UNITED STATES
The Denver Post
[with video]
By Lisa Kennedy
Special to The Denver Post
It was a Sunday morning after the holidays, and the Boston Globe’s Jan. 6, 2002, article on Page 1 didn’t mince words: “Since the mid-1990s, more than 130 people have come forward with horrific childhood tales about how former priest John J. Geoghan allegedly fondled or raped them during a three-decade spree through a half-dozen Greater Boston parishes.”
That was just the half of it. And, in many ways (though difficult to fathom), not the worst of it. The article — the first of roughly 600 published over the next year — went on to lay out the breadth and depth of a criminal and moral outrage both individual and institutional. As many as 1,000 children and adolescents had been molested or sexually assaulted and the Catholic Archdiocese’s most senior officials often knew about the frocked perpetrators. Priests, the newspaper uncovered, were shunted to fresh parishes where congregants were unaware of the priests’ pasts. This often led to the predators having further contact with children and teens. Under then-Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the archdiocese sought to keep the abuse a secret.
In 2003, the Globe’s dedicated investigative team, Spotlight, earned the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its tenacious inquiry into the archdiocese’s handling of decades of abuse.
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