Thanks in part to the global nature of the Internet, supporters began enlisting from around the country and the world—in one weekend in April, twelve hundred people signed up as members of the group. They began planning a convention, raising money to hire staff, figuring out how to create an international organization, meeting with survivors, and setting up a fund for Catholics unwilling to route charitable contributions through the cardinal. “I consider myself a committed Christian and Catholic, and feel that the clergy, and most especially our bishops, must start listening to those of us they describe as laymen,” said Richard W. Rohrbacher of San Joaquin, California.
Theologians saw something remarkable happening — the clergy sexual abuse crisis had energized Catholics who had long remained silent. “There have always been people on the activist agenda who have wanted to change the Church, either on the left or on the right, and who haven't had much impact, but this crisis has moved the broad middle of the Church, people who have been pretty content and have been complacent,” said Boston College Theology Department chairman Stephen J. Pope. “There are a lot of mainstream, middle-of-the-road Catholics who are feeling called to be active in the Church in a new way, and that's one of the significant elements of this crisis.”
But none of them seemed sure exactly where they were heading. “I don't know what's going to happen in the end, but this is a very important time,” said Gisela Morales-Barreto, a psychologist with the Boston Public Health Commission and a parishioner at Our Lady Help of Christians in Newton. “These sexual abuse victims endured horrific pain and trauma, and the good that is coming out of it is people coming together to support them, and looking for change in the Church while keeping faith alive. As always happens, from evil comes good.”
O
ne December morning, Friday the 13th, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law sat down at the Vatican with Pope John Paul II and told him he was ready to resign.
A year of revelations had taken an extraordinary toll on the man who was once mentioned as a possible pope. The story that began with John J. Geoghan had come to include so many characters that few people could keep track. More than one hundred accused priests. An estimated five hundred men and women suing the archdiocese. A possible price tag of $100 million.
The steady drip of revelations, fueled in part by victims’ lawyers who succeeded in forcing the Church to turn over its files on abusive priests, was simply too much for Boston Catholics to stomach. By early December 2002, newly released documents had shown allegations that a priest had terrorized and beaten his housekeeper, another had traded cocaine for sex, and a third had enticed young girls by claiming to be “the second coming of Christ.” The clamor for Law's resignation was deafening, from Voice of the Faithful and throughout the archdiocese. But the loudest voices came from the most unexpected quarter: fifty-eight priests, who signed a letter saying it was time for Law to quit.
As the furor intensified, Law traveled to Washington for a meeting with the pope's apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, who was the Vatican's top emissary to the United States. Law told Montalvo it was time.
“It came to be ever more clear to me that the most effective way that I might serve the Church at this moment is to resign,” Law explained a few days later.
From Washington, he had flown on to Rome, and within a few days it was over. An eighteen-year-career as Archbishop of Boston ended with a terse legalistic statement from the Vatican that made no reference to priests, children, or the crisis in the Church. In a perfunctory list of the pope's activities that day, the Holy See declared that the pope “accepted the resignation from the pastoral care of the archdiocese of Boston, U.S.A. presented by Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, in accordance with Canon 401, para. 2, of the Code of Canon Law.”
Over the course of a year that Law had described as a “nightmare,” the crisis had reached down into the pews and up to the papacy, ultimately forcing the Church to rethink its whole approach to abusive priests in an effort to protect children and placate an angry public.
Laypeople and clergy struggled to deal with the fallout. As the intensity of the crisis waned, the Church woke up with a hangover: fewer people at Mass and less money in the collection basket.
The crisis seeped deep into American popular culture, transforming how Catholicism was viewed and treated. Catholic priest jokes became a staple of late-night television and were traded even at Catholic social gatherings. Abusive priest and abused altar boy costumes were featured at Halloween parties. At a fall football game between Columbia and Fordham, the Columbia announcer taunted his Jesuit-educated rivals with a crude joke about clergy sexual abuse. By November, a network television drama,
The Practice,
had featured a protagonist who leaves the Catholic Church over the crisis. The most popular movie in Mexico,
El Crimen del Padre Amaro,
was a tawdry melodrama about a handsome priest who has an affair with his housekeeper and her daughter. And despite objections from the Vatican, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival went to a Scottish film,
The Magdalene Sisters,
about abusive nuns in Ireland.
Although incidents of abuse by priests were reported throughout the Catholic world, the scandal resonated most deeply in English-speaking developed countries, such as the United States, Canada, Britain, and Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, one of the most Catholic countries in Europe, the Church's attempt to reform itself and minimize the scandal with a handpicked blue-ribbon commission was overwhelmed by public outrage, especially after a documentary on the state-run broadcast service showed the extent of the problem and the Church's cover-up in Dublin. The Irish government, which had once afforded the Catholic Church a “special position” in the country's 1937 constitution, decided the Church was incapable of policing itself and set up its own inquiry.
Nonetheless, for a lime it had seemed as if Law might be able to stage a recovery. After months in the bunker, he attempted to reintroduce himself to the public, a chastened man who now understood the incorrigibility of abusers and the importance of protecting children. In Dallas and Toronto, he met for five minutes each with newspaper and television reporters from Boston, testing the waters for reentry into the public eye. He settled eighty-four Geoghan lawsuits, for a relatively affordable $10 million — far less than initially anticipated. Endeavoring to address the archdiocese's increasing financial woes, Law won a loan of up to $38 million from the Knights of Columbus.
Law's reemergence really seemed to accelerate in early October, when he showed up at the dedication of the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge spanning the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, sitting patiently as Bruce Springsteen told a story about meeting the pope. In some ways, the appearance was unremarkable — Law was close to Zakim, who until his death had been the executive director of the New England regional office of the Anti-Defamation League. But considering that Law had canceled all his 2002 graduation speeches and turned down an honorary degree for fear of being a distraction, the highly visible appearance reflected a new level of comfort; the cardinal could show up in public without attracting a horde of hecklers.
Four days after the bridge dedication, Law held a special Mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross for striking Boston janitors. Again, such an event would not have been unusual a year earlier, but Law's once-loud voice on public policy had almost entirely disappeared, so for him to weigh in on a labor dispute took on new significance. By the time of the November bishops’ meeting in Washington, Law was clearly ready to return to normal. He walked through the halls, shaking hands with his brother bishops, even receiving a round of applause for his three years of service as chairman of the bishops’ international policy committee. Most remarkably, after months of being held up as an example of moral turpitude, he led the bishops in two days of debate over the pressing moral question of the day — whether the United States would be justified in invading Iraq — and then he showed up at two news conferences to discuss the possibility of military action.
When Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was asked why he chose Law to lead the discussion, he cited Law's chairmanship of the international policy committee. “He has an outstanding record on being knowledgeable, being informed, and being committed,” Gregory said. And Bishop Michael D. Pfeifer of San Angelo, Texas, who triggered the Iraq discussion by declaring that he had been “astounded” to see no mention of the possible war on the bishops’ agenda, said of Law: “It's good to see that he can talk in another forum, other than the forum of sexual abuse. He has a lot of skills and expertise. He will do a good job.”
Law changed his approach toward priests and laypeople, meeting with large groups of archdiocesan clergy, as well as with the leadership of Voice of the Faithful.
Most dramatically, Law changed his approach to victims.
One crisp, clear night in the fall, Law rode in his black Mercury Marquis to the small northeastern Massachusetts town of Dracut, where he slipped quietly into the basement of a six-year-old A-frame church. There, gathered around several folding tables with white tablecloths, coffee, and a few plates of cookies, were seventy-five men and women who shared one dark secret: their lives had been shattered by Rev. Joseph E. Birmingham's fondness for young boys.
Some were among the fifty men who had accused Birmingham of molesting them during a history of assignments that must have seemed like a fantasy for someone with a hankering for sex with minors: six parishes over three decades, plus a job as the chaplain at a juvenile court. Others were friends or relatives of the victims; six people in the room said they had lost someone to suicide because of Birmingham's behavior.
Law, dressed in a simple black cassock, wasted little time getting to the point.
“Apology is a weak thing, but I don't know how else to begin,” he said. “I beg your forgiveness, and I understand that can be a very difficult thing to give, because the hurt is so deep, the memory so raw, and the wound so searing.”
The Dracut meeting, at which victims, one by one, got up to tell Law about their hurt and their pain, was a signal moment for the cardinal and, by extension, the Church in America. Law's actions had sparked the biggest crisis in the Church's history; now he was endeavoring to work his way out.
The cardinal's relationship with the alleged victims of Father Birmingham, like his relationship with victims of other priests, had been terrible. They blamed Law and his predecessors for failing to remove Birmingham from ministry, despite multiple complaints about the priest's behavior. One of Birmingham's alleged victims, Thomas Blanchette, claimed that Law, after celebrating Birmingham's funeral Mass, had attempted to prevent Blanchette from talking about his abuse by invoking the seal of the confessional. And then, after the clergy sex abuse scandal exploded in early 2002, after Law had declared himself eager to talk with victims, Blanchette had arrived at Law's doorstep, only to be turned away.
But the Birmingham victims were unusually well organized and had formed a support group, Survivors of Joseph Birmingham, that would not go away. Two of the group's leaders, Olan Horne and David Lyko, at first spurned in their requests to meet with Law, won access to the archbishop in midsummer and then asked him to come meet with their group.
“We wanted to speak to him because we thought it would be important for him to get an unfiltered view of a victim and the impact the abuse had,” Home said. “He has to see the devastation and peripheral fallout that sex abuse has caused.”
In the fall, Law began apologizing with far more personal language than he had used previously. At the request of the victims he met in Dracut, he issued a dramatic public apology at the Cathedral in October, for the first time seeming to accept personal responsibility for mishandling child abusers.
“I did assign priests who had committed sexual abuse,” he said, at times choking up. “… The forgiving love of God gives me the courage to beg forgiveness of those who have suffered because of what I did. Once again, I want to acknowledge publicly my responsibility for decisions which I now see were clearly wrong…. I acknowledge my own responsibility for decisions which led to intense suffering. While that suffering was never intended, it could have been avoided, had I acted differently.”
Law's spokeswoman, Donna M. Morrissey, described a change in the cardinal's behavior. “We're in a lot different place today than we were earlier this year,” she said in late October. “Openness, and speaking publicly about what we're doing, hopefully will add to the healing process. We've made some sweeping policy changes, we have a broad-reaching education and prevention curriculum we're embarking on, and we have dramatically increased our outreach and support to victim-survivors. This isn't about public relations, it's about doing the right thing.”
Nationally, too, the American bishops had been trying to make amends, starting with their annual spring meeting in Dallas. When the bishops arrived, they were greeted by the kind of circus that normally attends a presidential convention: seven hundred reporters and producers and camera crews; theologians and laypeople and priests and nuns; protesters representing the full spectrum of causes lined up outside the Fairmont Hotel beside the television tents and the small army of police.
Inside, Bishop Gregory, who the previous November had been elected as the first black president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, set about trying to steer the bishops through the crisis.
“My brother bishops, my brothers and sisters in Christ,” Gregory intoned. “The Catholic Church in the United States is in a very grave crisis, perhaps the gravest we have faced. This crisis is not about a lack of faith in God. The crisis, in truth, is about a profound loss of confidence by the faithful in our leadership as shepherds, because of our failures in addressing the crime of the sexual abuse of children and young people by priests and Church personnel. What we are facing is not a breakdown in belief, but a rupture in our relationship as bishops with the faithful. And this breakdown is understandable. We did not go far enough to ensure that every child and minor was safe from sexual abuse. Rightfully, the faithful are questioning why we failed to take the necessary steps.”