Only after other complaints against Rosenkranz surfaced three years later did the archdiocese quietly remove the priest from his parish and commission a nun to let Pollard know that his initial complaint had been handled “inappropriately.” “From my perspective,” said Pollard, “McCormack basically abused me again. For me, the emotional and spiritual scarring came from the betrayal, and my betrayal by [Cardinal] Law and McCormack was as damaging as what Rosenkranz did.”
Finally, in April 2002, Pollard hired an attorney and sued the archdiocese and Rosenkranz. By then, Rosenkranz had left Massachusetts, and attempts to locate him were unavailing. Pollard is not alone, but like so many others, he suffered privately for years because he thought he was. By the time he complained about Rosenkranz, he knew there were hundreds like him around the country, coaxed from the shadows in small clusters during scattered scandals involving priests that cropped up publicly beginning in the mid-1980s.
Now there are thousands. In the Boston archdiocese alone, more than five hundred people retained lawyers in the first four months of 2002 with claims that they were molested by priests when they were growing up.
Most victims, experts have long believed, will never come forward. But around the country, this scandal has prompted an unprecedented number of them to emerge from years of private darkness. As their numbers grow, the stigma attached to their experiences diminishes. In the first months of 2002, emboldened by the knowledge that the Church had hidden the extent of the abuse, more than two hundred victims of Boston-area priests contacted the
Globe,
most in confidence, to relate their stories. Hesitant at first, and often in tears, many said they now regret having kept the abuse a secret. They would never have dreamed of telling—or dared to tell — their devout parents. Some admitted that they have suffered in such profound silence that they have been unable to confide even in close friends, siblings, or spouses.
For some, men and women approaching middle age, the first people to hear about their experiences and the shame and guilt they had lived with for years were the faceless reporters who happened to take their phone calls. Others who contacted the
Globe
wanted the world to know what had happened to them and to talk about their childhood trauma.
“He took everything. He took my innocence. He took my spirituality. He took my purity,” Timothy J. Lambert said of the priest who allegedly molested him — and his brother, he discovered years later — in a Queens, New York, parish, starting when he was in the sixth grade. “How bad is it when your first sexual experience happens when you are unwilling, a minor, it's a homosexual experience, and at the hands of a priest?” Lambert started drinking within days of the first molestation. “It's the way I medicated myself,” he now says.
Lambert, the alleged victim of a priest, is a priest himself.
But he is an embittered priest — angry at the Brooklyn diocese, which he accuses of protecting the priest who allegedly molested him, Rev. Joseph R Byrns, a Brooklyn pastor, and let down by his own New Jersey diocese, which he says ostracized him for not keeping his silence. Byrns and the Brooklyn diocese deny that Lambert was abused.
In Boston, the cardinal's advisers fear that mounting financial claims could bankrupt the archdiocese. But for most of the victims the issue is not money. It is the need to have their suffering acknowledged, they say, to have people understand what the Church has done to them. Some victims, like Patricia Dolan of Ipswich, on Boston's North Shore, have poured out their hearts because, like Pollard, they believe the Church has treated them coldly.
In the 1960s, Dolan's life was the Church. Her father worked three jobs to pay for his four daughters’ parochial school educations. Seven days a week while she was in high school, Pat Dolan worked at the parish rectory in her hometown, answering phones, making spiritual bouquets, and assisting the parish's two priests. One of those priests repeatedly molested her, Dolan said, causing her to suffer panic attacks for years. Ever since then, the trauma has made it difficult for her to forge meaningful relationships, because of her inability to trust people.
In 1995 she finally went to the archdiocese, which agreed to pay for psychotherapy “as long as [she] needed it.” But Dolan said the archdiocese has been needlessly callous toward her. Late in 2001, after a chancery official unsuccessfully tried to get her therapist to disclose the confidential results of her therapy sessions, she was notified that the payments would stop.
That was not the first time that she felt demeaned by the archdiocese. Dolan said that Sister Rita V. McCarthy, the chancery's former point person for abuse victims, once called her to say that she had been surprised to learn that the priest who molested her was past middle age when the abuse occurred. “He couldn't have done that much to you,” McCarthy said, according to Dolan.
In testimonials like Dolan's, in the allegations now being made in scores of new lawsuits, and in the thousands of pages of Church documents that have been put on public display since January 2002, there is much for Catholics to digest. Among all the priests who dedicated themselves to healing souls and soothing hearts, some only pretended to do so. Their sexual misbehavior took a staggering toll on the victims, on the victims’ loved ones, and on the Church: souls darkened, hearts broken, lives shattered, families disillusioned, faith abandoned, and the Church exposed to potentially catastrophic claims.
Years after their abuse, many victims say they have yet to recover from the trauma. Like Dolan, they have found it hard to establish or nourish close relationships. Or it has driven them to alcohol, drugs, or depression — or a life-threatening combination of the three.
One such victim is Patrick McSorley. He is still struggling to shake off the effects of his 1986 experience with former priest John J. Geoghan, whose serial pedophilia, well known to Law and other bishops at the time, has become the flash point for what is now a Churchwide scandal.
Following his usual modus operandi, the affable Geoghan befriended Catholic mothers, including McSorley's, whose lives were in crisis. His offers to help, often by taking the children for ice cream or praying with them at bedtime, were accepted without suspicion. For many families in such straits, the help of a priest was a blessing from God.
That is how McSorley, a twelve-year-old who lived in a Boston housing project, became a Geoghan victim. It was two years after Law, knowing about Geoghan's sexual attraction to young boys, had assigned Geoghan to an affluent parish in suburban Weston. From that base, with its intact, educated — and perhaps more vigilant — families, Geoghan revisited Boston's gritty neighborhoods in search of the more vulnerable.
Geoghan, who knew the McSorley family from his years at St. Andrew's in nearby Jamaica Plain, learned of the suicide of McSorley's alcoholic father and dropped by their apartment to offer his condolences. Geoghan offered to take Patrick out for ice cream.
“I felt a little funny about it,” McSorley recalled. “I was twelve years old, and he was an old man.” During the ride home, after the priest bought ice cream for his young charge, Geoghan consoled him. But then he patted McSorley's upper leg and slid his hand up toward his crotch. “I froze up,” McSorley said. “I didn't know what to think. Then he put his hand on my genitals and started masturbating me. I was petrified.
“I was looking out the window the whole time, but I could see out of the corner of my eye that he had his private part out and was working it up and down.” Gradually, the ice cream melted over his hand and down his arm as Geoghan continued to gratify himself and finally pulled the car over to the side of the road. “He made a moan like he ejaculated,” McSorley remembered. Then Geoghan dropped McSorley off at home, but not before warning, “We're very good at keeping secrets.”
When McSorley went indoors, his mother sensed something amiss and asked what was wrong. But the boy was tongue-tied. “I couldn't answer her. I remember my arm was all sticky from the ice cream. I didn't know how to tell anyone something like that,” he said. Looking back, McSorley believes that if his molester was someone other than a priest, he might have done more to resist and might have been more willing to tell his mother. “I was at that preteen age when I knew right from wrong, but because it was a priest doing it, it set off a whole wave of confusion,” he explained.
McSorley said he buried the memory of his encounter with Geoghan because of the trauma it caused him, and that it was the catalyst for the alcoholism and depression he has battled since. “I was actually going around to doctors asking them, ‘Why am I so depressed?’ “ he said.
McSorley made the connection between his depression and his experience with Geoghan during a 1999 dinner with his girlfriend, his sister, and her husband. During dinner, his sister mentioned that a priest she had known in parochial school was being sued for molesting boys. “Things started to click right then, when she mentioned Father Geoghan,” McSorley said. “I think I got up for a minute and had to go outside and get a breath of fresh air.” When he returned to the table, he told the others what Geoghan had done to him.
“To find out later that the Catholic Church knew he was a child molester — every day it bothers me more and more,” McSorley said.
Like others who were molested as children, McSorley is overprotective of his own children, particularly his three-year-old son. “I never let him away from me. T never let him away from my side,” McSorley said.
“I don't trust anyone. If a priest can molest a little boy, anything can happen.”
Thomas P. Fulchino was especially concerned about his children, ever mindful of that night in 1960 when he was twelve and was the last child left in his parochial school after an evening activity. Rev. James R. Porter, newly ordained, offered him a ride home.
But Porter started “being grabby.” Frightened, Fulchino ran. ”I ran up to the second floor, and that bastard, he got me then, and just, just got me down on the ground and was just going like a madman … just… now I understand this: he was humping me like a dog,” Fulchino said.
Tom Fulchino finally pulled away and ran and hid under a desk in a dark classroom until Porter gave up trying to find him. Then he ran from the school and all the way home. For much of the time since then, he has been running from the memory.
In December 1992, Fulchino was one of more than one hundred people molested by Porter who received settlements from the Fall River diocese in southeastern Massachusetts. By then, Fulchino was a successful businessman with five children and a wife, who shared his caution about never leaving their children unattended with adults they do not know and trust.
Their caution extended even to St. Julia's in Weston, the parish where they worshiped and sent their children to Sunday school during the 1980s. It is the very parish where Law chose to transfer John Geoghan in 1984, the same parish from which Geoghan was removed for six months in 1989 and hospitalized for further treatment of his “affliction,” as one Church document described it, and the same parish Geoghan was returned to after a diagnosis that his pedophilia was “in remission.”
It was a brief remission.
On a Sunday morning weeks later, Geoghan was making his rounds of Sunday school classes, asking questions. Christopher T. Fulchino, a shy thirteen-year-old, fielded one of those questions and, to his everlasting regret, had the right answer. Mostly, Geoghan handed out quarters and candy for the right answer. But as Chris Fulchino recalled in a tremulous voice, Geoghan was fresh out of quarters and candy, so the priest said, according to Chris, “If you come over to the [rectory] during your break, I'll have milk and cookies with you, and we'll say Our Father. I was like, ‘Hey, that's awesome!’”
In a dark room in the rectory, Geoghan was sitting in a lone red-velvet chair, with two glasses of milk and chocolate chip cookies on a plastic platter. He hoisted his unsuspecting guest onto his lap, and they said the Our Father. That was when Geoghan began to fondle the boy.
Father and son remembered the brute force of their attackers. “I thought I was going to die. I couldn't breathe,” Tom Fulchino said of his struggle against Porter so long ago. From Chris, there was nearly an echo: “He squeezed me as tight as he could. I felt like I couldn't breathe, and I was gagging.”
Like his father nearly three decades earlier, Chris squirmed free and ran. His dad had hidden under a desk; Chris hid behind the church until his unsuspecting father came to pick him up. And like Tom Fulchino in 1960, Chris Fulchino said nothing to his parents in 1989.
Since 1997, when Chris Fulchino told his parents what had happened, no one from the Fulchino family has set foot inside St. Julia's. When Chris is home from his, job in Maine, he drives back roads in Weston to avoid passing the church. He refuses to enter any church at all. Often, he awakens from nightmares about Geoghan. Each time that happens, he takes a shower.
Like Chris Fulchino, few abuse victims told their parents, at least initially. Armand Landry, who is now eighty-six, said he was molested by his parish priest in Laconia, New Hampshire, in 1927, when he was twelve. Three quarters of a century later, Landry remembered the ride in the priest's car, where it happened, even the day — Saturday. “I never told my parents; they would have slapped your face,” Landry said. “I was twelve years old or so. No one would believe you in those days. The priests were everything.”
Even in recent years — though perhaps no longer — many Catholics have reacted in disbelief to the notion that a priest would molest a child. One woman was raped by a priest in a rectory closet in a parish in Lynn, north of Boston, in the 1960s when she was only nine. But she said she only summoned the courage to tell her mother what had happened to her five years ago. “My own mother didn't believe me. Her middle name is denial,” the woman said. The archdiocesan nun who handled her case told her that her molester had left the priesthood to marry in the late 1960s, and now had a family and three children. “You wouldn't want to report him, because it would hurt his life,” she said she was told. The archdiocese pays for her therapy, but the woman said the rape still affects her. For one thing, she said, “I have never worn anything but ugly underwear.” And that, she said, is because the day she was raped, the priest “complimented me on my fancy underwear.”