Answers went along with Law to the grave
The day we got to talk one-onone remains a warm memory here.
Bernard Cardinal Law, after asking if this writer “would like a Coke or cup of coffee,” swung his feet upon a massive table in the opulent conference room of his residence at 2101 Commonwealth Ave., and asked, “So, what do you think?”
Noting the walls were adorned with framed portraits of his seven predecessors, it was suggested, “It was probably a lot easier being Cardinal Cushing back in the ’50s than it is being you right now.”
He smiled, then picked up on the theme of finding yourself in the eye of a storm, remembering when he started out as an assistant pastor of a small parish down in Natchez, Miss., where police dogs and water hoses soon came to symbolize the explosiveness of racial relations.
Young and zealous, he excoriated rednecks while editing a boatrocking Catholic weekly called the Mississippi Register.
“A lot of people thought I was a pain in the neck,” he recalled. “They had a saying: ‘He’s done quit preaching and gone to meddling.’ Well, my view was that if the preacher ain’t meddling, he ain’t preaching.”
He was obviously proud of those memories, and in hindsight it was easy to see how they set him on a path to clergical prominence, peaking here when he became Boston’s archbishop, a post so desirable that Pio Laghi, the pope’s ambassador, told him, “After Boston, only heaven.”
How could he have tumbled from that mountaintop?
How could he have wound up so reviled that just a mention of his name still enrages his detractors?
There’s no question priests were being protected and children weren’t, which, in every proven instance, was indefensible and despicable.
No one disputes that.
But as the scandal magnified like a metastasizing cancer, it gave birth to more than righteous indignation; it also provided a platform for shoot-from-the-hip assaults on the Catholic Church by exploitative dissidents who had been denouncing it for years.
After it was revealed that predatory priests were reassigned when they should have been defrocked and handed over to authorities, the buck stopped with Law because it happened on his watch.
Was he that arrogant, or that clueless, or in that much denial? Who can say?
A very popular priest, still active in his archdiocesan ministry, had a theory that didn’t justify what happened, but possibly explained it.
“I think part of it stems from the history of Irish Catholics in this country, back to a time when protecting the institution was necessary. That mindset of dealing with our problems internally has been perpetuated to this day, a ‘let’s keep it all in the house’ mentality that still leads to a lack of openness.”
Could that be it? We’ll never know.
Law died two days ago at 86. If there was an explanation, he took it with him.