Read an Excerpt
1
Father
Geoghan
He was a small, wiry man with a disarming smile that, from a distance, gave
him the gentle bearing of a kindly uncle or a friendly neighborhood shopkeeper.
It was hard to detect the darkness behind John Geoghan's bright eyes.At first
glance, almost no one did.
Frank Leary certainly didn't see it. The fifth of six children being raised
by a single mother on welfare, Leary was thirteen years old and had yet to learn
his older brothers' tricks for ditching Mass on Sunday mornings when he first
encountered Geoghan in the late spring of 1974. The priest's smiling face was
already a fixture at the back of St. Andrew's Church in the Jamaica Plain
section of Boston.After Mass, the parish priest would hug the mothers, shake
hands with the fathers, and deliver soft pats to the backs of the children.
"He always had a big grin—it was as wide as his face," Leary recalled.
"My mother liked him. He was very popular. He was like a little imp." Leary
said hello to the priest, received his friendly tap across the shoulder blades,
and didn't focus on Geoghan again until the summer.
The rectory groundskeeper was Leary's friend, and Leary helped out a couple
times a week, raking freshly mowed grass or gathering hedge clippings in a
wheelbarrow. It was taxing work under an August sun, and one afternoon Geoghan
bounded down the short steps of the rectory, offering a tall, cool glass of
lemonade. Leary thanked the priest but demurred. He didn't like lemonade. But
the priest insisted, and sweetened the offer. He had a wonderful stamp
collection that the boy might enjoy. Soon the priest and the boy were upstairs
in Geoghan's room at the rectory.
Leary sat in a large leather chair in the middle of the room, and the priest
handed him an oversized book that contained the stamp collection. The priest
went to the back of the room, keeping up a constant, reassuring patter. The
collection did not hold the boy's interest, but Geoghan pressed the matter. "He
said,'Here, I'll show you a few things.' And he had me get up and he sat down
and I sat on his lap," said Leary. The priest placed his hand on Leary's knee
and started turning pages that were a blur to the boy. Geoghan told him that his
mother had suggested the visit. But still, Geoghan said, they should keep it a
secret. All the while the priest's hand climbed farther up Leary's leg, until it
reached under his cotton shorts and beneath his underwear.
"He was touching me, fondling me. I'm frozen. I didn't know what the hell was
going on. He was talking constantly. He said, 'Shut the book. Close your
eyes.We'll say the Hail Mary.' And that's what I did." But before the prayer was
finished, the boy darted from the room, hurried down the stairs, and found
himself shaking behind the church.
Within a week or so, it happened again. Leary was sweeping concrete next to
the church when Geoghan walked up, put his arm around the teenager, and told him
how special he was. The priest then ushered Leary back into the rectory, where,
Leary later said, he saw a scowling nun standing at the foot of the stairs.
Geoghan swept past the nun and directed Leary to the same chair in which the
first attack had occurred. The shades were drawn against the summertime
brightness. At first, the priest stood behind him, placing his hands on Leary's
shoulders. He asked the boy to begin reciting the most familiar prayers of the
Catholic faith: the Our Father and the Hail Mary. "I'm praying and I've got my
eyes closed. And he moves over to the chair and pulls my pants down one leg. And
I couldn't move. I was frozen. He had his shoulder on my chest at this point. He
was praying too. And I was saying prayers, following him. I'm shaking. I felt
very, very strange. I couldn't do anything."
Geoghan moved down the young boy's body and began to perform oral sex on him.
"I was trying to hold back the tears and keep saying my prayers and keep my eyes
closed. I didn't see him do that. I remember being pushed back in my chair."
The assault did not last long. Perhaps only a minute, Leary estimated, before
it was interrupted by a sudden commotion. "Geoghan stood straight up. The door
flew open. And a priest with longish white hair started yelling at him. 'Jack,
we told you not to do this up here! What the hell are you doing! Are you nuts?'
He was yelling and screaming, and I just remember floating out of that
chair."
Leary fled to a tree-shaded spot behind the school and tried to regain his
composure. He sat for a while in a local cemetery, and when he finally went
home, he went directly to his room. He didn't tell anyone about the assault for
many years.
Geoghan had been a Catholic priest for a dozen years at the time Leary says
Geoghan sexually assaulted him. As he moved through parishes in and around
Boston-from the edges of the city to the tony suburbs beyond-he was known as
"Father Jack" to the people in the pews. He baptized their babies. He celebrated
their weddings. He prayed over their dead, sprinkling the caskets with holy
water. On Saturday afternoons, he sat in the dark and, from behind a screen,
listened to their sins and meted out their penance. On Sunday mornings, he
delivered the word of God to them.
For faithful Catholic mothers, especially those struggling to raise a large
family by themselves, Geoghan seemed a godsend. He was there on their doorsteps
with an offer to help. He'd take their sons out for ice cream. He'd read to them
at bedtime. He would pray with them beside their beds.He would tuck them in for
the night.
And then, in the near darkness, their parish priest would fondle them in
their nightclothes, pressing a finger to his lips and swearing them to
secrecy.
"He looked like a little altar boy," said Maryetta Dussourd, who eagerly and
proudly allowed Geoghan access to the small apartment where she lived with her
daughter, three sons, and four of their cousins in Jamaica Plain. Geoghan was a
calculating predator whose deceptive charm opened many doors.
As he sits today in oversized prison-issued clothing, John J. Geoghan is
perhaps the nation's most conspicuous example of a sexually abusive member of
the clergy, not just because of the stunning number of his victims—nearly two
hundred have come forward so far—but because of the delicate and deceptive way
the Church handled his sins. For more than two decades, even as two successive
cardinals and dozens of Church officials in the Boston archdiocese learned that
Geoghan could not control his compulsion to attack children, Geoghan found
extraordinary solace in the Church's culture of secrecy.
"Yours has been an effective life of ministry, sadly impaired by illness. On
behalf of those you have served well, and in my own name, I would like to thank
you," Cardinal Bernard F. Law wrote to Geoghan in 1996, long after the priest's
assaults had been detected. "I understand yours is a painful situation. The
passion we share can indeed seem unbearable and unrelenting. We are our best
selves when we respond in honesty and trust. God bless you, Jack."
Geoghan was one among many. And while the breadth of his assaults was vast,
they were perhaps not as horrific as those committed by fellow priests who in
some cases violently raped their young prey and then shooed them away as they
resumed their priestly ministry. If it was a secret to the daily communicants
and the congregations that filled the churches on Sunday mornings, it was common
knowledge among Church leaders, who heard the anguished pleas from the mothers
and fathers of children abused by priests. They promised to address the problem.
They vowed they would not let it happen again.And then they did.
When Maryetta Dussourd discovered that Geoghan was molesting her boys—one of
them just four years old—she found no solace from her friends or her church.
Fellow parishioners shunned her. They accused her of provoking scandal. Church
officials implored her to keep quiet. It was for the sake of the children, they
said. Don't sue, they warned her. They told her that no one would believe
her.
"Everything you have taught your child about God and safety and trust—it is
destroyed," said Dussourd, whose claims against the Church were settled in a
1997 confidential agreement—like scores of others in which the victims received
money and the Church obtained their silence.
Until January 2002, when this scandal erupted, priests were the men whose
Roman collars conferred upon them the reflexive trust of parents who considered
it an honor to have them in their homes. That was certainly how it had been with
Geoghan. On warm summer days when he arrived without notice and offered to take
their little boys out for ice cream cones, they swelled with pride and wished
the priest well on his outing with their kids.When he showed up on their
doorstep at night offering bedtime stories, they were certain that God had
smiled on their children.
