Betrayal (9 page)
In fact neither Mullins nor Brennan had any expertise in evaluating sexually deviant behavior. Mullins, a neighbor and friend of the Geoghan family in Boston's West Roxbury section, was a family physician with no credentials in psychotherapy, psychology, or psychiatry. Indeed, a 1989 evaluation of Geoghan by the Institute of Living referred to Mullins's treatment of Geoghan as “friendly, paternal chats and not really psychotherapy.” Brennan, for his part, was a certified psychiatrist but with no specialty in treating sexual disorders. And in 1977 he had been charged in a civil lawsuit with sexually molesting one of his patients. In 1980, at about the time he began treating Geoghan, the suit was settled and the woman was paid $ 100,000.
Moreover, neither Mullins nor Brennan could be said to have made an “independent” evaluation of Geoghan—the term used by Law's attorney. While Mullins's impartiality was compromised by his friendship with the Geoghan family, Brennan's was tainted by his relationship with the Church. At the time, Brennan was director of psychiatric education at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, a Catholic institution, and was accepting patient referrals to his private practice from Rev. Fulgence Buonanno, a well-known Franciscan priest and a psychologist who worked at St. Anthony's Shrine, in downtown Boston,
Still, Church records show that Brennan was capable of delivering a harsh critique, though never in writing. In April of 1989, five years after Geoghan had been reassigned to St. Julia's, and after more accusations that he had molested boys, Brennan delivered a dire message to Bishop Banks, who was jotting down notes of their telephone conversation. “You better clip his wings before there is an explosion,” Brennan said. “You can't afford to have him in a parish.” After that exchange, Banks asked Geoghan to resign from the priesthood, but he later changed his mind. And after he and Law had cleared Geoghan to return to St. Julia's, Brennan resurrected the sympathetic tone he had used in all of his written evaluations. “I have known Father Geoghan since February 1980,” Brennan wrote in December of 1990. “There is no psychiatric contraindication to Fr. Geoghan's pastoral work at this time.”
The Church's aversion lo negative evaluations of Geoghan — and its preference for positive written assessments to coincide with new parish assignments — is underscored by several letters between Bishop Banks and officials at the Institute of Living that were written in 1989 after Geoghan had received treatment there. In a three-page evaluation written in November of that year, doctors Robert F. Swords and Vincent J. Stephens said psychological testing of Geoghan “showed an immature and impulsive nature” and an individual who “could be a high risk-taker.” Their official diagnosis: an “atypical pedophile in remission.” But Banks wrote back to say he was “disappointed and disturbed by the report” and insisted that he had been “assured that it would be all right to reassign Father Geoghan to pastoral ministry and that he would not present a risk for the parishioners whom he would serve.” Underscoring his displeasure, Banks noted that Geoghan had already been allowed to return to St. Julia's and asked for an additional letter that “would express the assurance I was given orally about Father Geoghan's reassignment.” Two weeks later, Banks got what he asked for. “We judge Father Geoghan to be clinically quite safe to resume his pastoral ministry after observation, evaluation, and treatment here for three months,” Swords wrote. “The probability that he would sexually act out again is quite low.” Yet within weeks of his 1989 return to St. Julia's, Geoghan lured a thirteen-year-old youngster to the rectory and molested him, according to a lawsuit filed in 2002.
By 1994, criminal authorities were finally investigating Geoghan. Their unusual appearance put the archdiocese in a state of crisis — and the crisis was spreading. Since the late 1980s Law and his deputies had been covering up the past sexual misdeeds of a growing number of priests. In 1996 the first of scores of civil lawsuits accusing Geoghan of sexually molesting children was filed, and two criminal investigations were under way. Two years later, in 1998, the church announced it had settled a dozen lawsuits against Geoghan for as much as $10 million. Then, with still more lawsuits being filed and investigators and police from two counties closing in, Cardinal Law finally defrocked Geoghan, removing his right to act as a priest. And he did so in a rarely used procedure that required the approval of Pope John Paul II and left Geoghan no opportunity for appeal. Law, in his first public acknowledgment of the dangers posed by a priest who had been on a sexual rampage through a half-dozen parishes over three decades, said, “I don't have the powers of incarceration but I do have the responsibility for the public exercise of ministry.”
But by then it was too late.
The Predators
T
o Michael McCabe, an altar boy in training, the touch seemed innocent enough. It was the early 1960s. He knew little about sex or sexuality. It happened casually and nonchalantly. It never occurred to the boy to tell his parents. After all, he called Joseph Birmingham “Father.”
“He'd come up behind you, rub your shoulders, make you calm, and then slip his hand beneath your underwear,” said McCabe, who is now in his early fifties. “It didn't seem wrong, and that's what's so weird about it.” Had McCabe's dad not sat his adolescent son down one day and given him the age-old talk fathers give their sons about the private things men and women do together, Michael McCabe might never have told anyone about Father Birmingham's wandering hands. When Howard McCabe raised the delicate issue of homosexuality, young Michael had informed his father that that was one aspect of sex he already knew something about. “My dad told me about how some boys touch other boys,” Michael McCabe recalled, “and I said, ‘Oh, hey, that's what Father Birmingham does to me.’” The touching, he told his father, happened in the sacristy, just off the altar, at Our Lady of Fatima parish in Sudbury, west of Boston. Michael was twelve or thirteen at the time.
Nearly forty years later, that faith-altering day remains vivid in his father's mind. “I was giving him my lecture on the birds and the bees, and when I got through I said, ‘If you've got any questions, just ask me,’” Howard McCabe, who is now seventy-nine, recalled. “Finally he said, ‘Jeez, Dad, Father Birmingham played with my penis.’ And I said, ‘You've got to be kidding.’ I couldn't believe what he said, and I didn't know how to handle it.” And so began the McCabe family's disturbing and, ultimately, shattering introduction to the troubled universe of priests who sexually abuse children.
Why some priests, and why some men in general, are sexually attracted to minors remains a much-debated and highly controversial issue, one cluttered with unanswered questions. But while the origins of the crisis remain uncertain, the reality that numerous priests have become abusers is not.
In the past fifteen years, an estimated fifteen hundred American priests have faced allegations of sexual abuse, according to Jason Berry, the reporter who documented Gilbert Gauthé’s abuses and the author of
Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children,
an authoritative early examination of the issue. In the aftermath of the Geoghan disclosures in January 2002, the names of more than ninety priests alleged to have sexually abused minors were turned over to Massachusetts law enforcement officials by the Boston archdiocese alone. And eleven sitting priests were abruptly removed from their posts — eight of them after Church officials discovered credible allegations of sexual abuse in their files — even though Cardinal Law had publicly asserted weeks before that all such priests had been removed from their assignments. The other three were removed when new victims came forward for the first time. Law's decision to cooperate with prosecutors, made under pressure, spurred Church officials in other major American cities, including Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York, to share with authorities the names of allegedly abusive priests in their dioceses as well. As a result of reverberations from the Boston scandal, more than one hundred and seventy priests suspected of molesting minors had either resigned or been taken off duty in the early months of 2002, according to a nationwide survey of Catholic dioceses by the Associated Press.
For every name passed along to prosecutors, a secret Church file of some type existed in virtually every case. But the smattering of information released by dioceses across the nation underscored an alarming reality: repeat abusers such as Geoghan, Porter, Kos, and Gauthé, all of whom were convicted for their crimes, appear not to have been the aberrations some Church officials claimed they were. Serial molesters “are not as much of an anomaly as people would like to think,” said A. W. Richard Sipe, a former priest and psychotherapist who specialized in treating priests who abuse children. The Geoghans and Porters of the priesthood, he said, are “extreme examples, in a way, because they're the ones who have gotten the notoriety. But there are many priests who have just never been reported.”
In the case of McCabe's abuser, Joseph E. Birmingham, the abuses were reported, but the reports fell on deaf ears. Like Geoghan, Birmingham served as a priest for nearly three decades, from his ordination in 1960 until his death in 1989 at age fifty-five. Like Geoghan, he was rotated through six parishes, despite a string of complaints about his sexual compulsion. Like Geoghan, he allegedly accumulated dozens of victims even though high Church officials knew he was molesting children. And, like Geoghan, the number of Birmingham's alleged victims is large—as many as twenty-five alone from his third assignment at St. Michael's parish in Lowell, north of Boston, in the 1970s. But in Birmingham's case, the public evidence that the Church stood by and did nothing to stop him early in his career appears to be even stronger.
That the McCabes even reported the alleged molestation to Church authorities made them unusual. Shame, embarrassment, and, sometimes, warnings by their abusers kept many victims from disclosing the abuse. Others confided in family members who found it difficult to believe them.
Howard McCabe himself at first doubted his son's innocent admission and intended to follow the advice of a neighbor and keep the information secret. But he changed his mind when Michael told him that a grade-school friend, Peter Taylor, had also been molested by Birmingham, and Taylor's father, Frank, confirmed that his son had indeed been victimized. Once the shock wore off and the anger took hold, the men acted.
“He came pounding on my door, and he had fire in his eyes,” Howard McCabe said, recalling the sight from almost four decades ago of Frank Taylor quaking with anger on his front porch. “He was a big man, but an awful gentle man, and he wanted to kill Birmingham.”
Stunned and chagrined, the two men contacted their local pastor, who arranged for them and their sons to meet with Church administrators at archdiocesan headquarters in Boston.
The chancery of the Boston archdiocese, located in the Brighton section of the city, made for an intimidating setting: mahogany tables, imposing Church officials. Among those gathered at the table was Monsignor Francis J. Sexton, a vice chancellor.
“I was scared to death,” recalled Peter Taylor. “I was just a kid.”
With Birmingham present, the two boys were ordered to repeat their complaints, in detail. Once they had described to the adults at the table what had happened to them, it was Birmingham's turn to speak.
He denied any wrongdoing.
“It was wicked embarrassing for a kid to have to tell this story in public,” Michael McCabe said. “I couldn't believe they were making us do that, making us say this in front of him and making us look like liars. When we left I said to my dad, ‘I told the truth, Dad. I really did.’ ”
The arduous experience seemed to have been worthwhile. Later the same day, their pastor paid a visit to the Taylor family's home, where the two men and their sons had gathered after the meeting. He had good news to relay: Birmingham, the pastor said, would be removed from Sudbury and sent to Salem, north of Boston, where he would be made chaplain of Salem Hospital and receive psychiatric treatment.
True to the pastor's word, Birmingham was transferred to Salem in 1964. Pleased and relieved, Howard McCabe felt his decision to notify the Church of the boys’ complaints had been the correct one. But that sense of relief evaporated about a year later, when his son saw Birmingham skiing in New Hampshire with a busload of young boys on what appeared to be an official school outing. The thought that their complaints had been brushed aside by Church authorities was crushing to the men's faith. “It was devastating,” Howard McCabe said.
“I left the Church,” said Frank Taylor, now seventy-seven. “I never went back again.”
The McCabes and Taylors would not be the last parents to take their concerns about Birmingham's sexual habits to the chancery. Over the course of the priest's career, at least seven people from at least two different parishes notified Boston archdiocesan officials of his alleged abuse. In his second assignment, a group of five Salem mothers also visited the chancery, in about 1970, to complain that Birmingham had molested several of their children, sometimes during confession. Their pleas too went unheeded.
It was several weeks after Birmingham had been transferred from St. James's parish in Salem to St. Michael's parish in Lowell that Judy Fairbank, Anne McDaid, Mary McGee, and Winifred Morton traveled together to the chancery to alert Church officials to the allegations. A fifth woman attended the meeting, but her son insisted that she not be named. They wanted to ensure that Birmingham's new pastor in Lowell would be notified of his history and that Birmingham would receive psychiatric care.
Until several of their sons told them that Birmingham had molested them, the women had believed that the priest's move to Lowell had been a routine transfer; they had even held a farewell party for him. But during their chancery meeting with Monsignor John Jennings, “We got no place,” said McGee. “He was sitting there, pompous, and pacifying us. At the end of the meeting he said, ‘You know, ladies, you have to be very careful of slander.’ ”