Bishop Helped Cover Up Priest's Abuse
By Noah Bierman, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Originally published in The Palm Beach Post, March 13, 2002
Thomas Daily, the Palm Beach Diocese's first bishop, acknowledged in depositions last year that he urged seven sexual abuse victims in Boston to keep quiet two decades ago, rather than subject the church to scandal.
Daily served as vicar general in Boston before coming to Palm Beach in 1984 to found the five-county diocese. He left in 1989 for the New York City borough of Brooklyn, where he is now bishop.
The coverup revelation came during depositions Daily gave in lawsuits last year against former Boston area priest John J. Geoghan. The lawsuits were settled for an estimated $15 million to $30 million late Monday night. The settlement was announced Tuesday. Daily was named as one of many church defendants in 48 of those 86 lawsuits filed by Geoghan victims and their relatives, according to Newsday.
A judge opened records in the lawsuits in January, at the urging of The Boston Globe. The Globe reported that Daily urged relatives of seven victims, all members of the same extended family, to stay silent about Geoghan's behavior. Church elders transferred the pedophile priest from parish to parish between the 1960s and 1990s as he continued to rack up victims.
"I am not a policeman. I am a shepherd," Daily said in his deposition.
Asked if it was policy in Boston's archdiocese to avoid scandal when possible, Daily said "yes."
Sam Barbaro, spokesman for the Palm Beach Diocese, said Tuesday he did not know details of Daily's connection with those lawsuits.
The revelations come at a tumultuous time for Daily's former Palm Beach flock. Bishop Anthony O'Connell, the diocese's third bishop, offered his resignation Friday after acknowledging inappropriately touching a former seminary student in the 1970s. O'Connell had replaced Bishop J. Keith Symons, who left abruptly in 1998 after admitting he sexually abused five young men as a priest in the 1960s.
Daily has not been accused of any sexual misconduct. The Boston lawsuits involve Geoghan, who is serving a nine- to 10-year sentence for fondling a child. Monday's settlement involves 86 plaintiffs, 50 of whom claimed sexual abuse by the defrocked priest.
"This isn't happy money. This is blood money," said Mitchell Garabedian, the plaintiffs' lawyer.
He said the settlement negotiations between the victims' families and the church were contentious and tedious, lasting 11 long months.
"This is not going to put their lives back together," he said. "They are not going to be buying yachts and floating around the Bahamas and living the good life."
The archdiocese has previously settled claims of $15 million against the priest. Though church officials were paying victims all along, they did not defrock Geoghan until 1998.
"At the time, there was such an aura of the need for privacy, both from the point of view of the perpetrator and the victims and reputations that there was a kind of cloak around that," Daily testified, according to The Boston Herald. "The whole system tended to cover over—not cover over so much, but protect the people. And that kind of an attitude has changed since the last 20, 25 years."
In the early 1980s, after Daily urged relatives of the abused children to keep silent, one relative complained to Daily's boss, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros. He complained that Daily had suggested "that we keep silent to protect the boys—that is absurd, since minors are protected under the law, and I do not wish to hear that remark again, since it is insulting to our intelligence."
Palm Beach Post wire services and staff writer Elizabeth Clarke contributed to this story.
