Betrayal Read Online Free Page A

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?’ Me 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,