FILED · 2002 · CATHOLIC · SEXUAL

The Boston Globe Spotlight Investigation

A six-month investigative project exposed systematic sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston and the institutional cover-up that protected the abusers for decades.

Catholic · Contemporary · Sexual abuse · Bernard Law

What happened

In January 2002, the Spotlight investigative team of The Boston Globe published the first in a series of reports establishing that John J. Geoghan, a defrocked priest, had been credibly accused of molesting more than 130 children over a thirty-year career, and that the Archdiocese of Boston — under successive archbishops including Cardinal Bernard Law — had moved Geoghan from parish to parish rather than report him to civil authorities.

The reporting unsealed thousands of pages of internal archdiocesan documents that had been previously held under seal by court order. The documents established that the practice of reassignment after credible accusations was not a Geoghan-specific anomaly. By the end of 2002, the Globe had documented credible accusations against more than 70 priests in the Boston archdiocese alone.

Institutional response

Cardinal Law resigned in December 2002, the first American cardinal forced from office over the abuse crisis. He was reassigned to Rome, where he served as archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore until 2011. The Archdiocese of Boston ultimately paid out approximately $85 million in settlements to more than 500 survivors. The reporting also triggered the formation of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People (the "Dallas Charter") in June 2002.

Wider impact

The Boston reporting catalysed similar investigations in dozens of dioceses across the United States and in countries including Ireland, Germany, Australia, and France. It established the methodology — patient document acquisition, statistical aggregation of credibly-accused names, treatment of the institutional records as the central evidence rather than survivor testimony alone — that subsequent national inquiries (the McAleese Report, the Royal Commission in Australia, the IICSA in the UK, the Sauvé Commission in France) would follow.

The Spotlight team was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Verification

The institutional record is established through (a) the unsealed archdiocesan personnel files admitted into evidence in Massachusetts civil proceedings; (b) the John Jay College Nature and Scope study commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and published in 2004; (c) the Globe's own contemporaneous reporting, which has been republished in book form as Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church. The cover-up element is not in dispute.

Sources

  • Boston Globe Spotlight Team, "Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years" (6 January 2002) and subsequent series. Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, 2003.
  • Boston Globe Investigative Staff, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church (Little, Brown, 2002).
  • United States Conference of Catholic Bishops / John Jay College, The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950–2002 (USCCB, 2004).
  • BishopAccountability.org — archdiocesan personnel-file database (Boston subset).