BOSTON (MA)
Newsweek
BY ALEXANDER NAZARYAN 10/8/15
In the summer of 1982, a woman from Dorchester, Massachusetts, named Margaret Gallant wrote a letter to Cardinal Humberto S. Medeiros, then archbishop of Boston. In the letter, Gallant said that seven of her nephews and grandnephews had been abused by a local priest, John J. Geoghan. “It embarrasses me that the church is so negligent,” she wrote. Medeiros did not appear especially concerned for the welfare of the children. “To be sure, we cannot accept sin, but we know well that we must love the sinner and pray for him,” the cardinal wrote back.
This is how it always went with Geoghan, whose proclivities were well known by the 1980s. Back in 1954, at the Cardinal O’Connell Seminary, he was singled out for his “very pronounced immaturity.” At his first priestly posting, at the Blessed Sacrament Church in Saugus, Massachusetts, he was known to wrestle with boys in his private chambers.
As Geoghan moved from parish to parish throughout his career, he continued to prey on boys, almost always from poor families where an overworked mother was happy to have a little help from the parish priest. His abuse would inevitably attract the attention of the archdiocese. The prelates would force him into psychiatric care at a church-controlled treatment center, after which he’d return to pastoral care. In three and a half decades of wearing the cassock, Geoghan sexually assaulted 130 children.
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