Situated in the Brighton section of Boston, the chancery is the headquarters of the archdiocese. For eighteen years, the chancery and the cardinal's adjacent residence had been the places where haw presided over a $50–million-a-year operation, with hundreds of millions more in real estate, seeing to every detail, working the phones, sometimes two at a time, and cajoling rich Catholics to pony up to pay for the Church's schools, hospitals, and outreach programs. By January 2002, in the middle of what would be his winter of discontent, Law's compound had become his sanctuary— in effect a bunker. Within a few months of the story breaking, Law was a virtual prisoner, working all day and seldom venturing outside the splendor of his Italian Renaissance residence at night.
On the
Tonight Show,
Jay Leno used the scandal as fodder for his monologues, referring to the archbishop of his family's old parish, St. Augustine's in Andover, north of Boston, as “Cardinal Above the Law.” Just outside his windows, Law could see protesters holding signs, demanding his resignation or indictment. Radio shock jocks, desperate for an audience, began doing live remotes outside the chancery.
Honk if you want the cardinal to resign.
It wasn't supposed to end this way.
Bernard Francis Law was born in 1931, in Torreón, Mexico, a place that, like others, was not home but was a way station in a childhood where moving was common. His father was a military and sometime commercial pilot, a job that caused the family to move six times while Law was young. His father was Catholic. His mother, Helen, to whom Law was devoted, was a Presbyterian who converted to Catholicism. Law went to high school in St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. If some children find frequent moves unsettling, Law said he recalled those nomadic years as exciting and enlightening. His parents, he said, enthusiastically embraced different cultures and settings. Law too was adaptable. One of the few whites at Charlotte Amalie High School in St. Thomas, he was elected senior class president by his mostly black classmates.
A good student, Law earned his way to Harvard, rooming with two Jews and a Southern Baptist. By his senior year, he had decided he wanted to become a priest. His four undergraduate years at Harvard would look easy in hindsight. Eight more years of study — two at a Benedictine monastery in Louisiana, six at a pontifical college in Ohio — would follow. Only twelve of twenty seminarians in his class made it.
After his ordination, Law's first parish assignment brought him to Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1961, as the civil rights movement gained momentum and John P. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, vowed to stand up to racists. Law took over as editor of the diocesan newspaper, using its columns to champion racial justice. Some local bigots didn't take kindly to the uppity priest, and it wasn't long before Law got death threats. But he did not back down.
In his twenty-fifth anniversary report to Harvard, Law looked back on those days in Mississippi as being not in the eye of a gathering storm but in the crucible of history. “To have been part of that significant moment of our history is in itself a grace, a gift,” he wrote.
Law was an ambitious priest. He confided to friends in Mississippi that one of his goals was to become the first American pope. As someone who was always around and comfortable with black people, Law's position on civil rights was natural. But he also longed to get involved in the Church's nascent efforts to foster ecumenism. In 1968 he was made executive director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, spending a few years in Washington, D.C.
In 1973 he was made a bishop and assigned to the Springfield diocese in the Missouri Ozarks. “He's a strategic leader, more an Eisenhower than a Patton,” said Terry Meek, a prominent Catholic businessman in Springfield, But Law remained idealistic. “He's a dreamer, a visionary, and at times not that practical,” said Rev. Philip Bucher, who served under Law in the Missouri diocese, “It's all overwhelming unless he has a good core of people around him who take suggestions for what they're worth.”
After ten years in Missouri, where he was the leader of 47,000 Catholics, 90 priests, and 63 parishes, Law was sent to Boston to preside over 2 million Catholics, 1,100 priests, and 408 parishes. It was like going from running a car dealership to running General Motors. The death of Cardinal Medeiros in Boston and the confidence of Pope John Paul II in Rome gave Law not only the opportunity to become archbishop of one of the largest dioceses in the United States but a real shot at even greater advancement. Law's three previous predecessors — William O'Connell, Richard Cushing, and Medeiros — had been elevated to cardinal. So when he arrived in Boston in March 1984, Law had to know that becoming a prince of the Church was only a matter of time.
He was given a warm welcome, and a wide berth. His three predecessors were considerably different characters. O'Connell was an eccentric, vainglorious man, fond of the high life, driving around town in the middle of the depression in a limousine, accompanied by his poodles. He was also part of the bricks-and-mortar brigade, as the Catholic Church in America built the churches, schools, convents, and rectories needed to house a growing congregation. Cushing, a plain-speaking populist, continued the tradition in which the archbishop of Boston acted as much like the CEO of a construction company as he did the spiritual leader of 2 million Catholics.
In his book
Bare Ruined Choirs,
Garry Wills noted that the Church's obsession with creating enough parochial schools to make the Catholic community independent of secular public education also created a career ladder for priests, monsignors, and bishops who were promoted “by virtue of business skill.” Wills contended it was this system that created a church hierarchy in America whose goal was not to help the faithful achieve eternal salvation but to achieve a healthy bottom line. “The priest had little time for theology, or for study of any sort. He adopted the businessman's no-nonsense ways and practicality,” Wills observed. “The pastor was obnoxious, not for his theology or his transitional ties but for his lack of theology and parochialism.”
By the time Cardinal Cushing died in 1970, the long growth period of the Catholic Church in America was coming to an end. Up to that point, the American Catholic Church had been dominated by the Irish. And for more than two centuries, ever since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and quickly moved up to Boston, the capital of New England was a Protestant city for a Protestant people. But that changed in the mid-nineteenth century, when Ireland's potato blight and Britain's refusal to bail out its colony sent more than 1 million Irish to the emigrant ships. Almost overnight, Boston's religious demographic changed, and by the end of the century, Boston had elected its first Irish-born mayor. The Irish used political power to take control of a city where they were initially reviled and greeted with those “No Irish Need Apply” signs.
When Italians and then Poles and other Eastern Europeans followed the Irish, they became part of an American Catholic Church that was, in essence, an Irish church. As
Boston Globe
reporter Maureen Dezell noted in her book
Irish America: Coming into Clover,
90 percent of men enrolled in American seminaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century had Irish names, while by 1900 three quarters of the American Catholic hierarchy was Irish. (Even by the 1990s, when Hispanics emerged as the biggest ethnic group in the American Catholic Church, and the Irish made up only 15 percent of the laity, a third of the priests and half of the American bishops were of Irish descent.)
Cushing's replacement, Medeiros, the son of a vegetable farmer from the Azores, could not have been more different from the two Irish priests-cum-pols O'Connell and Cushing. O'Connell and Cushing were larger than life, characters who could have been plucked out of Edwin O'Connor's novel
The Last Hurrah,
as comfortable in back rooms twisting arms as they were in confessionals handing out penance. Medeiros, by contrast, was shy, retiring, and pious, the antithesis of the bishop-as-businessman.
Within a few years of his arrival, Medeiros managed to alienate the heart of the archdiocese, the mostly Irish and Italian working class of Boston, by ordering that any student suspected of being part of the “white flight” to avoid court-ordered desegregation of the city's public schools was not to be allowed into Catholic schools. Medeiros's directive was largely ignored. The archdiocese's schools swelled in numbers, and many Boston Catholics swelled in resentment, seeing Medeiros as unfairly judging them as racist when many simply wanted to avoid the chaos of busing that no one in the wealthy suburbs had to endure.
Thomas H. O'Connor, a professor of history at Boston College and author of
Boston Catholics,
said Medeiros was never fully accepted in Boston. Medeiros was an outsider. He was visibly an outsider. People said, “He's not one of us.” And he knew it. He made smiling references to the fact that Cardinal Cushing was a hard act to follow and that he wouldn't try to follow him. Even Medeiros's mannerisms — the folding of his hands, the upward thrust of his eyes, the exaggerated piety — had he been in a Latino country, it would have been no big deal. But they were out of character in Boston. So there was never a good fit here.
Although he was of Irish descent, Law was not a throwback to O'Connell and Cushing so much as a change from Medeiros. He had O'Connell's administrative skills and the political savvy of Cushing, who often boasted that he and old Joe Kennedy mapped out JFK's campaign for the White House inside the chancery. He had the intellectual gravitas that his predecessors lacked. Cushing came home from the Vatican II council early, complaining he couldn't understand the Latin. And while O'Connell seemed to regard the religious component of his job as a nuisance, Law seemed almost as pious as Medeiros, but considerably more approachable and down-to-earth.
“Much of the initial reaction to Law was, ‘We got one of our own back.’ A white, blue-eyed Harvard grad. He wasn't born here, like Cushing and O'Connell, but he looked Irish. The reaction in Boston was, ‘Finally, Rome has come to its senses and sent us one of ours.’ But I think that early assessment was wrong. The longer Law stayed here, the fewer people seemed to think he was one of us,” said O'Connor. “He had a public persona and a private persona. Publicly, he's like O'Connell, very pompous in the pulpit, elongating his vowels while speaking, the gravitas, the weight of the words. But in social circles, in small groups, he would be charming and gracious and sophisticated and humorous. He was always conscious of his rank and position. He can laugh at himself, but no one else can.”
Unlike Cushing, Law was no backslapping populist. He insisted on formality. He expected his staff to call him “Your Eminence” in conversation, and they did. They also insisted that others do likewise. Law's former spokesman once chastised a reporter who referred to the cardinal as simply “Law” during a telephone conversation.
While interviewing priests for his book, O'Connor asked them to give him one word or phrase to describe Boston's cardinals. For O'Connell, it was
pompous.
For Cushing, it was
gravel-voiced.
For Medeiros, it was
pious.
But Law stumped them.
“Finally, one priest who knows Law quite well told me:
rootless.
I looked at him in surprise and asked, ‘Ruthless?’ And he said, ‘No, rootless.’ And I understood what he meant. Law doesn't call any place home. He was an army brat. He really doesn't have any roots. In that respect, he's probably the first American cardinal and archbishop we had in Boston. He was an American, not a Bostonian.”
Perhaps because he was not a native Bostonian, and not beholden to the city's ancient preoccupations and grudges, Law seemed to have a special affinity for immigrants — the Central and South Americans, the Haitians, the Vietnamese — who were the new faces of a changing Church in Boston. His history of advocating for racial and social justice, and his tireless campaigning for affordable housing for low-income families, made him a hero among immigrants. Hispanics loved a cardinal who could speak to them in fluent Spanish. When things turned sour for the cardinal, it was the immigrant groups that were his staunchest supporters.
And as the years passed, it was the old guard, not the newcomers, who came to question Law's stewardship. Critics saw him as patronizing, self-righteous, and increasingly isolated. Instead of his influence growing with his longevity, it waned.
The first priest to greet Law when he arrived in Boston, Rev. Bernard McLaughlin, then the chaplain at Logan Airport, said there was great hope when Law became archbishop, but that Law didn't fulfill his promise because he was too isolated, shut off from the flock, living in a palatial mansion, surrounded by advisers who gave him bad advice. “Boston is a village,” Rev. McLaughlin said. “I don't think the cardinal ever learned that.”
O'Connor came to share that view and said Law never appreciated the need to be out and about more, to be seen, to be a bigger part of the community, whether it was going to a Red Sox game or going to a restaurant. O'Connor remembered Law casually telling him that he had given back a lifelong ticket to the Boston Athenaeum, one of the oldest and most prestigious private libraries in the United States. “My eyebrows went up. Every archbishop has had one. They are priceless. Bishop Cheverus, Boston's first bishop, had helped found the Athenaeum and had given it his personal library. When I asked Law why he gave the ticket back, he said, ‘I never get down that way.’ He figured he didn't need it. Maybe that's a small thing to some people, but you put it all together and you see he didn't understand Boston. He just didn't get it.”
Instead of mixing with the masses, Law spent an inordinate amount of time in the office, his nerve center. It was there that O'Connor saw the Bernard Law who is a workaholic, and who is very much in charge.
“He's a compulsive micromanager,” said O'Connor. “When notes come to him, he corrects the grammar. He's very much at home in the electronic age. He's got computers and faxes. I've been talking to him, and at the same time he's on the phone, calling someone else. The people he talks to, he gives them orders. ‘Get him at his job. Get him on the golf course.’ The furious energy of the man is fascinating. And watching him in action reminded me of something a priest once told me [about Law]. He said, ‘You've got to remember that Bernie was an only child. All the toys are his. He never had to share.’”