sexual abuse unit.

Coakley said the incredulity with which the public greeted evidence suggesting that the Church had a large number of sexual predators in its clergy stems from societal ignorance about sexual abuse. “People expect the guy to be drooling, lurking around in a trench coat. But when I started doing these cases, it became obvious that most abusers are caretakers, respectable people who use that respectability as a cover to carry out their abuse. There was an aura around priests that protected them, and that protection extended to sexual abusers. The incredibly backward lifestyle of these men contributed to the problem. You have single men, moving from parish to parish, with no family of their own. It was a formula for disaster.”

Like Reilly, Coakley was initially encouraged by Cardinal Law's response to the Porter case, and in 1993, as that case drew national attention, she began preparing for her first big sexual abuse trial. It involved a priest named Rev. Paul Manning, and it was a messy case. The eleven-year-old alleged victim, a Puerto Rican boy who spoke poor English and whose mother was very religious, recanted his allegations and would not testify against Manning. But another priest, Rev. Paul Sughrue, did come forward, and what he had to say was as disturbing as it was incriminating. Sughrue claimed that one night he had returned to the rectory at St. Charles's Church in Woburn, just north of Boston, and heard “five distinct screams” from a child. “They were horrifying,” Sughrue later testified. “They were pain-filled screams. They demanded attention.”

Sughrue said he went upstairs and, peering from a second-floor landing into Manning's third-floor study, saw two pairs of bare legs intertwined. A child was sitting on top of Manning, moving rhythmically, up and down. Sughrue said he was disturbed by what he saw but was also conflicted over what to do. He eventually contacted the chancery, where officials waited a month before contacting police about the allegations.

Because the victim refused to testify, Coakley knew the case would be difficult to win. But Sughrue's testimony was compelling and, in the Boston area at least, unprecedented — a priest breaking ranks to point a finger at another priest.

But it wasn't just a reluctant victim that Coakley had to contend with. Manning's parishioners stood by him. More than one hundred of them attended his arraignment. Dozens came to the courtroom each day of the trial. They said they were showing their faith in their priest. Coakley said they were intimidating the jury, just as the victim had been intimidated into recanting.

Parishioners seemed less upset about the substance of the allegations than the fact that Sughrue was making them. Coakley said the defense was a case study in exploiting a culture that was instinctively deferential to the Church in general and to priests in particular. An FBI agent testified for Manning as a character witness. Manning's lawyer, Eileen Donoghue, the mayor of Lowell, an old mill city north of Boston, portrayed Manning as a hardworking, caring priest whose fluency in Spanish made him especially beloved among Hispanics. Donoghue said Manning had taken the boy under his wing. She said there was no sexual contact between the boy and his priest, just “horseplay.” If it seemed odd that a fifty-three-year-old priest would have an eleven-year-old boy in his third-floor study at night, Donoghue said the boy spent a lot of time in the rectory “because his family is poor.”

After fifteen hours of deliberations over three days, the jury acquitted Manning, saying prosecutors had not convinced them of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Despite the acquittal, the archdiocese removed him from parish work. As frustrated as Coakley was with the unquestioning loyalty Manning's parishioners showed him, she was encouraged by the archdiocese's cooperation with the prosecution and its decision to ensure that the priest did not have access to children anymore. Sughrue was subsequently promoted to pastor of another parish.

Coakley's actions did not win her the political gains Manning accused her of seeking with his prosecution. Quite the opposite: people accused her of being disrespectful to the Church. A
Lowell Sun
columnist berated her, and closer to home, the mother of one of her best friends said it was outrageous that she had prosecuted a priest. “They were still untouchables in many people's opinions,” Coakley said.

But Coakley said attitudes began to change as the cases mounted. In 1994 Rev. John Hanlon was convicted of raping altar boys in Hingham, south of Boston. An unrepentant Hanlon was sentenced to three life terms in prison.

Coakley said attitudes have changed dramatically in the eight years since she unsuccessfully prosecuted Manning. “No way today would you get the level of intimidation that occurred in that case” she said. “And I think juries today are more willing to convict.”

Judges are more willing to mete out severe punishment too. When a Middlesex County jury in February 2002 convicted Geoghan of squeezing the buttocks of a ten-year-old boy at a public swimming pool, the indecent-assault charge involved was one of the less egregious acts of abuse he had carried out over the years. But Judge Sandra Hamlin stunned some legal observers by handing down a ten-year sentence, the maximum allowed. Hamlin said she did so because she believed Geoghan would always pose a threat to children.

Hamlin's giving Geoghan the maximum was a far cry from 1984, when Judge Walter Steele sentenced Rev. Eugene M. O'Sullivan, the first priest in Massachusetts to be convicted of sexual abuse. The prosecutor, George Murphy, asked for three to five years after O'Sullivan admitted he had anally raped a thirteen-year-old altar boy. Judge Steele gave the priest probation on the condition he not be allowed to work with children. The Boston archdiocese ignored the judge, and the following year Cardinal Law shipped O'Sullivan off to a new diocese in New jersey, where he served in four parishes over the next seven years.

Even in 1991, when prosecutors in western Massachusetts went to get a search warrant for the home of Rev. Richard Lavigne, a serial predator who later pleaded guilty to molesting three boys, a judge refused to give them a warrant, saying it would be outrageous for police to search the home of a priest. Despite committing a litany of abuse far worse than what Geoghan was convicted of, Lavigne got just ten years’ probation when he was sentenced in 1992. “I think he would have gotten a much longer sentence today,” said David Angier, who prosecuted Lavigne.

Judges, many of them Catholic, were complicit in the secrecy that kept the extent of the abuse hidden from public view. Between 1992 and 1996, for example, a group of judges sitting in Boston chose to impound all the records in five lawsuits involving three priests who molested children, because they reasoned that, as one judge put it, “the particulars of the controversy” ought to be kept from the public. In one case, a judge impounded all the records even though the victim testified that he only wanted his identity kept from public view. But well before then, the Church realized that its special treatment was in jeopardy nationwide: the 1985 confidential report on sexual abuse by priests warned, “Our dependence in the past on Roman Catholic judges and attorneys protecting the Diocese and clerics is GONE.”

In January 2002 that report's prediction came true in the person of Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Constance M. Sweeney. She was the judge who had heard arguments in September 2001 on a
Globe
motion to lift an order that had shielded from public view all the damaging records in the lawsuits against Geoghan. Church lawyers were confident that Sweeney would not agree to make the records public.

At fifty-two, Sweeney had sixteen years on the bench— the same number of years she had spent in Catholic schools in her youth. After attending Catholic grammar school and high school in her native Springfield, Sweeney went to college at Newton College of the Sacred Heart. But in November 2001 Sweeney decided that the public's right to know overshadowed the Church's right to keep the documents secret. The cardinal's lawyers, staggered by the ruling, appealed her decision. It was upheld.

As the deadline for release of the documents approached, the lawyers worked feverishly to settle the lawsuits, believing a settlement would obviate the need to make the documents public. But during a January 2002 court hearing, Sweeney made it clear to the cardinal's lawyers that she was intent on having her decision carried out. The public, she said, had a right to see the documents. A week later nearly ten thousand pages of documents became public.

Coakley is encouraged by the change in attitudes, but wary too. “Of course, the pendulum can swing too far the other way also,” she said. “First the attitude was, no priest could do this. Then it was, well, some might do it, but not my pastor. There is a danger of cynicism becoming so bad that too many will presume that all priests are like that, and that's not fair either. My feeling about priests is like my feeling about cops. Most are good. But if there are bad ones, I'll go after them. And the few bad ones are making everybody else look bad.”

If many people give prosecutors credit for getting tough on the Church, many others can't understand why leaders like Cardinal Law have not been charged with being an accessory to the crimes of pedophiles such as Geoghan, especially because Law put Geoghan and others in positions to molest children, even after being warned about their sexual attraction to children.

Some prominent legal analysts, including Joseph di Genova, the former U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., contend that Catholic prosecutors in and around Boston are still too deferential to the Church to bring criminal charges against those who put abusive priests in positions to victimize children. It is a charge many prosecutors bristle at. “That's baloney, and that's outrageous to say about me and any of my colleagues,” Coakley said, “If we had the statutes, we'd prosecute anybody, including the cardinal. But the statutes are not there. We looked. Civil law provides for remedies for negligent supervision. But in Massachusetts, there are no criminal law provisions in this area.” And there were other constraints too. “Remember, these people didn't come to law enforcement, and neither did their lawyers. They chose to settle this civilly, and enter into confidentiality agreements. I think the plaintiff lawyers bear some responsibility on that level, but that's the route they chose.”

Reilly has also pointed out that accessory and conspiracy laws didn't seem to apply to the cardinal and other Church leaders who transferred known sexual predators, because they didn't share the predators’ criminal intent. But Reilly has not ruled out bringing charges against Law and other Church leaders, and said his office was trying to determine if the state's broadly construed civil rights law was applicable. And though some lawyers have filed civil suits, citing the federal racketeering law, none has yet been successful. Others have urged federal prosecutors to use the racketeering law to charge those who move abusive priests around, but U.S. attorneys’ offices have stayed clear of the issue.

Some, including di Genova, accuse prosecutors of hanging back and going after the hierarchy only after they saw public opinion was squarely behind doing so. Still others, including Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University, said Coakley had compromised herself by taking a volunteer position on Law's Commission for the Protection of Children, which Law formed in response to the scandal. “She's in a position to be advising the Church hierarchy as she's investigating members of the clergy that could include the Church hierarchy, and those two roles simply do not mix,” said Gillers. But in May 2002, after Rev. Paul Shanley was indicted by Coakley's office, arrested in San Diego, and extradited to face trial in Massachusetts, Coakley quit the cardinal's commission.

Coakley is dismissive of proposed legislation that would make it easier to criminally charge someone who knowingly moves a sexual predator to a job that gives him access to children. “I'm very conservative when it comes to creating new laws in the midst of an emotional period like this,” she said. She believes that attitudes have changed so dramatically, and the Church's interests are so threatened by the kind of secrecy it employed to cover up sexual abuse, that it is virtually impossible for the situation ever to repeat itself. “We can't let the Church figure out who to report and who not to report. We're going to have mandatory reporting for the Church, and that is why I don't think you're going to see a new generation of victims.”