NEW YORK (NY)
CRUX
December 22, 2017
By Christopher White
NEW YORK – At a press conference in Boston on Wednesday, Cardinal Sean O’Malley was asked whether he believed Cardinal Bernard Law, his predecessor who became the public face of the Church’s child sexual abuse scandals, would be welcomed into heaven.
Law died in Rome on Wednesday, and is largely remembered for his damning cover-up of clergy sexual abuse.
O’Malley told reporters that he hoped everyone would be welcomed into heaven – while also adding that he was not the one to judge. He also said that there was more to Law than his mistakes – a means of acknowledging the obvious, while also pulling a page from Shakespeare in an effort to perhaps signal that discretion is the better part of valor.
While Law’s death did not exactly elicit the sounds of silence that some had predicted, and indeed, some had even hoped for, it was by no means the usual fanfare that typically surrounds the death of a United States cardinal.
When Cardinal William Keeler, who led the archdiocese of Baltimore from 1989 to 2007, died in March of this year, his death was met with an outpouring of tributes from fellow U.S. bishops. In the days following his death, Keeler received a grand send-off with his reposed body given viewings at two locations, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York served as homilist for the funeral mass.
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