A Familiar Pattern By Eileen McNamara Boston Globe July 22, 2001 The Cardinal has no comment on what the court record confirms: He was told more than 10 years before the arrest of the Rev. John J. Geoghan that the priest was a suspected serial child molester. The Cardinal has no comment on what his attorney acknowledges: He got a letter warning him about Geoghan in 1984 and transferred the priest to another parish, where he allegedly continued to prey on children for eight more years. Geoghan, now defrocked, will go on trial in September for his alleged sexual assault of dozens of children, but will Cardinal Bernard F. Law be allowed to continue to play duck and cover indefinitely? Will no one require the head of the Archdiocese of Boston to explain how it was that the pastors, bishops, archbishops, and cardinal-archbishops who supervised Geoghan never confronted, or even suspected, his alleged exploitation of children in five different parishes across 28 years? The Geoghan case, like the James R. Porter case in Fall River before it, and the Christopher Reardon case in Middleton after it, follows an all-too familiar pattern. The men who molest children are prosecuted eventually, but the powerful, private institution that harbored the pedophiles and covered up their crimes is never held publicly accountable. There are civil settlements, of course, checks signed over to victims in exchange for public silence on the culpability of the Catholic Church. Estimates of such settlements nationwide top $1 billion. The money is small compensation to individuals who have been harmed so grievously, but it is no consolation at all to communities that have been betrayed so blatantly. For years, the Catholic Church has argued that it was as ignorant as the wider society of the prevalence of child abuse. But in 1985, the same year that Law transferred Geoghan from St. Brendan's parish in Dorchester to St. Julia's parish in Weston, the National Conference of Bishops was briefed on the extent of pedophilia in the priesthood. Some church leaders responded with a commitment to break the silence. In Chicago, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadin established an independent board to investigate priests accused of child abuse. In Boston, by contrast, Law simply blamed the media for focusing on "the faults of a few." The Cardinal's preoccupation with public image even extended to asking the court to delete his name from the public record of defendants in a civil suit filed by Geoghan's alleged victims. The judge refused. If the usual pattern holds, the archdiocese will negotiate settlements with the victims of Reardon, the Catholic youth minister who pleaded guilty earlier this month to the rape and sexual assaults of dozens of boys in the rectory of St. Agnes Church in Middleton. If Geoghan is convicted, the church will try to make amends to his victims, too, without a public trial. Quiet settlements spare the victims from having to relive the trauma of sexual abuse, but they also spare the church from having to explain the repeated incidents of such abuse. Why was Geoghan allowed to have continued contact with children after the Cardinal was told he had molested seven boys? How could the pastor of St. Agnes Church not know Reardon was molesting children under the rectory's roof? How did he miss the more than 1,000 images of child pornography on the rectory computer they shared? Maybe the Rev. Jon Martin suspected; maybe he didn't. The public has no way of knowing. He left St. Agnes for "a sabbatical" after the scandal broke. If the priest did suspect the youth minister he has described as "my right arm," nothing in state law would have required him to report Reardon. Clergy are exempt from mandatory reporting laws that require others regularly in contact with children - doctors, teachers, social workers - to alert authorities to suspected cases of abuse. Clergymen, like Cardinals, do not have to comment. Eileen McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mcnamara@globe.com.

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