ROME
Daily Beast

December 20, 2017

By Barbie Latza Nadeau

Bernard Law, the American cardinal who became of the face of the Catholic clerical abuse scandal in America, is dead at the age of 86, but his cover-up legacy lives on.

ROME—Cardinal Bernard Law, the former archbishop of Boston who resigned in shame at the height of the American clerical sex-abuse scandal in 2002, who died early Wednesday morning in a Roman hospital, never rose above the disgrace that brought him down—at least not outside the Vatican’s protective walls.

He was sent to Rome in 2004 by Pope John Paul II, and, despite making a public apology for his failings and culpability in the cover up of rampant clerical sex abuse against children, he remained active in policy-making dicastery departments of the Holy See. He was allowed to resign honorably from those duties in 2011 when…