Betrayal Read Online Free Page B

Jack.”
    Geoghan was one among many. And while the breadth of his assaults was vast, they were perhaps not as horrific as those committed by fellow priests who in some cases violently raped their young prey and then shooed them away as they resumed their priestly ministry. If it was a secret to the daily communicants and the congregations that filled the churches on Sunday mornings, it was common knowledge among Church leaders, who heard the anguished pleas from the mothers and fathers of children abused by priests. They promised to address the problem. They vowed they would not let it happen again. And then they did.
    When Maryetta Dussourd discovered that Geoghan was molesting her boys — one of them just four years old — she found no solace from her friends or her church. Fellow parishioners shunned her. They accused her of provoking scandal. Church officials implored her to keep quiet. It was for the sake of the children, they said. Don't sue, they warned her. They told her that no one would believe her.
    “Everything you have taught your child about God and safety and trust — it is destroyed,” said Dussourd, whose claims against the Church were settled in a 1997 confidential agreement — like scores of others in which the victims received money and the Church obtained their silence.
    Until January 2002, when this scandal erupted, priests were the men whose Roman collars conferred upon them the reflexive trust of parents who considered it an honor to have them in their homes. That was certainly how it had been with Geoghan. On warm summer days when he arrived without notice and offered to take their little boys out for ice cream cones, they swelled with pride and wished the priest well on his outing with their kids. When he showed up on their doorstep at night offering bedtime stories, they were certain that God had smiled on their children.
    John J. Geoghan's priestly career nearly ended just as it was beginning.
    When Monsignor John J. Murray, the rector of Cardinal O'Connell Seminary in Jamaica Plain, reviewed Geoghan's performance in the summer of 1954, he was not impressed. His faculty was concerned about Geoghan. They considered the nineteen-year-old seminarian decidedly immature, a characteristic not entirely evident in a casual setting. Further, they found Geoghan “feminine in his manner of speech and approach.”
    “Scholastically he is a problem,” Murray concluded in a letter to a colleague. “To be sure he received passing grades in most subjects, but I still have serious doubts about his ability to do satisfactory work in future studies.” As he considered whether to recommend Geoghan to superiors at St. John's Seminary in nearby Brighton, the next academic rung in a ladder that would lead to Geoghan's ordination, Murray opted to look on the bright side. “In his favor are the following good qualities: a very fervent spiritual life, industry, determination to succeed, happy disposition, obedience, docility, interest in and regard for others, and respected by his contemporaries, Perhaps maturity will bring to this young man the qualities he needs in order to be successful in his quest for the priesthood.”
    Perhaps. But the troubled Geoghan, in a pattern that would repeat itself for more than thirty years, would need help from on high. This time he found it from a monsignor he could call his own: his uncle.
    Geoghan's father, whom he recalled as a kind and generous man, died when he was just five years old. And although he would later remember the funeral as spiritually uplifting, the death of his father struck the young boy hard: he wet his bed for two years as he struggled with the loss. Geoghan considered his mother a saintly woman who provided for him and his older sister a household of prayer and normalcy. It was, he said, a happy childhood. And in his mother's brother, Monsignor Mark H. Keohane, he found a father figure, role model, and protector. “The perfect substitute father,’’