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		Church Silence Now Deafening by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 03-18-2002 The odor of the scandal seemed to drift over the parade on Saturday, and for the first time in many years, the aching sounds of musical lament seemed absolutely fitting. The St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York is now officially designated a Catholic parade, not an Irish celebration, and is the largest such annual event in the world. This year, the grand marshal was our own Edward Cardinal Egan. The march correctly memorialized those who died on Sept. 11. But for many who were watching on Fifth Ave. or on television, the day's gray drizzle and the sounds of the bagpipes combined to express the tragic mood of millions of people who make up the church. Once more, New York's Catholics mourned their valiant dead. But the wider scandal would not go away. The heart of the scandal, of course, is priestly pedophilia. That's a fancy word for raping the young. Under New York State law S. 130, every case of an adult (over 21) having sex with a person under 17 is statutory rape, a class E felony. It doesn't matter if the victim gave his or her consent. It doesn't matter if the rapist is homosexual or heterosexual. It doesn't matter if the event took place in a seminary, a rectory or the roof of a housing project. The crime is rape. In addition, paying hush money, coercing witnesses, destroying or burying relevant documents and arranging to move the rapist out of the state are acts called obstruction of justice. These are not trivial crimes. They are felonies. And now evidence is arriving from all over the country that these interconnected crimes have been going on for decades. In recent months, there have been reports about priestly pedophilia from Palm Beach, Fla.; East Meadow, L.I.; Pittsburgh; St. Louis; Tucson, and a dozen other places in what seems to be an epidemic. Even if the percentage of such priests is relatively small, the cost is enormous. Over the past 17 years, the church has paid out an estimated $1 billion to settle these and other cases — money that could have been spent on schools or care of the poor. The most vile case — so far — is the one in Boston, of course, where a serial rapist named John Geoghan, a Catholic priest since 1962, went his nasty way for more than 30 years, victimizing at least 130 boys. By his own admission, he twice raped a 10-year-old boy. In a courtroom this year, defrocked and disgraced, his face grizzly with white whiskers, Geoghan looked like he'd trained for his priestly duties at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He is now in a Massachusetts prison cell, but his victims are serving a life sentence. The larger context of his criminal past is more troubling. Geoghan was enabled in his career by many others, all of them bureaucrats in the church hierarchy. After each new charge, and each new retreat into rehab, Geoghan was sent on to another parish. It was as if the church bureaucrats were trying to prove they were environmentalists, by recycling garbage. 7 Related Victims Sadly, among his enablers was Bishop Thomas Daily, now head of the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens. In 1977-78, while serving at St. Andrew's in Jamaica Plain, Mass., Geoghan molested seven boys in the same family. Lawsuits were filed. The church settled, and then sealed the records. Daily, then the bishop there, put Geoghan on sick leave. It's not known if Daily knew that Geoghan had left three previous parish assignments because of sexual acts with boys. If he didn't know, he was naive or incompetent. There are, after all, limits to Christian compassion. Geoghan underwent psychoanalysis and counseling for a year, then ended up at St. Brendan's in Dorchester. Once again, the predator went after little boys, and once again — in September 1984 — he was removed from the parish. By then, his lengthening ecclesiastical rap sheet should have caught the attention of Daily or the new archbishop, Bernard Law. If it did, nothing happened. Two months after his removal from the Dorchester parish, Geoghan was assigned to St. Julia's in Weston. Among his other duties — you can't make this stuff up — he was put in charge of the altar boys. Daily has yet to say much about this (other than referring calls to his Boston lawyers), but he's not alone in his discreet silence. There is much to be told by Egan. Yesterday, The Hartford Courant newspaper published a detailed account of Egan's testimony in lawsuits over sexual abuse by priests in the Bridgeport Diocese. (All took place before Egan assumed command of the diocese, but he was forced to defend the diocese in the lawsuits.) Seamy Details of Priestly Abuse 'These things happen in such small numbers," Egan said in a deposition. "It's marvelous when you think of the hundreds and hundreds of priests, how very few have even been accused, and how very few have even come close to having anyone prove anything. Claims are not of interest to me. Realities are. Claims are claims. Allegations are allegations." He was asked about charges against the Rev. Raymond Pcolka, who was accused by more than a dozen people with sexual abuse of boys and girls that went back decades. The details included anal sex, violence and sadistic language. Pcolka was also accused of having a girl perform oral sex on him on her seventh birthday. Egan responded to the question: "I am not aware of any of those things. I am aware of the claims of those things, the allegations of those things. ... I am aware that there are a number of people who know one another, some are related to one another, have the same lawyers and so forth, I am aware of the circumstances, yes." In other specific cases, he answered in the same way: Allegations are not proof. And, of course, he was correct. But the decision to take such charges seriously can't be left to the inner circle of the church — not the Catholic Church, not any church. Cases of rape and obstruction of justice must be decided by the secular society, by district attorneys and grand juries. And there is another issue here. The Catholic Church is an extraordinary institution. It provides consolation for millions of human beings. Thousands of its priests and nuns do heroic work on many levels. I've seen them laboring in the worst places in Latin America, and my friends have seen them at work in the otherwise godforsaken villages of central Africa. But this epidemic of pedophilia could cause ferocious damage to that church. Seminaries are already closing in Ireland, for want of candidates for the priesthood. Church attendance and contributions could erode. Some parents say they even fear sending children to Catholic schools. The issue must be addressed with candor and humility and pity. Egan and Daily could lead the way. They could vow to report all allegations to the cops. They could ask for the quick convoking of a Vatican III, similar to the Second Vatican Council made up of the church's leadership that Pope John XXIII convened to reevaluate the church's role. The new council can meet if not under the current Pope, then under the next one — and have the worldwide church debate the tortured question of priestly celibacy. In this crisis, they can't get cute with legal language. And they don't really have the option of silence.