The Death of Cardinal Bernard Law and the Legacy of Clergy Sex Abuse

By James Carroll
New Yorker
December 20, 2017

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-death-of-cardinal-bernard-law-and-the-legacy-of-clergy-sex-abuse

Banished from Boston and protected in Rome, Cardinal Bernard Law became a symbol of the Catholic hierarchy’s failure to reckon with its crimes—a failure that continues today.Photograph by David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe via Getty

In the spring of 1989, a group of black-clad clergy gathered to bury one of their own—a Boston priest named Father Joseph Birmingham. Presiding at the funeral was their leader, Cardinal Bernard Law, who died himself on Wednesday, in Rome. As the obsequies for Birmingham drew to a close and the crowd began to disperse, Law was confronted by a man named Thomas Blanchette. He identified himself as having been sexually abused as a child by Birmingham, who would ultimately be accused of having molested more than forty boys. In 2002, Blanchette told the Boston Globe what happened next; Law “laid his hands on my head for two or three minutes. And then he said this: ‘I bind you under the power of the confessional never to speak a word of this to another.’ ”

Law never admitted saying such a thing, but why would Blanchette make it up? Of all the gruesome details that surfaced during the Globe’s investigation into Law’s years-long protection of rapist priests, this incident, for a Catholic, epitomizes the perversion. What Law did in response to a traumatized victim was to reverse the meaning of the Seal of the Confessional, the solemn Catholic mandate that forbids priests from revealing anything said by a penitent in the sacred forum of the Sacrament of Penance. In doing so, he was seeking to protect not only the one priest but also the clerical structure of power to which, even dead, that priest still belonged. Law was prepared to twist the Sacrament itself to his own foul purpose, even exploiting the ritual gesture of hands imposed on a vulnerable penitent’s head. This was a savage abuse of Catholic piety, obviously intended to intimidate and silence. It amounted to a sacrilege.

But then, of course, the entire saga of Catholic sex abuse—thousands of priests harming tens of thousands of young people; the worldwide Catholic episcopate protecting the abusers instead of the children—is a sacrilege. And, no, it has not yet been finished with. Law’s death is a reminder not only of the hierarchy’s grievous failure during the sex-abuse crisis but of the way in which the Church has yet to reckon with what the crisis laid bare.

Law’s own fate offers an object lesson in Vatican denial. After he was forced to resign as Archbishop of Boston, in 2002, he was rescued from disgrace by Pope John Paul II, who appointed him to one of the most prestigious positions in Catholicism—Archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major. It was a clear signal of support. After all, Law had merely implemented the Vatican’s own policy of reserving to Church jurisdiction, instead of civil authority, the abuse of children by priests. As a 2001 directive from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, put it, crimes “perpetrated with a minor by a cleric .?.?. are subject to the pontifical secret.” That Law, banished from Boston, was then protected in Rome meant that the entire structure of misogynist clericalism—all male, sexually repressed, blatantly dishonest—was protected, too. That structure is intact, protected still, even by the otherwise liberalizing Pope Francis. On Thursday, Law will be laid to rest in Rome with the full panoply of observances due an honored prince of the Church, with Francis himself pronouncing the final blessing. The ongoing grief, rage, and heartbreak of abuse survivors will not, one presumes, be acknowledged.

The Church thinks of itself as the body of Christ. That body is wounded to the core, and the Catholic people—including the legions who can no longer bear to associate with the institution—are the ones who bleed. The hierarchy is in as much denial as ever. Law was both its scapegoat and its hero. He was properly disgraced. If he was then protected by Popes and bishops, it was only as their way of protecting themselves. Yet, in the end, Law’s attempt to bind the deadly secret failed. At a time when the voices of women, especially, resolutely refuse to be silenced, the Catholic hierarchy’s own attempts to keep the secret of its sexualized power will fail, too. Law, despite himself, was the harbinger of the coming truth.