Father Geoghan
Father Geoghan, I am sorry that you died. I feel sorry that your life was taken from you, and if it hurt a lot, then I am sad. I hope you felt, in your last moments, that you were ready to meet God. Did He forgive you, in the end? Was it scary, going down the icy white corridor, into the light of Him, the light we are supposed to all see? Did you get cold and blinded by it, or were you comforted? Was He proud to receive you? Was He surprised? I bet He was nice to you, and I hope He is nice to all of us. Life isn’t nice, and people like you made it worse, but I am sure that we have all been guilty of making life bad for someone else. You took life away from so many of us Father. How did you manage it? Could you not see what you were doing? Did you have that ability to forget so easily the pain that you inflicted, the irretrievable innocence that you stole? Were you unafraid of God’s wrath? Was it easy? Was it hard? Did you get scared, those hours after, alone and abated, wondering whether or not it was your last day on earth? I know that feeling, living and lying, piling lie upon lie like sedimentary rock, until you have no idea where you stop and the lie begins. You pray to be found out, because the lie is starting to bleed into the truth, and erasing time, the theft of your life right from under you, and you are the thief. Did you ask God for help then? Was this all part of your master plan? Was the guilt too much to compete with the need to be who you wanted people to think you were? Did the real you conspire against the lie and trip you up? Are people actually good, and do they hold themselves accountable for their own misdeeds? Did you feel lonely, when you were wreaking havoc on the lives of so many children, because you felt you were victim more than villain? Were you the captive of your own impulses, held prisoner by your uncontrollable urges, serving a life sentence from whence there is no parole, on a death row of your own making? I don’t like how you were labeled that “Gay Priest” because you yourself did not consider you gay. You knew that you were wrong, and you knew that you were sick, but you did not think that you were gay. It makes me mad because now some people will think that if you are gay, that you molest children, and that is not what it means to be gay. There has to be some way to keep them from thinking that, but I guess people will think what they want to, and there isn’t any way to change their minds. You can’t do anything about it now. You did enough damage in your life. I hope the kids that you hurt do not suffer any more from what you did, that they have lives now that don’t feel like yours did, that they have love and laughter and maybe even children of their own, and your death doesn’t touch them at all, because you cannot touch them now or ever again.