| His Eminence Bernard Francis Law |
|
|---|---|
| Archpriest Emeritus of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore | |
| See | Boston (Emeritus) |
| Enthroned | March 23, 1984 |
| Reign ended | 21 November 2011 |
| Predecessor | Humberto Sousa Medeiros |
| Successor | Seán Patrick O'Malley |
| Other posts | Archbishop of Boston (1984-2002) Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau (1973-84) |
| Orders | |
| Ordination | May 21, 1961 |
| Consecration | December 5, 1973 |
| Created Cardinal | May 25, 1985 |
| Personal details | |
| Born | November 4, 1931 Torreón, Mexico |
Bernard Francis Law (born November 4, 1931) is an American Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He is the Archbishop emeritus of Boston, member of the Roman Curia, archpriest emeritus of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, and titular Cardinal Priest of Santa Susanna, the American Catholic church in Rome.
He resigned as archbishop of Boston on December 13, 2002, in response to the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal after Church documents were revealed which suggested he had covered up sexual abuse committed by priests in his archdiocese.
Pope John Paul II in 2004 appointed him Archpriest of the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome. Law resigned from this position in November 2011.
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Law, an only child, was born in Torreón, Mexico on November 4, 1931. His father was a US Army pilot in World War I, and had moved to Torreón to run an airline. His mother, Helen, was a convert to Roman Catholicism from Presbyterianism.
He attended schools in New York, Florida, Georgia, and Barranquilla (Colombia), and graduated from Charlotte Amalie High School in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.
He graduated from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a major in medieval history, before entering priesthood studies at St. Joseph Seminary in St. Benedict, Louisiana, from 1953 to 1955, and the Pontifical College Josephinum in Worthington, Ohio, from 1955 to 1961.
On May 21, 1961 Law was ordained a priest and worked as a priest of Natchez-Jackson, Mississippi. He served two years as an assistant pastor of St. Paul's Catholic Church in Vicksburg, and was made the editor of the Mississippi Register, the diocesan newspaper. He also held several other diocesan posts from 1963 to 1968, including director of the family life bureau and spiritual director of the minor seminary.
Law was a civil rights activist.[1][2] He was a member of the Mississippi Leadership Conference and Mississippi Human Relations Council.[2] For his civil rights activities and his strong positions on civil rights in the Mississippi Register, of which he was editor, he received death threats.[2][3] The newspaper lost many subscribers for whom his civil rights stance was repugnant.[3]
Charles Evers, activist and brother of Medger Evers (activist assassinated in 1963), praised Law and said he acted “not for the Negro, but for justice and what is right.”[3]
Law's civil rights activity led him to develop ties with Protestant church leaders and he received national attention for his work for ecumenism[3] and in 1968 he was tapped for his first national post, as executive director of the U.S. Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.[3]
Pope Paul VI named him bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau on October 22, 1973 and he was ordained as a bishop on 5 December 1973. Law's predecessor in Springfield-Cape Girardeau was William Wakefield Baum, another future cardinal.
In 1975, he made the news when he arranged for the resettlement in his diocese of one hundred and sixty-six Vietnamese refugees who had arrived in the United States, and who were members of a Vietnamese religious order, the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix.
In continuing his ecumenical work, Law formed the Missouri Christian Leadership Conference. He was made a member of the Vatican's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and served from 1976 to 1981 as a consultor to its Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. In the late 1970s, Law would also chair the U.S. bishops' Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
In 1981, Law was named the Vatican delegate to develop and oversee a program instituted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in which U.S. Episcopal priests would be accepted into the Catholic priesthood. In the program's first year sixty-four Episcopal priests applied for acceptance. This brought married priests with their families into U.S. Roman Catholic dioceses for the first time (Eastern Catholic Churches, in keeping with their own traditions, have ordained married men to the priesthood for centuries).
In this period Law was also a pro-life activist and spoke out against abortion. During the 1984 presidential race, when Geraldine Ferraro, who was a Roman Catholic, was the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Law and then Archbishop of New York John Joseph O'Connor both denounced her support of abortion rights for women. Law called abortion "the critical issue of the moment".
| Styles of Bernard Francis Law |
|
|---|---|
| Reference style | His Eminence |
| Spoken style | Your Eminence |
| Informal style | Cardinal |
| See | Boston (Emeritus) |
On January 11, 1984, Cardinal Law was appointed Archbishop of Boston, by Pope John Paul II. He was installed as Archbishop on March 23, 1984.
Only a little over a year later on May 25, 1985, he was elevated in consistory as a member of the College of Cardinals, where he was also appointed the Cardinal-Priest of the Titulus S. Susannae.
It was his speech at the 1985 Synod of Bishops marking the 20th anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council, that led to development of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in which Law oversaw the first draft of the English translation.
In the mid-1980s, Law chaired the bishops' Committee on Pastoral Research and Practices at the time it distributed a major study report on Freemasonry. The bishops' report concluded that "the principles and basic rituals of Masonry embody a naturalistic religion, active participation in which is incompatible with Christian faith and practice."
In 1989 and 1990 Law visited Cuba. He met with Fidel Castro in 1990 and in January 1998 he led a delegation of two hundred and forty Bostonians to Cuba during the papal visit there. In 2000 he was part of an inter-American delegation of bishops that met with Castro for more than four hours.
During his time as Archbishop he continued to oppose abortion. However, in 1995, when John Salvi attacked two Boston abortion clinics, he urged a moratorium on clinic protests.
Cardinal Law's reign as Archbishop of Boston began in popularity but quickly declined into turbulence towards the end of his term. Allegations and reports of sexual misconduct by priests of the Archdiocese of Boston became widespread causing Roman Catholics in other dioceses of the United States to investigate similar situations there. Cardinal Law's actions and inactions prompted public scrutiny of all members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the steps they had taken in response to past and current allegations of sexual misconduct at the hands of priests. The events in the Archdiocese of Boston exploded into a national Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal.
Under questioning, the cardinal stated that, when a priest committed a sex crime, his practice was to seek the analysis of psychiatrists, clinicians and therapists in residential treatment centers before deciding whether to return a priest accused of sexually abusing a child to the pulpit.
Cardinal Law became the first individual shown to have actively participated in the cover-up of child molestation.[4] Despite substantial amounts of documentation that demonstrated his deep involvement with covering up the molestation of thousands of children, Law refused to step down as Archbishop of Boston. After he left Boston, there remained a significant number of undisclosed priests in the Boston area who confessed to molesting boys, and who continue to work as priests. Some have criticized Law for perpetuating this situation by declining to disclose the names of priests accused of sexual abuse during his tenure as Archbishop.[4]
The Archdiocese closed sixty-five parishes before Cardinal Law stepped down from service.
Law submitted his resignation as Archbishop of Boston to the Vatican and Pope John Paul II accepted his resignation on December 13, 2002. He remained a Cardinal and an Archbishop, and was eventually succeeded in Boston in 2003 by Sean O'Malley, O.F.M. Cap..
In a statement and apology Cardinal Law said, "To all those who have suffered from my shortcomings and mistakes I both apologize and from them beg forgiveness". He remained cardinal, which is a separate appointment, and participated in the 2005 papal conclave.
In December 2002, Cardinal Law left Boston. It is often alleged that he left just hours before state troopers arrived with subpoenas seeking his grand jury testimony; however, he had previously given evidence before two grand juries and been fully investigated by the state attorney general and the 5 district attorneys in the counties in which the Archdiocese operates. When the state attorney general issued his report entitled Child Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston (July 23, 2003) he severely criticised Law but he did not allege that Law had tried to evade investigation and he did state that Law had not broken any laws.[5] In May 2004, John Paul II appointed Law to a post in Rome, putting him in charge of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, with the title of Archpriest.[6] He is also a member of the Congregations for the Oriental Churches, the Clergy, Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, Evangelisation of Peoples, Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, Catholic Education, Bishops as well as the Pontifical Council for the Family. He held membership in all these congregations and of the council before resigning from the governance of the Archdiocese of Boston, and at that time was also a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture.[7]
Law reached age 80 on November 4, 2011 and lost the right to participate in any papal conclave and on the same day he ceased to hold his various Curial memberships. He remained as archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore until 21 November 2011, when Archbishop Santos Abril y Castelló was appointed as the new archpriest.
| Episcopal lineage | |
| Consecrated by: | Joseph Bernard Brunini |
| Consecrator of | |
|---|---|
| Bishop | Date of consecration |
| Tomás Andrés Mauro Muldoon | October 8, 1984 |
| Robert Joseph Banks | September 19, 1985 |
| Roberto González Nieves | October 3, 1988 |
| John Richard McNamara | May 21, 1992 |
| John Patrick Boles | May 21, 1992 |
| John Brendan McCormack | December 27, 1995 |
| William Francis Murphy | December 27, 1995 |
| Francis Xavier Irwin | September 17, 1996 |
| Emilio Simeon Alluè | September 17, 1996 |
| Richard Joseph Malone | March 1, 2000 |
| Walter James Edyvean | September 14, 2001 |
| Richard Gerard Lennon | September 14, 2001 |
| Catholic Church titles | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by William Wakefield Baum |
Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau 1973–1984 |
Succeeded by John Joseph Leibrecht |
| Preceded by Humberto Sousa Medeiros |
Archbishop of Boston 1984–2002 |
Succeeded by Sean O'Malley, OFM Cap |
| Preceded by Carlo Furno |
Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore 27 May 2004–21 November 2011 |
Succeeded by Santos Abril y Castelló |