John Geoghan

John J. Geoghan (/ˈɡeɪɡən/; June 4, 1935 – August 23, 2003) was an American Roman Catholic priest who sexually abused children while he was assigned to parishes in the Boston Archdiocese of Massachusetts. He was reassigned several times to parish posts involving children, including after attempted treatment for pedophilia.

The investigation and prosecution of Geoghan was one of numerous cases of priests accused of sexual abuse in a scandal that rocked the archdiocese in the 1990s and 2000s. It led to the resignation of Boston's archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, on December 13, 2002, as he was accused of protecting dozens of priests by reassignment, thus allowing abuse of additional parish children to take place. Law lost the support of his priests and the laity. Geoghan was finally convicted of sexual abuse, laicized, and sentenced in 2002 to nine to ten years in Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison. Less than a year later, he was murdered there by Joseph Druce, an inmate who is serving a life sentence. The Boston Globe's coverage of Geoghan's abuse opened the door for public knowledge of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Boston and sexual abuse by priests in the USA in general. This coverage is a key plot element of the movie Spotlight that was released in 2015.

Born in Boston in 1935 to an Irish Catholic family, John Joseph Geoghan attended local parochial schools. Intending to become a priest, he attended Cardinal O'Connell Seminary. An assessment in 1954 noted him as "markedly immature." He graduated in 1962 and was ordained.

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