Betrayal (16 page)

The report punctuated six months of work that began in the summer of 2001. The record showed that within six months of his arrival in Boston in 1984, Law knew about allegations that Geoghan had been attacking boys.

The Church's efforts to contain the scandal were so pervasive that even one of the priests whose abuse of children resulted in confidentiality settlements said he was troubled by a Church that successfully hid his problem and those of so many other priests. “What they were protecting was their notion that the Church is a perfect society,” the priest said. “If the archdiocese really wanted to protect its other priests from scandal, they would have gotten those of us who abused children out of there much earlier.”

By early February, Law had twice reassured the public that the archdiocese had removed all priests known to have sexually molested minors from any assignments. “There is no priest known to us to have been guilty of the sexual abuse of a minor holding any position in this archdiocese,” Law said. Under questioning from reporters, Law repeated his assertion three times. And then finally, and with an edge to his voice, he promised: “There is no priest, or former priest, working in this archdiocese in any assignment whom we know to have been responsible for sexual abuse, I hope you get that straight.”

Law's promise didn't last for long. Eight days after his statement, parishioners in two suburban Boston churches were stunned when their pastors were removed after the archdiocese found evidence that both men had been accused of sexually abusing children in the past. Five days after that, six more priests were removed after the archdiocese combed its personnel files going back forty years. Stunned parishioners walked into their churches, receiving the news through tears and disbelief.

“It's a shock to see your parish priest's picture in the newspaper with a story like this,” said one parishioner, a prominent Boston businessman. “I mean, I took Communion from the guy.” By May, eleven priests had been forced from assignments after Law's assurance that the Church had rid itself of problem priests. In March, a former vice chancellor of the archdiocese was ousted over similar accusations. By then, Boston's widening scandal was the talk of the nation.

Scottish bagpipes wailed. An Irish harp echoed lyrically. And more than two hundred deacons and priests paraded behind colorful banners to welcome a new bishop to Palm Beach in January 1999.

Anthony J. O'Connell, a son of County Clare on Ireland's west coast, had arrived, replacing Bishop Keith Symons, driven out after admitting sexual misconduct with young boys early in his forty-year priesthood. It was a time of hope and joy and prayer in Florida, a time of renewal. “It is an awesome responsibility that God entrusts to us the mission of Jesus Christ,” a buoyant O'Connell told the faithful at his installation at the Cathedral of St. Ignatius. But even as he stood there before a congregation of twelve hundred and watched the smoke of sweet incense fill the crowded church, the newly arrived bishop harbored a dark secret.

“It always hung over me,” O'Connell would later confess. What the Palm Beach congregation did not know on that winter's day in 1999 was that their new shepherd, who promised to repair the breach, was guilty of sexual abuse himself.

In the 1970s, when O'Connell was rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Hannibal, Missouri, a seminary student named Christopher Dixon sought him out for counseling. Dixon, who is gay, said he was struggling with his sexual orientation. He was feeling guilt and shame. He told O'Connell, who was his school counselor, about an earlier molestation by a priest.

“We would talk for endless hours about my acceptance of who I am, my body,” Dixon said. “He engendered a lot of trust. With a view to trying to [help me] accept my body, he took me to bed with him, naked, and rubbed his body up against mine. I thought. Well, this man is a man of God and how can he be wrong? But I just knew something was wrong, or I wouldn't have been feeling so sickly and nervous.” Dixon said O'Connell fondled him three or four times over two years.

Some twenty years after that sexual contact, Dixon wrote to O'Connell, who by then was in Tennessee. In the twenty-fifth year of O'Connell's priesthood, the Pope had elevated him to be Knoxville's bishop. Dixon wanted O'Connell to get treatment and make restitution. The 1995 letter sounded alarm bells, and Church officials found their solution in a remedy that was already a familiar, if secret, fixture in the Church in Boston: they made a secret settlement. The Jefferson City diocese did not admit to Dixon's allegation, but they paid him $125,000 in 1996, and he promised to drop further claims against the diocese.

Dixon said he decided to break the confidentiality deal and call the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
after reading about other victims who had stepped forward because of the Boston scandal; he felt safer in a crowd. “I do not want these men in a position where they can continue to do what they've done,” Dixon said. Just hours after the St. Louis newspaper broke the story in Missouri, O'Connell, sixty three, a popular and well-traveled bishop in Florida, announced his resignation. As he quit, he was flanked by many of the same priests and deacons who three years earlier had welcomed him as the leader of 350,000 Catholics in five Florida counties. A day earlier. O'Connell had joined nine other Florida bishops in issuing a statement that denounced sexual abuse as “criminal and sinful.” Now he was pleading guilty to that abuse himself. He made his confession standing in the same cathedral where his Florida ministry had begun.

“I want to apologize as sincerely and as abjectly as I possibly can,” said O'Connell, the lilting accent of his native County Clare still firm in his voice. “I am truly and deeply sorry for the pain and hurt and anger and confusion, as it will result from all of this. I have been loved since I came to this diocese, been loved far more than any human being could ever deserve to be loved. I certainly have worked hard in the diocese. That's the only way I know to work is to work hard. God has given me a lot of abilities and great gifts, and I can truthfully say I have used those gifts very fully.

“My heart bleeds for Chris Dixon. I have not heard anything from him since the time settlement was made…. My understanding was that he made the settlement with the diocese. He signed off. He asked for confidentiality for his own reasons. And I thought that brought all of that to a conclusion. It always hung over me. I don't think I've ever preached without being conscious of it and especially in these recent times.” O'Connell called his conduct stupid and foolish and the result of trying to help Dixon work through personal issues. But he still seemed to diminish the seriousness of his conduct, lying naked with a youthful seminarian. “There was nothing in the relationship that was anything other than touches,” O'Connell said. “There was nothing beyond that. Nothing of any sexual nature beyond that. So in the ordinary understanding of sexual activity— no, there wasn't — and I certainly want to make sure my people know that. It still doesn't change the naïveté and stupidity and misguidancy. Would I change all of that? I would change it in a minute, for his sake as well as for mine.”

O'Connell's fast fall stunned and embarrassed the congregation he once led. Rev. Brian King of St. Juliana's in West Palm Beach had been a seminary student who worked as a driver for O'Connell's predecessor. He said he could understand suspicions that the cover up of O'Connell's abuse was not an isolated event. “Given the fact that the bishop of this diocese — the second bishop, another bishop of this diocese — this has happened to him, they're all going to wonder, what's happening in this diocese that people are covering up? What's going on?” King told the
Palm Beach Post.

Ordained in May 1990, Dixon has since left the priesthood. He remembers thinking that O'Connell was one of the brightest people he had ever met. “I don't feel like a victim now,” Dixon said. “But this is bittersweet. Had this been taken care of appropriately years ago, we wouldn't have to be going through this now.”

And within weeks, Dixon did not stand alone. Three more men stepped forward and charged that O'Connell had sexually abused them too.

O'Connell was Palm Beach's third bishop. Its second was Symons, the cleric forced out in June 1999 after acknowledging his own sexual misconduct. Its founding bishop was a man named Thomas Vose Daily — the same man accused of being one of the principal architects of the cover-up of John Geoghan's sexual assaults on children in Boston.

Bishop Daily preaches from New York now as leader of the Brooklyn diocese, the nation's fifth largest, Prom his pulpit there, he has expressed regret about the way he handled Geoghan in Boston, even as he confronted fresh accusations that he ignored sex abuse as the spiritual leader of 1.6 million Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens.

Daily, a native of Belmont, Massachusetts, was ordained in 1952. In the early 1960s, he worked for five years in the missions of Peru as a member of the Society of Saint James the Apostle. He returned to Boston and gradually worked his way up the rungs of the Boston archdiocese. When Cardinal Medeiros died in 1983, Daily ran the diocese until Law was appointed Medeiros's successor. Daily was a guardian of the archdiocesan secret personnel files that were kept under lock and key at the chancery.

In 1979, it was Daily who, when alerted about one instance of Geoghan's attacks, took charge. He oversaw a speedy, hands-off investigation. Without questioning the mother who reported the abuse of her son, Daily wrote to Geoghan to tell the pedophile priest that he had been cleared. Daily said a police chaplain had investigated and found the charges “irresponsible, totally false, [and] made by a woman who is well known and without credence in the community.”

The bishop later said he believed at the time, incorrectly, that priests had immunity from civil and criminal prosecution for sexual abuse. To Daily, Geoghan was not a criminal or a rapist — he was a lost sheep. “I am a pastor who has to go after the Lord's sheep and find them and bring them back into the fold and give them the kind of guidance and discipline them in such a way that they will come back,” Daily said. “I'm not a detective.”

At seventy-four, as he said a Mass celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his priesthood, the news from Boston shadowed him in New York. “He's such a good guy. It's tough to see this happening, especially now, with an anniversary of this import,” the bishop's spokesman said. But as he fended off questions about his tenure in Massachusetts, Daily faced new charges raised in a
Globe
article that he had brushed aside sexual abuse allegations in New York four years earlier.

Rev. Timothy J. Lambert, a forty-four-year-old clergyman on a leave of absence, made the allegations in a 1998 meeting with diocesan leaders. His attorney repeated them a year later in an eight-page letter to Daily. The letter described Lambert's charges against a priest who had become a welcome figure in his home, where Lambert's mother struggled to raise four sons and a daughter on her own. Her husband, an alcoholic, had left the family. Lambert, a troubled teenager, yearned for a father figure's affection. “That set up the perfect situation for a predator,” claimed the letter, which identified the accused priest as Rev. Joseph R Byrns, a pastor at Brooklyn's St. Rose of Lima Church. “Fr. Byrns knew that many of his sexual needs would be satisfied by this young boy as long as he successfully groomed him with pseudo-affection and gifts, which represented to this child the love no other male figure, particularly his father, had ever given him.”

Byrns admitted he had known the Lambert family since 1969, but he denied the accusations. “There's nothing to the story,” Byrns said. And Byrns's bishop, Daily, backed him to the hilt. The bishop said he had reviewed the allegations. He blessed Byrns's reputation as solid, concluded that Byrns was innocent, and ruled the case closed.

Lambert called the “investigation” a fraud. He doubted that any diocesan investigator ever interviewed any of the counselors he had consulted about his abuse, or any member of his family. “They didn't investigate anything,” Lambert said.

Daily's aversion to vigorous investigation meant that in the early days of the crisis, Brooklyn was not among the many dioceses around the nation that examined dusty personnel files and handed over to authorities the names of priests who had been accused of sexual abuse. This despite the Brooklyn district attorney's plea that “if there are any allegations, we want them sent over to us.” And this despite the view of New York's newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who, when asked at a city hall press conference whether the Church should hand over information about clergy sexual abuse, did not hesitate to proclaim, “There's no reason, based on occupation, why any group should not have to obey the law. Period.”

Daily defended his handling of the complaints against Byrns but said he regretted how he handled the Geoghan case in Boston. Lie insisted that most victims prefer secrecy to a public airing of allegations of sexual abuse. “We feel that we have a policy … and we feel that we've been responsible. And we're sticking with that policy.” (When the bishop invited victims to contact his staff, Lambert replied acidly, “That's the last place I'd go.”) And through it all, Daily dug in. He said he would not release the names of alleged sex abusers. “Some of these guys are dead,” he said. “A man's got a right to his reputation even when he's dead.”

By early April, however, Daily's defiance began to crumble. His aides were meeting with prosecutors from Queens and Brooklyn, and within days Daily was being accused of ignoring repeated warnings about a priest's after-hours parties with teenage boys in a rectory in Queens in the early 1990s. In June 2000, that priest was arrested on sodomy charges.
Newsday
reported that Rev. John McVernon said he had notified Daily four separate times that he was concerned about the priest's conduct. “I told Daily, ‘There are things that are going on in the rectory that give me pause.’ He listened attentively. Nothing changed after that first visit,” McVernon said. The charges were later dropped, and records in the case were sealed.