Betrayal (6 page)

But what he had heard was barely the beginning.

2

Cover-Up

W
hen, precisely, Archbishop Bernard F. Law first became aware of the wayward John J. Geoghan is not known to anyone but Law himself. But what is certain is that in early September of 1984, less than six months after he arrived in Boston, Law received an urgent letter from Margaret Gallant informing him that Father Geoghan was a serial child molester.

“It is with deep regret that I impart the following information,” she wrote on September 6.

There is a priest at St. Brendan's in Dorchester who has been known in the past to molest boys. The Cardinal [Medeiros] had sent father for treatments, and after returning to parish duties he maintained a low profile for quite a while. Lately, however, he has been seen in the company of many boys, to the extent of dropping them off at their homes as late as 9:30
P.M.

Writing in the voice of the devout Catholic that she was, Gallant spoke of her own sense of responsibility for Geoghan's sexual predations and the secrecy that had enshrouded his crimes. “My heart is broken over the whole situation and it is a burden to my conscience since I am trying to keep a lid on the anger of family members,” she said. Chillingly, she added that she also harbored “a very real fear of the disgrace this would bring to the Church, to all good priests and finally, but most importantly, my fellow members in this Body of Christ who are left in the dark as to the danger their children are in, while I have knowledge of the truth,”

Law's reply just two weeks later was terse and devoid of concern for the seven boys in Gallant's extended family who had allegedly been repeatedly molested by Geoghan. It was also decidedly vague. “The matter of your concern is being investigated and appropriate pastoral decisions will be made both for the priest and God's people,” Law wrote.

But by then Law had already consulted with Bishop Thomas V. Daily — who had been Medeiros's chief deputy and was now Law's — and had removed Geoghan from St. Brendan's. Law denned Geoghan's status as “in between assignments,” a term the archdiocese often used to describe problem priests. Law also had heard from the pastor at St. Brendan's, Rev. James H. Lane, who had been shocked by complaints that Geoghan was molesting children in the parish.

Before Law's arrival, Church leaders had taken steps that almost guaranteed that Geoghan's crimes would continue. For instance, Church officials had never told Lane about the earlier instances of sexual misbehavior by Geoghan. So when Geoghan arrived at St. Brendan's, in 1981, Lane and others in the parish had initially admired the new priest's eagerness to spend a lot of time with children. But over time, some parishioners had become suspicious.

“We knew something wasn't right,” recalled a teacher in the parish who spoke often with Lane. “He just zeroed in on some kids.” When Lane learned Geoghan was sexually molesting those children, he was so devastated that he broke down while trying to tell his teacher friend the news. “Father Lane was almost destroyed by this,” the teacher said, speaking years later, after Lane's retirement.

But the next decision Law made only put more children at risk. Despite Geoghan's recidivism, Law's response was simply to sweep Geoghan and his troubles to another parish, from blue-collar St. Brendan's in Boston to St. Julia's in Weston, an upscale suburb off the high-technology Route 128 corridor. This time the church pastor, Monsignor Francis S. Rossiter, was told about Geoghan's background. But parishioners were left in the dark, even though many entrusted their children to Geoghan as altar boys, youngsters attending religious instruction, and members of a church youth group.

When he arrived in Boston in March of 1984, Archbishop Bernard Law seemed the perfect choice to lead the faithful in America's most Catholic major city. A Harvard man with no shortage of charisma, Law charmed Church leaders and thrilled the laity during an inaugural week of hope and celebration.

On a Monday night in Weymouth, a Boston suburb, Law was all but mobbed by an overflow crowd that waited several hours for him to say a rare seven-thirty Mass at Immaculate Conception Church. By four in the afternoon, nearly two thousand parishioners had crammed into all of the available seats, while three thousand more jammed the aisles and spilled outside into the cold evening air to await the new archbishop.

And Law did not disappoint. At fifty-two he had a shock of thick, silvery hair. And he had a politician's gift for addressing a large crowd while making each person feel he was speaking directly to them. “There's a magnetism I certainly have not witnessed before, almost of the Kennedy magnitude,” said John Logue, an administrator at Catholic-affiliated Carney Hospital, who read one of the scripture lessons for the Mass that evening.

To be compared to the late John F. Kennedy, the slain scion of Boston's most celebrated political clan and the nation's first Roman Catholic president, was secular praise of the highest order. But Law was also quickly compared to the late Cardinal Richard Cushing, the popular prelate who had led the Boston archdiocese for twenty-six years, until 1970, and had become an internationally known figure for his role in the Second Vatican Council and his association with the Kennedy family.

There was plenty of subtext here too. While comparing Law favorably with two of the most beloved figures in the city's storied past, Boston Catholics were also implicitly saying that Law was not like his immediate predecessor, the late Cardinal Humberto S. Medeiros. Whereas Law appeared to connect easily with Church leaders and average parishioners, Medeiros had been humble to a fault, naturally shy and retiring in a city that expected wit and charm and a healthy dose of political savvy from its tribal chiefs. In that sense Boston Catholics were also hailing the new archbishop as one of their own. And Law reinforced that notion right away. A supporter of civil rights during an early stint as editor of a Catholic newspaper in Natchez, Mississippi, he let Boston Catholics know that he was also deeply conservative in other respects, and ready to toe the ecclesiastical line drawn by Pope John Paul II on a wide array of issues.

At one Saturday evening Mass, Law said, “I will call you who with me are the archdiocese to live out fully our profession of faith…. We cannot tolerate the false notion that it can be ‘yes’ in some aspects of our life and ‘no’ in others.” Asked later about his stand on a proposed constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Law said there should be no doubt that “whatever breath I have will be expended in the cause of human life.”

That apparent toughness was what inspired many to liken Law to Cushing, Still, Rev. A. Paul White, editor of the Boston archdiocesan newspaper,
The Pilot,
who had known both men, took exception to the comparison. “Both are forceful,” White said, “but I see in Archbishop Law the charm and personality and the clarity and openness I didn't see in Cardinal Cushing.”

If White or anyone else believed “clarity and openness” would be the touchstone of Law's tenure, they were terribly mistaken. Indeed, if Law had listened to one of his own bishops, Geoghan's crimes might have ended shortly after the priest arrived at St. Julia's — only eight months into Law's tenure and before he was elevated to cardinal. Less than a month after Geoghan started working at St. Julia's, Bishop John M. D'Arcy wrote to Law, challenging the wisdom of the assignment in light of Geoghan's “history of homosexual involvement with young boys.” D'Arcy also reflected the common understanding among top bishops in the archdiocese that Geoghan's “recent abrupt departure from St. Brendan's, Dorchester may be related to this problem.”

In the same letter, D'Arcy urged Law to restrict Geoghan to saying weekend Masses while undergoing treatment for his pedophilia. But D'Arcy was promoted to bishop of the Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, diocese and Geoghan was permitted to remain at St. Julia's, where he was free to select new victims from the stable of boys who helped him say Mass and deliver Holy Communion.

Yet the boys of St. Julia's were not enough to satisfy Geoghan's appetites. With unerring radar for the weak and the needy, Geoghan had long ago realized that children from poor families, especially those living in broken homes, were more vulnerable than children from wealthier two-parent families. The priest began hanging out at the Boys & Girls Club in nearby Waltham, a working-class suburb west of Boston not far from St. Julia's, and before long he was in trouble again.

In 1989, with more accusations leveled at Geoghan, Law removed the priest from St. Julia's and had him sent to the St. Luke Institute, in Maryland, which had developed a treatment program for priests with sexual disorders. After a three-week evaluation, doctors diagnosed Geoghan as a “homosexual pedophile, non-exclusive type” and characterized him as a “high risk.” At that point Bishop Robert J. Banks, another Law deputy, told Geoghan he could no longer continue working as a priest. But after Geoghan spent three months at the Institute of Living, a Hartford, Connecticut, facility that also treated priests with sexual problems, Banks in effect negotiated a diagnosis more favorable to Geoghan and allowed the priest to return to St. Julia's.

From the time Law assigned Geoghan to St. Julia's parish in November of 1984 to the day Law finally removed him in January of 1993, Geoghan sexually molested many more children; more than thirty of them later filed claims against him.

Of course, the Church's habit of concealing Geoghan's activities was well established before Law arrived in Boston. And Law, in a column he would publish in
The Pilot
in July of 2001, insisted he had not attempted to hide Geoghan's crimes by moving him from one parish to another. “Never was there an effort on my part to shift a problem from one place to the next,” Law wrote. “It has always been my contention that it is better to know a problem and to deal with it than to be kept in ignorance about it.”

In the same column, Law attributed the decisions he did make about Geoghan to a dearth of knowledge among Church officials and the larger society about the forces that motivate child molesters. “I only wish that the knowledge that we have today had been available to us earlier,” Law said. “It is fair to say, however, that society has been on a learning curve with regard to the sexual abuse of minors. The Church, too, has been on a learning curve.”

Yet Law's learning curve seemed to be remarkably flat. In 1981, when he was bishop of the Springfield-Cape Girardeau diocese in southern Missouri, Law had been told that a forty-three-year-old priest he had recently promoted to pastor had sexually molested the teenage son of a Springfield couple. In a move that would later emerge as a pattern, Law pulled Rev. Leonard R. Chambers from his ministry, ordered him to undergo treatment, and ten months later reassigned him to another parish. Years after Law left, Chambers was removed from the priesthood for violating an order that he not be alone with children.

After arriving in Boston, Law had also initially been one of the principal backers of a confidential 1985 report on clergy sexual abuse of minors written for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops). The report was laced with clear and dire warnings — often in capital letters — about the incorrigible nature of priests who sexually molest youths, especially those who, like Geoghan, preferred prcpubescent boys.

“The recidivism rate for pedophilia is second only to exhibitionism, particularly for homosexual pedophilia,” the report said. “This is whether the person has received traditional psychiatric treatment or not.” Indeed, the authors of the report — a trio of psychiatric, legal, and canon law experts — said, “Recidivism is so high with pedophilia and exhibitionism that all controlled studies have shown that traditional outpatient psychiatric or psychological models alone DO NOT WORK.” Finally, as if to erase any and all doubt about these sexual disorders, a section on follow-up care declared pedophilia a “lifelong disease with NO HOPE AT THIS POINT IN TIME for cure.”

The report was written by Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, a canon lawyer then stationed at the Vatican embassy in Washington; the late Michael R. Peterson, then a psychiatrist and director of the St. Luke Institute; and F. Ray Mouton, a Louisiana attorney who was representing Rev. Gilbert Gauthé, who had been criminally charged with sexually molesting eleven boys in the Lafayette diocese.

Details of Rev. Gauthé’s serial abuse of the children entrusted to his care began to trickle out on a sweltering night in June 1983, when a nine-year-old altar boy in the tiny village of Henry, Louisiana, told his mother, “God doesn't love me anymore.” Alarmed, the boy's mother pressed for details and learned that her son had been sexually molested by the priest that she and her husband had often invited into their home.

When the boy's mother and father discovered that Gauthé had also abused their two older sons, they hired an attorney, Paul Hebert, who accompanied the boys’ father to a meeting with Church officials, where they asked that Gauthé be removed from the parish. As described in Jason Berry's richly detailed 1992 book,
Lead Us Not into Temptation,
what they learned from Church leaders left them stunned: Gauthé had abused other children and the Church had known about it and allowed him to continue working as a parish priest. “We've known that Fr. Gauthé had a problem for some time but thought it had been resolved,” said Monsignor Henri Alexandre Larroque, a top diocesan official. In fact, when Bishop Gerard L. Frey was later deposed he admitted knowing of allegations against Gauthé dating to 1974.

When Church officials confronted Gauthé about the new allegations, he confessed and was quietly sent to the House of Affirmation, a now-defunct Massachusetts facility for sexually abusive priests, located in the Worcester diocese. Its director, Rev. Thomas Kane, later settled a sexual misconduct lawsuit, although he admitted no wrongdoing.

Back in the village of Henry, parishioners at St. John the Evangelist Church were told that Gauthé had been removed “because of grievous misconduct … of an immoral nature.” Despite the lack of specificity, parishioners divined the truth as the families of more of Gauthé’s victims began coming forward.