Until recently, a mountain constructed of these small secrets helped dioceses around the country hide the extent of the Church's problem. Children were too ashamed to tell their parents. If they did, guilt-ridden parents most often did nothing. To be sure, some went to their pastors but were usually asked to pray for the offender and say nothing — all for the good of the Church.
Even those who went to the chancery to insist that something be done about a molesting priest got little satisfaction for their efforts. At best, the priest was removed — and then promptly assigned to a new parish. In that respect, Geoghan was no anomaly among the scores of priests in the Boston archdiocese who are known to have abused children.
There are many reminders that to focus on the suffering of victims is to miss a larger universe of people who are also in pain — the parents of victims. Many blame themselves for entrusting their children to priests, for not detecting signs, now obvious in hindsight, that something was amiss.
Other parents feel an extra burden. They discovered at the time what was happening and now wish they had done more to end the careers of priests who abused their children and then went on to target others. Among those parents is Kenneth A. MacDonald. Now seventy-two and gravely ill with heart disease, he and his wife, Eileen, raised nine children in St. Gerard Majella parish in Canton, a suburb south of Boston. Both parents taught Sunday school, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, or CCD. Ken MacDonald was a lector at Mass and a member of the Parish Council.
In 1979, Rev. Peter R. Frost was one of St. Gerard's priests when Bryan MacDonald, the fifth of MacDonald's nine children, had a part-time job in the rectory. He was fourteen. The priest was thirty-nine. And one night, Frost got Bryan drunk and molested him.
“I was so shaken up, I told my cousin. He told my aunt and uncle, and they told Dad,” Bryan said. Ken MacDonald remembered taking his soil outside and drawing the truth out of him. “As soon as I found out, I felt like shooting Frost,” he said. It never came to violence, but Ken MacDonald did something other parents rarely did — he confronted he priest.
“He was in the rectory. We went into his office. I was very upset. I told him, ‘I [can't] believe this happened.’ There was no denial. He admitted it. He said, ‘I'm caught.’ I asked him how he could have done it, and I got no answer,” MacDonald said. Frost told MacDonald he was getting psychiatric help and led him to believe his superiors were helping him. From time to time, MacDonald remembered, “I spoke to Father Frost about it. I'd ask him, ‘How's your problem going?’ He'd say he was fine.”
Several years later, the parents of another Canton teenager complained to St. Gerard's pastor when their son was also molested by Frost. According to the victim, they were assured Frost would get counseling. But instead of being put out of commission, Frost was transferred to St. Elizabeth's in nearby Milton in 1988. It was not until 1992 that the Boston archdiocese removed him from active ministry. Frost, now sixty-two, has been on “sick leave” ever since. The day Bryan MacDonald filed suit against Frost, the archdiocese admitted the priest had molested minors.
“It's bothered me all along. I let him get away with it. I ended up hiding his problem,” Ken MacDonald said. “We had so much respect for priests.” His wife Eileen interjected, “That's twenty-twenty hindsight. It was the Church that hid him.”
Self-doubt, however undeserved, is a common denominator among parents of victims. For most, their children were grown and the priest long gone by the time they learned of the abuse. Among those who found out about it when it occurred, few were willing to confront the abuser, as MacDonald did.
For some other parents, the guilt is intermingled with feelings of deep betrayal. Unwittingly, they welcomed the Roman-collared predators into their families and gave them access to the children, often out of a reflexive Catholic conviction that there could be no better role model for them, especially the boys. In many Catholic homes, children were brought up to idolize priests. “God's men on Earth,” their parents taught them.
In February 2002, the day before Law relieved Rev. Joseph L. Welsh because of allegations that he had molested children, members of one close-knit, devoutly Catholic family told the
Globe
that Welsh had been a de facto family member for three decades. He dined with them weekly, vacationed with them, and rarely missed a holiday dinner at their home. The family even named their youngest boy after him. Late last year, the family learned for the first time that as each son, including Welsh's namesake, had reached puberty, Welsh had sexually abused him.
Much the same fate befell a Maine family with such deep roots in the Church that the parents, Frank and Virginia Doherty, most often turned to the priests they knew for help in coping with the strains that raising three boys and a girl can bring to a marriage.
Frank Doherty was also a devoted alumnus of Cheverus High School in Portland. He was a friend to many of the Jesuits at the top-ranked Catholic high school, and he and Ginny were earnest in their practices and beliefs. They proudly sent their three sons to Cheverus.
Not surprisingly, when the Jesuit order transferred Rev. James R. Talbot from Boston College High School in Boston to Cheverus in 1980, the Doherty family formed a bond with
a
man who became their sons’ soccer coach, and as Michael Doherty remembers, “the best teacher at Cheverus.” Their home became Talbot's second home. They set aside
a
room, with a closetful of his clothes, for his frequent overnight slays. “My wife bought his clothes for him so he could come over and take off his collar,” Frank Doherty says. “She put cards in his jacket pockets to tell him what color went with what color.” He had his mail delivered to their house. Even Talbot's mother was an occasional guest at the Dohertys’.
Talbot spent most holidays with the family. He celebrated family birthdays with them. And when Frank and Ginny Doherty experienced difficulty, they turned to Talbot. “When we had problems with the children we went to him, whether it was an issue of grades or sexuality…. We discussed those things with him as if he were a senior member of our family,” Frank said. “I felt he had actually shared in the raising of my children…. That's how intimately close we were with him. He was as close as a brother to me.”
Little did they know that Talbot had molested numerous boys during a decade at Boston College High School, according to claims about the priest that flooded in after some of his victims described in news articles in February how he molested them. What's more, documents obtained by the
Globe
contain strong hints that he was moved to Cheverus specifically because his superiors in Boston knew about his behavior.
The consequences of the decision to ship Talbot to Maine have been calamitous for the Dohertys. In 1984 and 1985, he repeatedly molested Michael, their youngest son, when he was fifteen and sixteen. For several years, Michael said nothing. But in the early 1990s, he shared some details of the abuse with his siblings.
His sister, Courtney Oland, then broke the dam. Concerned that Michael was severely affected by the abuse, and without telling anyone, she decided to act. When she mailed invitations to her 1995 wedding, she slipped a handwritten note into Talbot's invitation telling him not to dare show his face. She also told him not to return to her family's house. When mail still arrived at the home for Talbot, as it often did, she threw it away so her parents would think Talbot had stopped by to pick it up when they were out. Eventually, one of Michael's older brothers, Ryan, approached Talbot to ask why he'd stopped coming to their house. Talbot replied, “Ask your sister.”
In 1998, Courtney wrote a letter to the Portland diocese notifying Church officials of the abuse. Talbot was quickly whisked out of Maine and sent for two years to a Maryland treatment center for priests who have sexually abused minors. She had to act, Courtney said, because “’we were losing [Michael]. I said, ‘This secret has to stop or we will lose him, or he will do something to himself.’”
Since 2000, the Jesuits have sequestered Talbot at their retirement home in Weston, Massachusetts. In 2001, Michael Doherty's lawsuit was settled by the Church. Nowadays, Michael said he has come to believe his sister's actions were wise. “I'll probably be healthier for it,” he said.
Frank and Ginny Doherty no longer attend Mass. And the Cheverus community has turned its back on them, they feel, for the embarrassment that Michael's charges brought to the school.
“I don't want to be any other religion,” Frank Doherty said. “I just can't go to church,” The ordeal, he said, “destroyed not just our view of Catholicism, but our faith experience.” Now, Frank said he has nowhere to turn when he needs help. “When everything else had shit the bed, you turned to the Church. Now what do you do?”
Like other parents, the Dohertys look back over those years and still blame themselves for not suspecting anything, “I feel so goddamn stupid, it's horrible,” said Frank Doherty. “The ripple effect of what these men do and what this Church has done … is incredible. They've wrecked lives that weren't even in place when they did what they did.”
The family remains disappointed by how coolly the Cheverus community has treated them, although they received several compassionate letters and phone calls after Talbot's alleged abuses in Boston were aired in the media. Cheverus, Ginny Doherty said bitterly, ostracized the family for telling the truth. “They talk about God, but I don't know who their God is.”
If nothing else, the public attention to their case against Talbot has helped crack the layers of secrecy that have long cloaked, and even enabled, the Church's sexual predators.
“I think being silent is a sin,” Ginny Doherty said. “There's never a healing if everybody's silent.”
No serial child molester is likely to soon eclipse James Porter and John Geoghan in the public consciousness. More than three hundred of their victims have come forward since 1991 to accuse the two men of sexual abuse, and experts believe that is just a fraction of the number of children they molested. But Joseph Birmingham — the priest who abused, among others, Michael McCabe — isn't so far off. In late March 2002, with details about Birmingham's chronic urge to molest boys surfacing in the press, more than forty of his victims enlisted lawyers. And there is evidence that Birmingham molested many more children in the six parishes he served in after his ordination in 1960.
One of these children was Tom Blanchette. From his simple home on Martha's Vineyard, Blanchette stares at a wrinkled, black-and-white photograph and is transported back across forty years to a childhood in Sudbury, a pretty town west of Boston. He remembers how idyllic it was — until he was eleven, when Birmingham began molesting him.
The man whose happy image dominates the photograph Blanchette has saved for decades casts a dark shadow on his childhood memories. In the photo, Birmingham, then about thirty years old, stands smiling at a side altar at Our Lady of Fatima Church in Sudbury. In the background is a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He is flanked by the officers of the Catholic Youth Organization; one of them is young Tommy Blanchette.
“He was gregarious, articulate. Very outgoing. He would always greet people with a booming, ‘Hi! How are ya?’ And by then, I had been having sex with this guy for two years — three or four times a week at that point,” said Blanchette. “If a teacher's a pedophile, he's the best teacher. If a Little League coach is a pedophile, he's the best coach. If a Boy Scout leader is a pedophile, he's the best troop leader. And that's how it was with Father Birmingham.”
Soon after the priest arrived in Sudbury, he became a frequent guest at the Blanchette home. As parents of seven boys and two girls, Blanchette's mother and father were happy to have the priest in their lives. What better role model for their sons? He even paid summertime visits to the family's Harwich Port cottage on Cape Cod. “It was like Bing Crosby in
The Bells of St. Mary's,
” Blanchette recalled.
When Blanchette was about eleven years old, he was sick one evening, when Birmingham stopped by for a meal. The priest asked the Blanchettes’ permission to check in on little Tommy, who was down the hall and under the covers in his first-floor bedroom, “He came in and said, ‘What's the matter?’ I told him I had the flu. And he offered to give me a stomach rub. The next thing I know, his hands are down my pajamas.”
His part-time job mowing the parish lawn and washing floors kept him within easy grasp of Birmingham. Soon, he said, he was being repeatedly attacked, even as the priest remained a frequent dinner guest at his home. He said Birmingham attempted to anally rape him “but at eleven or twelve you can't accommodate that.” The priest attempted to force the boy to perform oral sex on him. “But there was no way in hell I was going to do that,” said Blanchette. But soon, in a sexual encounter he estimates repeated itself three hundred times, he found himself naked in Birmingham's bed. There was mutual masturbation. There was forced French kissing. “He would spread my thighs and insert his penis between [them],”said Blanchette.
Blanchette said he memorized the pattern on the wallpaper on Birmingham's walls. In his mind's eye, he can still see the Martha Washington bedspread across a four-poster, pineapple mahogany bed. There is a large oak desk against one wall. There is a chest of drawers. An air conditioner sits in the bottom of one window.
And always, there is one of Birmingham's shoes, jammed under the bedroom door — a safeguard Birmingham believed would guarantee privacy. “Afterward we would talk, but not about sex,” said Blanchette. “It's very much the same modus operandi of a guy who rapes his wife. It's over, and you don't talk about it. I used to think this was unhealthy and not talking about it was unhealthy. I had the weirdest thoughts. He was always talking about vocations, saying sex is good but masturbation is bad. I thought, ‘Is this a weird initiation to the priesthood?’”
The attacks occurred elsewhere too. They occurred so often in Birmingham's car that Blanchette vividly remembered details of the automobile— a 1963 black Ford Galaxy. It had a red interior and was a hardtop convertible, all the rage forty years ago.