Betrayal
Copyright © 2002 by the
Boston Globe
Afterword copyright © 2003 by the
Boston Globe
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from in the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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First eBook Edition: April 2003
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Contents
Praise for
BETRAYAL
The Crisis in the Catholic Church
“What we are now calling the Catholic Church scandal began with a court document that could have been buried in a sea of legal papers had it not been for a team of reporters from the
Boston Globe.
… The
Globe's
work, both in the stories that began appearing in January 2002 and in this book, is extraordinary.”
—Sandi Dolbee,
San Diego Union-Tribune
“Every detail of this sordid story has had to be dragged from the reluctant archdiocese, mostly by the dogged investigative reporting of the
Boston Globe:
”
—Bill Keller.
New York Times
“If the
Boston Globe
had not told the story of the church's horrific failures in Boston, the abuse would have gone right on. There would have been no crisis, no demand from the laity that the church cut out this cancer of irresponsibility, corruption, and sin, and no charter for the protection of children. The
Globe
did the church an enormous favor.”
—Andrew Greeley,
Chicago Sun-Times
“Only one newspaper, the
Boston Globe,
had the persistence and courage to tackle this story by forcing the Boston archdiocese to release internal documents that finally revealed the scope of the scandal.”
—Peggy Noonan,
Wall Street Journal
“This book is more than a religious and journalistic morality play for modern times. It's a classic example of what serious, long-form investigative reporting and dedicated community service by the press can accomplish.”
—
Buffalo News
“This is a watershed moment for the
Boston Globe.
They brought the Church to heel. Not only was it an outstanding piece of reporting, but a brave piece of publishing.”
—Alex S.Jones,
American Journalism Review
“The only reason that some of the truth has been revealed is because the
Boston Globe
got a judge to open documents that the Boston archdiocese fought to keep closed.”
—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“It is hard to imagine any reader interested enough to pick up the book putting it down unfinished.
Betrayal
shows public-affairs journalism at its best.”
—Steve Weinberg,
Denver Post
“If journalism is the first draft of history,
Betrayal
gives present readers and future historians a good start.”
—Alan Cochrum,
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Although published in the summer,
Betrayal
is even more germane today because of the continuing upheaval in the Catholic Church and the abdication of Bernard Cardinal Law.
Betrayal
covers the whole gamut of rogue predatory priests.”
—Dermot McEvoy, author of
Terrible Angel
“An excellent account of [Cardinal] Law's troubles by the
Boston Globe
reporters who exposed them.”
—Garry Wills,
New York Review of Books
“A stunning account of the genesis of the Church's headline-grabbing sex-abuse scandal. …
Betrayal
is a must-read for anyone who has doubted the importance of this ongoing story.”
—Michelle Bearden,
Tampa Tribune
“Betrayal hangs like a heavy cloud over the Church today.”
Cardinal Bernard E Law
Archbishop of Boston
Good Friday (March 29), 2002
I
n June 2001, Cardinal Bernard E Law, the longtime Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, used a routine court filing to make an extraordinary admission: seventeen years earlier he had given Rev. John J. Geoghan a plum job as parochial vicar of an affluent suburban parish, despite having been notified just two months previously that Geoghan was alleged to have molested seven boys.
For the investigative staff of the
Boston Globe,
that document was a turning point: a story about a priest who was accused of molesting children was now a story about a bishop who protected that priest. The document, and a defense offered in late July by the cardinal's lawyer asserting that physicians had cleared Geoghan for ministry, prompted an investigation by the
Globe's
Spotlight Team, which set out to determine whether the Geoghan case was an anomaly or part of a pattern.
The troubling answer to that question — dozens of Boston-area priests had molested minors, and in too many cases bishops had known about the abuse but failed to remove the priests from their jobs — was revealed in a series of stories published in early 2002 that has triggered the most serious crisis to confront the Catholic Church in years.
The
Globe's
reporting, and the events it set off, led to the writing of
Betrayal,
which is the story of priests who abused the children in their care, victims whose lives were shattered at the hands of those priests, bishops who failed to prevent the abuse, and laypeople who rose up in anger.
“Since the mid-1990s, more than 130 people have come forward with horrific childhood tales about how former priest John J. Geoghan allegedly fondled or raped them during a three-decade spree through a half-dozen Greater Boston parishes,” began the Spotlight Team's first article on the subject, published in January 2002. “Almost always, his victims were grammar school boys. One was just 4 years old.”
Over the next four months, the
Globe
ran nearly three hundred stories about clergy sexual abuse. Though the problem had been widely known nationally and sporadically written about since the mid-1980s, the
Globe's
reporting used the Church's own documents to demonstrate that high-ranking officials had repeatedly put the welfare of their priests ahead of that of the children.
In the Geoghan case a succession of two cardinals and many bishops over thirty-four years had failed to place children out of Geoghan's reach, sending the priest compassionate letters even as they moved him from parish to parish, leaving a trail of victims in his wake.
The first
Globe
stories struck a nerve. Catholics were furious and felt betrayed. Cardinal Law apologized, and in the ensuing days and weeks, he agreed to turn over the names of all priests, past and present, accused of sexually abusing minors, even though such reporting was not then required under Massachusetts law. He announced a zero-tolerance policy, vowing to oust any priest against whom a credible allegation was lodged, and promised new efforts to reach out to victims.
But the dam had burst. Many Catholics called for Law's resignation and began withholding contributions to the Church. State legislators passed a bill requiring clergy to report allegations of sexual abuse to secular authorities. Prosecutors began issuing arrest warrants for priests.
This story began, as all stories do, with a group of reporters trying to answer a set of questions. The
Globe's
Spotlight Team — editor Walter V. Robinson and reporters Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael Rezendes — set out to discover how many priests in Boston had molested children, and how much the Church had known about the abuse.
Within a few days, the reporters discovered that Geoghan was merely the best-known example of a much deeper problem. The Archdiocese of Boston had quietly settled claims of abuse against multiple priests in recent years. Most of the claims had been settled in private, with no public record. It was an agreeable arrangement: the Church got to keep the ugly truth under wraps; shame-filled victims, having no clue that there were so many others, were able to protect their privacy. Victims’ lawyers received a third or more of the financial settlements without ever having to test their cases in court.
Even in the infrequent instances when lawsuits were filed, the reporters found that official records often had vanished. That was because judges agreed to impound the cases once they were settled, shielding from the public not only the outcomes but any traces that the suits had even been filed.
Reporters met another roadblock. In the scores of civil lawsuits pending against Geoghan, a judge had placed a confidentiality seal on all the documents produced in the case, including depositions and Geoghan's personnel records.
Martin Baron, who had just become editor of the
Globe,
decided that the newspaper should challenge the judge's confidentiality order on the grounds that the public interest in unsealing the documents outweighed the privacy concerns of the litigants. In August 2001 the newspaper's lawyers filed a motion seeking to unseal the Geoghan papers.
Superior Court Judge Constance M. Sweeney ruled in the
Globe's
favor in November. The Church appealed the decision, but in December a state appeals court judge upheld Sweeney's ruling. The documents would be released sometime in January 2002.
On December 17, 2001, Wilson D. Rogers Jr., the cardinal's lawyer, sent the
Globe
a letter threatening to seek legal sanctions against the newspaper and its law firm if the
Globe
published anything gleaned from confidential records in the suits. He warned that he would seek court-imposed sanctions if reporters even asked questions of clergy involved in the case.
But by this time, the Spotlight Team had determined through numerous interviews that in the past decade many priests in the Boston archdiocese had faced sexual abuse allegations that were credible enough that the archdiocese had paid settlements to the victims — and had done so secretly. The team used the Church's annual directories, which list where priests are assigned, as its compass. The reporters developed a database showing that scores of active priests had inexplicably been removed from parish assignments around the time the victims were receiving secret settlements. The scope of the abuse was far greater than previously known.
With Geoghan due to face his first criminal trial on a variety of sex abuse charges in January, the Spotlight Team put aside the secret-settlements story in mid-December and began work on what was initially conceived as a three-thousand-word article that would set the stage for the first Geoghan trial. This was not to be a full-blown investigation but a three-week in-depth look at the wrecked lives Geoghan had left in his wake during the course of a thirty-four-year rampage.
But after just a week of combing through court files, the
Globe
found never-publicized documents that were extremely damaging to the archdiocese. The documents included a 1984 warning to Law from one of his bishops that Geoghan remained a danger; a 1982 letter from a parishioner to Law's predecessor, Cardinal Humberto S. Medeiros, laying out Geoghan's abuses and demanding to know why he was still allowed to serve in a parish with children; and some of Geoghan's psychiatric records. The documents proved that the archdiocese had known of Geoghan's abuse of children for decades.
The
Globe
published its first Spotlight series on the Geoghan case on January 6 and 7. Law declined to be interviewed for the articles. Then, in anticipation of the public release of about ten thousand more pages of Geoghan court documents on January 25, the
Globe
obtained the files early and published excerpts and stories about them on January 24, adding rich detail and context to the initial series.
On January 31, the newspaper ran the piece it had first undertaken the previous summer, revealing that over the past decade the Archdiocese of Boston had secretly settled cases in which at least seventy priests had been accused of sexual abuse. The story — based on court documents and records, a database, and interviews with attorneys and other sources involved in the cases — was a watershed, establishing that the Geoghan case was not an aberration.
Within weeks, and under pressure from prosecutors, the archdiocese dug into its files and turned over to local district attorneys the names of more than ninety priests about whom it had received credible sexual abuse complaints over the previous forty years. Soon, prodded by their local media, other dioceses around the country were also combing their files for past complaints and jousting with authorities about what to do with their accused priests. Many of the dioceses began to formulate new policies on how to deal with sexual abuse complaints, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops prepared to adopt a national policy for the first time.