Catholics were furious and felt betrayed. In the Geoghan case a succession of three cardinals and many bishops over thirty-four years had failed to place children out of Geoghan’s reach, sending the priest compassionate letters even as they moved him from parish to parish, leaving a trail of victims in his wake. Though the problem had been widely known nationally and sporadically written about since the mid-1980s, the Globe’s reporting used the Church’s own documents to demonstrate that high-ranking officials had repeatedly put the welfare of their priests ahead of that of the children in their care. Over the next four months, the Globe ran nearly 300 stories about clergy sexual abuse. "Almost always, his victims were grammar school boys. Geoghan allegedly fondled or raped them during a three-decade spree through a half-dozen Greater Boston parishes," began the Spotlight Team’s first article on the subject, published in January 2002. "Since the mid-1990s, more than 130 people have come forward with horrific childhood tales about how former priest John J. The Globe’s reporting, and the events it set off, led to the writing of Betrayal, which is the story of priests who abused the children in their care, victims whose lives were shattered at the hands of those priests, bishops who failed to prevent the abuse, and laypeople who rose up in anger.
#Boston legal torrent series#
The troubling answer to that question-dozens of Boston-area priests had molested minors, and in too many cases bishops had known about the abuse but failed to remove the priests from their jobs-was revealed in a series of stories published in early 2002 that has triggered the most serious crisis to confront the Catholic Church in years. The document, and a defense offered in late July by the cardinal’s lawyer asserting that physicians had cleared Geoghan for ministry, set off a lengthy investigation by the Globe’s Spotlight Team, which set out to determine whether the Geoghan case was an anomaly or part of a pattern. For the investigative staff of the Boston Globe, that document was a turning point: a story about a priest who was accused of molesting children was now a story about a bishop who protected that priest.
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