Betrayal (5 page)

That sort of brazen conduct was frequently reflected in Geoghan's discussions with those who evaluated and treated him at a series of inpatient treatment centers. The priest would admit to sexual abuse. But Geoghan was apparently unable to see why his sexual assaults would have a serious effect on his priestly career. He would advise a young boy on the eve of his first Holy Communion and then take him into his shower at home, where he would fondle the boy until he ejaculated. And Geoghan, who was also accused of fondling a young boy in the bleachers at Fenway Park while watching a Boston Red Sox game, had a ready explanation for the avalanche of allegations that built up against him over the years: It was the children's fault.

“While I was at St. Andrew's, many of the youngsters I was involved with were from troubled homes,” he said. “I recalled these two boys and I remembered their home situation. Both were severely disturbed children under treatment at various hospitals and clinics, both admitting to sexual abuse at the hands of anyone: doctors, teachers, friends. Anyone! I don't think they were able to distinguish between normal and abnormal, good or bad, right or wrong.”

And as the years wore on, the same could be said for Geoghan's superiors in the Church. The man whose uncle had helped smooth his path to the priesthood expected help from above. He would pick up the phone or write a letter, seeking an intercession. Rarely was he disappointed.

Rev. Francis H. Delaney, a pastor at one of the churches Geoghan served, deflected allegations against his associate pastor in 1979 by questioning the credibility of his accuser. Geoghan, Delaney maintained, was “an outstanding, dedicated priest who is doing superior work” and “a zealous man of prayer who consistently gives of himself in furthering the cause of Christ.” This was the same Francis Delaney who, while living in the rectory with Geoghan, once asked his housekeeper about the young voices he heard upstairs. “And the housekeeper, whoever that was, said that Father Geoghan had some urchins up there letting them use the shower, so I confronted him on that and said, ‘You know the rule.’ And he denied it vehemently, but I had no proof,” Delaney said.

Asked once why he had not acted more decisively after a parishioner accused Geoghan of assaulting her sons and nephews, Bishop Thomas V. Daily answered: “I am not a policeman. I am a shepherd.”

In this ecclesiastical climate of dodged facts and phantom rules, Geoghan endured with the help of friendly physicians on whose medical blessings his superiors relied for evidence that he had exorcised the sexual demons that drove him toward his predatory practices. “I feel like a newly ordained priest!” Geoghan exulted in February 1981, after the doctors cleared him for return to his priestly duties. “Thank God for modern medicine and good doctors.”

Oddly, in the summer of 1982, with suspicions again swirling around Geoghan, with his victims’ relatives demanding his removal, the Church decided to give Geoghan a sought-after perk. They shipped him to a scholarly renewal program in Rome. And his brethren helped pick up the tab.

“I am happy to inform you that you will receive a grant of $2,000 to help you with your expenses,” Cardinal Humber to S. Medeiros told Geoghan that August. “These funds will be sent to you when they become available as a result of the generosity of your fellow priests. It is my hope that the three months will provide the opportunity for the kind of renewal of mind, body and spirit that will enable you to return to parish work refreshed and strengthened in the Lord.”

But it didn't work. When he returned from Rome, Geoghan's attacks continued, even as he assured a Church bishop that his sexual attraction to children had withered and that he had been chaste for five years.

Increasingly, Geoghan grew defensive and dismissive — annoyed, really—at any suggestion that he needed outside help. His sister, Catherine, just seventeen months his senior, offered a window into his increasingly circumscribed world. No one had ever been closer to John Geoghan than Catherine, a kindergarten teacher, who watched him grow from a little boy into a priest and would stand by him later as prosecutors closed in and handcuffs tightened around his wrists. Asked once whether her brother was upset about the molestation charges against him, she replied, “Of course he's upset, because they're all false charges.” Her brother told her he had been unfairly targeted by “dysfunctional” families. And she believed him. After all, she said, she had seen them for herself. In the summer of 1998, after Geoghan's abuse had become headline news across the region, some of his victims showed up at the family's summer home in Scituate. ‘“They came and sat on my patio and sat and waited,” Catherine Geoghan said. “I had to call the police and have them leave. They just came and sat…. They told the police they weren't sitting there, they were just waiting for Father Geoghan. They moved onto the seawall. They put down their chairs, their water bottles, their drinks, their binoculars, their cameras. That's the kind of people you're dealing with.”

In the decade between 1980 and 1990, Geoghan had received several clean bills of health that the Archdiocese of Boston used to justify assigning him to two parishes despite his extensive record of abuse. By the mid-1990s, however, as police and prosecutors began to circle, top diocesan officials had finally conceded that Geoghan was an incurable child molester —a thrice-diagnosed pedophile. “A pedophile, a liar, and a manipulator,” Rev. Brian M. Flatley, a Boston archdiocese official, pronounced him.

Through it all, Geoghan, now an embarrassment the Church desperately sought to conceal, tried to work the priestly network he had assembled and relied on for more than thirty years. When his pastor in Weston announced plans to retire in the early summer of 1990, he immediately wrote the cardinal at the chancery, raising his hand for the job. His qualifications? “I have been six years in Weston. I know the people, the parish, and its problems. I am confident that I can build a vibrant Faith Community.” He did not mention that by then he had been removed three times from parishes for molesting children.

The archdiocese turned him down. And when Geoghan sought the same promotion two years later, the posting went instead to a former Holy Cross and seminary classmate. The Church tried to let Geoghan down easy. “It is important that you not interpret this appointment by the cardinal in any negative way with reference to yourself,” an aide to Law wrote Geoghan.

By early 1993, the Church had shunted Geoghan into a job as associate director of the Office for Senior Priests at a clergy retirement home in downtown Boston, while it fretted about his unsupervised access to children. Superiors were not pleased with his performance there. They considered his work habits lax, his judgment poor, and his manner “boyish.”

Sure enough, alarm bells sounded on December 30, 1994. Geoghan had been accused of molesting boys in nearby Waltham. “There is a crisis,” Flatley told Edward Messner, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Messner's notes from that day convey the situation's gravity. “A priest had admitted abusing minors in the past and had been acting out again recently…. Police and the district attorney are involved…. The allegations mirror what has come up before.” Six hours later Geoghan was sitting in therapy with Messner, beginning regular sessions in which Geoghan admitted to being “drawn by affection and intimacy with boys” and “pointed out that his misconduct occurred during a time of sexual exploration in this country.”

Remarkably, Church officials’ patience had yet to be exhausted. Cardinal Law wrote that he was sorry to learn of the new allegations against Geoghan, placing him on administrative leave and confining his pastoral duties to the celebration of Mass in private. He was quietly shipped off again for inpatient psychiatric evaluation.

This time, after a ten-day stay at the St. Luke Institute, a Catholic psychiatric hospital in Maryland, the diagnosis was far less optimistic than earlier judgments. “It is our clinical judgment that Father Geoghan has a long-standing and continuing problem with sexual attraction to pre-pubescent males,” the evaluation read. “His recognition of the problem and his insight into it is limited.” Therapists at St. Luke advised that Geoghan have no unsupervised contact with minor males and that he return for residential treatment. For his part, Geoghan found the staff confrontational, but while at St. Luke he admitted that he had “inappropriate sexual activity with prepubertal boys in the early 1960s” an admission that directly contradicted an earlier contention to therapists that he had not been sexually attracted to children before 1976.

In early 1995, steeling himself for the gathering storm of civil lawsuits against him, Geoghan and his sister struck a business deal. Just months after prosecutors began a criminal investigation, and a year before the first civil lawsuits were filed against him, Geoghan sold his sister his half-interest in two houses he owned with her to a real estate trust she controlled. The two homes, a large brick-and-stucco colonial in West Roxbury and the oceanfront home in Scituate, were once owned by the Geoghans’ mother and their uncle the monsignor.

The two houses —in the family for a half century and together worth from $895,000 to $1.3 million — were now Catherine Geoghan's alone to control. And they were legally out of the reach of the people who claimed that her brother the priest had attacked them. “My mother said she didn't think anything should be left in my brother's name because he's so generous and so kind to everybody that he wouldn't have a cent,” Catherine Geoghan said. “We wouldn't have a house over our heads because he was always helping people out. So she thought it was better if just my name was on it.” Now, with Geoghan's legal trouble advancing, his mother's wish came true. The price Catherine paid for the homes was $1 each.

Increasingly isolated, increasingly desperate, Geoghan grew anxious and bitter. He had difficulty sleeping, and when sleep did come it was fitful. He gained weight. In some respects Geoghan considered himself “already dead,” but he assured his therapist that while he was scared, anxious, and afraid, he was not suicidal.

“I have been falsely accused and feel alienated from my ministry and fellowship with my brother priests,” he wrote to then Monsignor William F Murphy after Murphy asked for his resignation as associate director of the Office for Senior Priests in late 1995. Geoghan refused Murphy's request, considering resignation tantamount to an admission of guilt, which he would not concede. “Where is there justice or due process?” he asked.

Geoghan, still mourning his “saintly” mother's 1994 death, expressed anger at God for the indignity that was visited upon her in her final days: her incontinence, her helplessness. He tried to buoy himself with a trip to Ireland with the then ninety-three-year-old Monsignor Keohane. He came home with gifts for his therapist. “He gave me a package of three nips of Bailey's Irish Cream,” Messner recalled. “He was enthusiastic about his vacation in Ireland with his uncle, despite the pall over him.”

“I enjoy a lot: family, friends, good food, good conversation, but I get tired easily,” Geoghan said. He took up golf again. He helped his sister clean out her attic. He gathered salt marsh hay near his home in Scituate for use in his garden. When friends visited from Ireland, he played tour guide and showed them the cranberry bogs of Plymouth and the Hyannis Port compound on Cape Cod that was still home to the extended Kennedy family. He tried to focus his day by gardening, cooking, even cleaning his room at Regina Cleri, the residence for older priests. He even joined his uncle in the celebration of Mass there. And, he confided to his psychiatrist, he was still sexually attracted to boys.

Finally, Law had had enough. In January 1996 he removed Geoghan from his post at Regina Cleri, and weeks later he ordered the priest into a residential treatment center, writing, “I know that this is a difficult moment for you.” Geoghan resisted. The Church wanted him to attend meetings of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Geoghan refused. He insisted he wasn't tempted. The Church wasn't convinced. “I see no signs that Father Geoghan has taken the steps that addicted people seem to feel are essential to recovery,” Flatley, who was handling Geoghan's case for the archdiocese, wrote. “He has not joined a group. He does not attend 12-step meetings. He has not been receiving ongoing counseling.”

Indeed, Geoghan was digging in his heels. He believed inpatient counseling unnecessary and punitive. “I feel depressed, tired, and beaten — on the verge of death row,” he said. “I feel condemned.” He scrutinized Church law to determine his rights and found the bishops held all the power. He was at their mercy. He wondered about retreating to his family's home, where he would live with his sister. But in July 1996, a Waltham, Massachusetts, woman filed a lawsuit against him, alleging that he sexually abused her three sons after she asked him to counsel them and be the father figure she felt the boys needed after their father moved out.

This was the first time, after decades of abuse, that Geoghan's problem with children became public, and it provoked a hand-delivered letter from Law with an ultimatum. Geoghan could choose inpatient analysis in Maryland or at the Southdown Institute in Canada, but he must go. Geoghan again balked, but his elderly uncle counseled him that the priesthood was worth any price, and Geoghan agreed to pay it by going to the Canadian treatment facility. The day after he arrived he said he was doing fine.

By the end of the year, Geoghan's treatment in Canada and what was left of his active priesthood would be over. The archdiocese declared him “permanently disabled” and agreed to finance his retirement from its clergy medical fund. At age sixty-one, Geoghan looked forward to taking college courses in creative writing and computer science. “Thank you for the permissions granted me. I also appreciate the warmth of your letter,” Geoghan wrote Law, acknowledging the cardinal's letter granting his retirement. “I am sure it was as difficult for you to write as it was for me to read.”

As the Church opened its season of Advent in 1996 — a bright time of preparation for the celebration of Jesus’ birth — Cardinal Law may well have believed he had heard the last of John J. Geoghan and the allegations against him.