Betrayal by The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe Page B

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.

3
    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