the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twenty-one)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

By 2002, the 1.8 million members of the Catholic archdiocese of Boston had grown used to regular scandals involving pedophile priests. None was more horrifying than that of Father James Porter of Fall River, Massachusetts, who pleaded guilty in 1993 to molesting dozens of children and was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Prosecutors revealed that local bishops had known since the 1960s that Porter was a pedophile yet, rather than defrock him, tried to hide his crimes by moving him from parish to parish. At the time of the guilty plea, Cardinal Law of Boston decried the “media circus” in the case and called for heavenly retribution against news organizations, especially The Boston Globe, the city’s largest newspaper. “By all means, we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.”

A decade later, frustration over the church’s failure to grapple with the crisis of clerical sexual abuse finally boiled over around the world, beginning in Boston. In January 2002, the Globe published the first of a series of articles, based on court documents, that revealed how Cardinal Law and his deputies covered up for dozens of child-molesting clerics in the Boston archdiocese, shielding them from law enforcement. The records showed that Law routinely tried to comfort pedophile priests and silence their victims. Several articles centered on the cardinal’s effort to protect Father John Geoghan, who had a well-documented history, inside the church, of child rape. The documents showed that shortly after Law arrived in Boston in 1984, he granted Geoghan’s request to move to a new parish, even though the cardinal knew Geoghan was a sexual predator who had been removed from other parishes for child abuse. In one earlier assignment, Geoghan acknowledged molesting seven boys from a single family. Archdiocese records showed that Law often sent bizarrely affectionate notes to Geoghan and other priests who admitted their crimes. In 1996, the cardinal told Geoghan, who by then had already confessed to molesting scores of boys, that “yours has been an effective life of ministry,” even if it had been “sadly impaired by illness.” In 2003, Geoghan was murdered in prison after his conviction the year before for molesting a ten-year-old boy.