Word: geoghan
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...punished harshly for such aberrations. Priests, guilty of far worse transgressions, were handled with kid gloves. The all-male power structure of the church employed the worst tactics of its secular counterparts: silencing victims, covering up crimes, shifting bad priests around like fungible account executives. Think if Father John Geoghan had been Sister Johanna Geoghan. Would she have been recycled from parish to parish, even given a sabbatical to Rome? Not according to Sister Joan. A nun who physically harmed a child would be sent "back to the motherhouse to boil potatoes or sew coifs. She wouldn...
...only the Pope were infallible enough to see that a thin blue line could have helped avoid the current catastrophe. I can imagine most nuns I know finding a way to forgive Father Geoghan and getting him help. But I can't imagine any of them protecting him at the cost of a child. Perhaps this will inspire Pope John Paul, or his successor, to see the wisdom of admitting women to the priesthood. I know a few good nuns...
Many of us may have just awakened to the stunning extent of priestly pedophilia since January, when the Boston Globe exposed the predations of John Geoghan and the habit the diocese had of systematically concealing them. But the U.S. church has known all about it--how deep sexual misconduct ran, how widespread, how frequent--at least since the first big abuse scandal broke at a Louisiana trial in 1985, when the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe was sentenced to 20 years for molesting dozens of children, who were awarded a combined $18 million in damages...
Desperate to put the worst behind it, the Boston archdiocese agreed last week to pay $20 million to $30 million to settle the high-profile lawsuits brought by 86 victims of defrocked priest John Geoghan. But that was hardly all that the scandal has cost Boston's Catholics. In confidential settlements intended to avoid any whiff of publicity, the church, starting in 1994, gave $15 million to a group of victims molested by Geoghan. In one instance, according to the Boston Globe, a single family got $400,000 to hush up the sexually explicit phone calls Geoghan made...
That may sound, at first, like a lot of hush money. Individual payments in the range of $50,000 to $300,000 will be parceled out to the 86 Geoghan victims on a sliding scale of severity: more for rape, less for a flash of nudity. Yet the cash doesn't go far. In 1992 David Gagnon, 37, quietly settled his suit for three years of sexual molestation by the Rev. Michael Doucette, one of two active Portland, Me., priests suspended March 9. After paying his legal bill, typically one-third of the total award, Gagnon netted $63,000. That...