Riley's reply two days later from the seminary camp was tart. He accepted Keohane's explanation, but requested a doctor's report to confirm Geoghan's condition. “I need not remind you that the circumstances of John's absence from the camp raise considerable doubt as to his ability to adjust to the regimen of the seminary,” Riley wrote. “Nor need I remind you how necessary it is for us to deal with matters such as this on a completely objective basis, since unauthorized concessions made to one student so easily set a precedent which would lead others to seek favors. We shall do everything within reason to help John settle his problem, but I think it must be admitted as a matter of principle that John is subject to the rule of the seminary and that his case should be dealt with in the same way as that of any other student.”
Keohane did not like Riley's tone. “I resent your implication that I sought favors or preferment for John,” he wrote back. He also complained that Geoghan, after three years in the seminary, “is now sick, unhappy, and appears to be wrestling with his soul.”
Geoghan left the seminary for a couple of years to attend Holy Cross, the liberal-arts Jesuit college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Then, his soul-searching apparently settled, he reentered the seminary. In 1962 he took his vows and was ordained into the Catholic priesthood.
It is not clear whether Geoghan's tortuous life as a seminarian was because of sexual dysfunction, depression, or immaturity. He would later tell therapists that his home was free of physical, sexual, and verbal abuse. He considered himself a heterosexual who was frightened by the sexual feelings he first experienced at age eleven. When he fantasized about sex, he focused on girls. As a teenager, he dated in group settings. He considered masturbation a sin to be avoided. Despite his attraction to girls as an adolescent and young adult, Geoghan said he entered the priesthood as a virgin. “After ordination, Father Geoghan says he consciously repressed his enjoyment of the company of women for fear of conflict with his desire for celibacy,” one therapist would later write. Tragically for hundreds of children and their families, Geoghan would seek the satisfaction of his sexual desires in the boys to whom he would enjoy so much unquestioned access.
Geoghan later acknowledged to his psychiatrist that it was soon after he was assigned to his first parish, Blessed Sacrament in Saugus, a blue-collar community north of Boston, that he grew sexually aroused in the company of boys. They would sit on his lap. He would fondle them over their clothing. There is no dispute that Geoghan abused children at Blessed Sacrament. The Archdiocese of Boston has settled claims on accusations that he did. For example, Church records note that in 1995 Geoghan admitted to molesting four boys from the same family while there. Geoghan focused on the three older boys — ages nine, ten, and eleven — and only ‘’on rare occasions” on the seven-year-old. He said he was “careful never to touch the one girl in the family.”
“It was not the intention of these innocent youth to arouse me,” Geoghan said in a critique of one of his psychiatric evaluations. “They were just happy to have a father figure with their own father being so angry and distant from them…. I have deceived myself that these intimate actions were not wrong. In hindsight, I should have sought advice as to how to deal with children from dysfunctional families.”
It's not clear whether Church officials knew about his earliest attacks at the time. A former priest, Anthony Benzevich, has said he saw Geoghan frequently escort young boys into his bedroom at the rectory. And Benzevich said he alerted Church higher-ups about it. But under questioning during a pretrial deposition in 2000, Benzevich — then represented by a lawyer for the Church — said his memory was foggy. He could not be certain that Geoghan brought boys into his room. He could not recall telling Church officials about it. Questioned later still by the
Boston Globe,
Benzevich said Geoghan liked to wrestle with young boys and dress them in priest's attire. Benzevich repeated his sworn assertion that he did not recall notifying superiors.
If the details of Geoghan's earliest assaults were sketchy, they acquired a sharp and stunning focus as he gained more experience as a priest and settled into rectory life. Geoghan doled on altar boys. He worked with first communicants. “We knew something wasn't right,” one Church teacher said. “He just zeroed in on some kids.” Geoghan paid particular attention to children from poorer families. “The children were just so affectionate, I got caught up in their acts of affection,” Geoghan explained. “Children from middle-class families never acted like that toward me, so I never got so confused.”
One priest, a former colleague of Geoghan, said he never had a chance to form a friendship with him because Geoghan was frequently out of the rectory while other priests were eating together, or reading, or otherwise socializing.
“I found him different, I must say. I mean, I just didn't know how to react to him. He was different,” added Rev. Thomas W. Moriarty, who was pastor at St. Paul's Church in Hingham, south of Boston, where Geoghan served from 1967 to 1974. “Something is wrong…. Something is not right here, but you can't put your finger on it.”
While he served with Moriarty in Hingham, Geoghan found time to befriend Joanne Mueller, a single mother of four boys who lived in Melrose, twenty-three miles away. Mueller's mother knew Geoghan from his days at Blessed Sacrament, and she introduced her daughter to the priest.
Soon Geoghan was a familiar figure in Mueller's home. As with some of his other victims, he took the boys for ice cream. He read them books at night. He helped get the boys in and out of the bathtub. Mueller would slip out for errands, and Geoghan would baby-sit for an hour here or an hour there. “He was our friend,” Mueller said. If Geoghan disappeared upstairs into the boys’ bedroom, she didn't give it a second thought.
One night in 1973, when Geoghan called asking to come over for a visit, the reaction of Mueller's third son, then seven or eight, surprised her. The boy did not want Geoghan in his home. He grew increasingly upset when his mother pressed him about his reluctance to see the priest she considered a valued friend.
“And then finally he broke out in tears ….” Mueller recalled. “He kept saying, ‘No, no, no. I don't want him coming down.’ He was insisting and I shouted back at him and I said, ‘Why? What? What is it?’ And he said, ‘I don't want him touching my wee-wee.’ I hate to be so blunt, but that's what he said.”
Mueller was shocked. “I said, ‘What? What do you mean? What are you saying?’ You know, I didn't understand. And then the next thing he blurted out was, ‘I don't want him doing that to my wee-wee.’
“And that I will never forget. Because it was dawning on me, just shock and horror, that, you know, he's saying this. And, I mean, this isn't just a normal thing he's saying, and for a kid to say that. So now it dawned on me. I mean, this is awful. I said, ‘What?’ And he literally threw himself on the floor and sobbed. He was completely hysterical.”
Soon, so too was the entire Mueller household. Her five-year-old dissolved into tears. She summoned her two other boys, who were upstairs. When their mother asked for details about Geoghan's conduct, they stood speechless at first. And then they began to cry. Her oldest boy told her, “Father said we couldn't talk about it and tell you, never to tell you because it was a confessional.”
Mueller was overwhelmed — Geoghan, at that very moment, was on his way to her home. It was raining. The weather was cool. She grabbed some jackets for the kids and headed for her local rectory, St. Mary's in Melrose, where she and her boys met with Rev. Paul E. Miceli, a parish priest who knew both Geoghan and Mueller's family.
Mueller said Miceli counseled her sons “to try to not think about this; to forget about it. ‘Bad as it was,’ he said,’ just try. Don't think about it. It will never happen again.’… He said, ‘He will never be a priest again. It will never happen again.’ He reassured me.”
Miceli, until recently a member of Cardinal Law's cabinet, contradicted Mueller in a court deposition. He said he did not recall her name and had never received a visit of the sort she described. But Miceli acknowledged receiving a call from a woman saying Geoghan was spending too much time with her children. Miceli testified that the caller said nothing about sexual abuse. Nonetheless, Miceli said he drove to Geoghan's new parish in Jamaica Plain to relay the woman's concerns to Geoghan face-to-face.
After Hingham, Geoghan's next stop was St. Andrew's, in the Forest Hills section of Jamaica Plain, where he served from 1974 to 1980.
Jamaica Plain was where Maryetta Dussourd was raising her own four children — three boys and a girl — as well as her niece's four boys. In her hardscrabble neighborhood, she hoped there was a priest the children could look up to. Then she met Geoghan. He supervised the parish's altar boys and Boy Scout troop. Geoghan was eager to help her too. Before long, he was visiting her apartment almost every evening — for nearly two years. He routinely took the seven boys out for ice cream and put them to sleep at night.
Dussourd worked hard to please Geoghan. When the priest mentioned that his uncle the monsignor had taken away his teddy bear when he was growing up, she bought him a blue one for his fortieth birthday. The gift delighted him.
All that time, Geoghan was regularly molesting the seven boys in their bedrooms. In some cases, he performed oral sex on them. Other times, he fondled their genitals or forced them to fondle his — occasionally as he prayed. An archdiocesan memo dated December 30,1994, and labeled “personal and confidential,” said Geoghan would stay in the Dussourd home even when he was on a three-day retreat because he missed the children so much. He “would touch them while they were sleeping and waken them by playing with their penises.”
Dussourd discovered what was happening after the children finally told her sister, Margaret Gallant, When Dussourd asked one of her sons to confirm the abuse, he told her about the time Geoghan asked him to stay overnight at the home of the priest's elderly mother. It was a night her son had never before spoken about — and never wanted to.
“Father Geoghan's mother had put him [Dussourd's son] in a bedroom across from Father Geoghan's,” Dussourd said. “And [he said] that three times during the night Father Geoghan had gone over to his room, and that he was making him feel very uncomfortable and he asked to go home…. He said that Father Geoghan then brought him over into his bedroom, which was across the hall…. He sat him up on his bed and he started to touch him…. He was touching my son's genitals. He asked him to stop and he was crying. He was crying very loudly…. And he continued to ask him to take him home, which he didn't, and after the episode was done, he returned him to his room.
“My son further told me that the next morning when they went down to breakfast that his mother questioned both Father John Geoghan and my son as to why my son was crying. She said she thought she had heard my son several times through the night.” When Dussourd asked her son why he never told her about the abuse, “he said because Father Geoghan told him that I would never believe him, that I loved the Church too much, that I wouldn't believe my own son.”
Horrified, Dussourd complained to Rev. John E. Thomas, the pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas, a nearby parish. Thomas confronted Geoghan with the allegations and was taken aback when Geoghan casually admitted they were true. “He said, ‘Yes, that's all true,’ ” said one Church official who asked not to be named. It was as if Geoghan had been asked “if he preferred chocolate or vanilla ice cream.”
Thomas promptly drove to the chancery, the archdiocesan headquarters in Brighton, to notify Bishop Thomas V. Daily, administrator of the archdiocese. In Thomas's presence that Saturday afternoon, February 9, 1980, Daily telephoned Geoghan at St. Andrew's and, in a brief conversation, delivered a curt directive: “Go home,” the official said.
Geoghan protested, saying there was no one else to celebrate the 4:00
P.M.
Mass.
“I'll say the Mass myself,” Daily insisted. “Go home.”
Geoghan disappeared from the parish.
Several weeks later a contrite Thomas came to Dussourd's apartment. He told her that Geoghan had admitted to abusing the boys but had excused his behavior by telling the pastor, “It was only two families.” Thomas later pleaded with Dussourd not to follow through on her threat to go public, she said. He cited the years Geoghan had spent studying for the priesthood, and the consequences for Geoghan if the accusations against him were publicized.
“Do you realize what you're taking from him?” Dussourd said Thomas asked her.
Geoghan spent the next year — from early 1980 to early 1981 — on sick leave, but living with his mother in West Roxbury. In February 1981, he was sent to his fifth parish, St. Brendan's, in the Dorchester section of Boston. And almost immediately, Geoghan was working with first communicants, befriending children and their parents, even taking some boys to his family's summer home in Scituate.
There, at the Geoghan family home on the Atlantic Ocean, parents would later discover, Geoghan's sexual attacks continued.
Church officials knew about Geoghan's pedophilia. He was shuttled from parish to parish to avoid public scandal. There were whispers in the rectories about his affliction. There were memos about his treatment. But the details about the predator priest — common knowledge to some of his colleagues — were a closely held secret to be kept from the parishioners who welcomed him into their homes.
When Rev. William C. Francis was asked in 2001 what he knew about Geoghan, he explained, “Well, when he was removed from St. Brendan's in Dorchester, there was talk that he had been fooling around with kids.”
Francis's simple reply belied the explosive substance of the gossip in the rectories. Indeed, Geoghan's long history of treatment, denial, and recidivism had already begun by the late 1960s, and perhaps even earlier. A. W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and former priest, said Geoghan received treatment for sex abuse at the Seton Institute in Baltimore, where Sipe then worked. That treatment occurred about the same time that Leonard Muzzi Jr. discovered Geoghan in his Hingham home at the bedside of his son. Geoghan's hands were under the blankets. Muzzi ordered Geoghan out of his house and told him never to return. But a few nights later, Geoghan was back sitting on Muzzi's couch with his three children.