BOSTON - Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who came to embody the priest sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the U.S. Roman Catholic Church this year, resigned yesterday, bringing relief and regret to this exhausted city.
Pope John Paul II, who met with Law at the Vatican yesterday, accepted his offer to step down as archbishop of Boston amid growing problems, including the possibility that his archdiocese might be forced to file for bankruptcy in response to multimillion-dollar civil suits brought by people claiming to have been molested by priests.
"To all those who have suffered my shortcomings and mistakes, I both apologize and from them beg forgiveness," Law said in a brief statement released in Rome. Though he made no direct mention of the victims of abuse, he has previously called molestation by priests "an appalling sin in the eyes of God."
"The particular circumstances of this time suggest a quiet departure," he concluded, asking parishioners to "keep me in your prayers."
Reaction to the long-anticipated resignation came from all corners of religious and secular life, with some priests calling Law's removal painful but necessary to begin healing, while some laymen called for a deeper shake-up of the church hierarchy.
"This was inevitable, but I'm sure a lot of priests feel no joy in this," said the Rev. Robert W. Bullock, an outspoken pastor who led the effort to draft a letter from 58 pastors that called for the cardinal's ouster.
Phil de Albuquerque, a member of Speak Truth to Power, an advocacy group for survivors of priest abuse, crowed about Law's departure. The kitchen designer has demonstrated outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross once a week during the past eight months, shouting for Law to step down even as the cardinal presided at the 11 a.m. Sunday Mass.
"It was his signature that enabled a lot of this to happen from the start," de Albuquerque said yesterday, waving a red STTP sign over his head as he stood outside the stone church in Boston's South End. "I hope he's just the first to go."
Baltimore's Cardinal William H. Keeler said the move was "an act of purification for our Church."
"In taking this step, he has been guided by his sense of accountability and guided by what he believes the Lord is calling him to do," Keeler said. "Many people have suffered. Trust has been betrayed.
"Yet, now is not the time to turn away. It is time for us to come together to answer scandal with witness and service, rededicating ourselves to lifting up Christ's call to holiness and hope."
Interim replacement
The pope appointed the Rev. Richard Gerard Lennon, the 55-year-old rector of St. John's Seminary in Brighton, Mass., to step in as interim apostolic administrator of the Boston Archdiocese. Lennon, who was ordained a priest in 1973, the same year Law was ordained a bishop, was named an auxiliary bishop last year.
He will have the power to reform the archdiocese while acting as spiritual leader to Boston's 2.1 million Catholics, according to a spokesman, the Rev. Christopher Coyne.
"He has the full authority and the rights of the archbishop of Boston," Coyne said. "He's not just a caretaker."
Law's resignation came at the end of a tumultuous week in the nation's largest Catholic archdiocese, in which a judge publicly released thousands of secret church personnel documents, papers that disclosed shocking abuse allegations, previously undisclosed financial settlements and Law's signature on records endorsing the relocation of priests accused of abuse.
Priests and laymen
Two groups voted this week to demand the resignation of the U.S. church's senior prelate, a conservative and a longtime favorite of the pope.
Fifty-eight members of the first group, the Boston Priests Forum, signed the letter asking Law to step down. Three days later, the Voice of the Faithful, a lay group of 25,000 moderate Catholics, echoed the call.
Theirs were not the first voices to demand Law resign. Earlier this year, columnist William F. Buckley Jr.; William J. Bennett, former U.S. secretary of education; and editorials in newspapers across the country made similar pleas.
The 71-year-old cardinal had fended off pressure to leave for nearly a year, since the first reports that priests accused of sexually abusing minors had been moved around like chess pieces, often landing in parishes where they had unfettered contact with young people.
Internal church papers revealed that Law knew years ago that now-defrocked priest John Geoghan was molesting children but transferred him between parishes anyway. Geoghan, now imprisoned, victimized 86 children.
The cries for Law's removal seemed to have died down in early fall, when the cardinal emerged from months of semi-seclusion. But anger escalated as the archdiocese considered filing for bankruptcy, infuriating abuse victims who feared that lawsuit settlements would be jeopardized.
Then, after Law left last week for consultations in Rome, a judge released the documents disclosing other abuse allegations, and the Rev. Paul Shanley, 71, accused of abusing boys at a church in Newton from 1979 to 1989, was freed on $75,000 bail.
Word that the pope had accepted Law's resignation was met cheerlessly by many of Boston's Catholics. James E. Post, president of the Voice of the Faithful, expressed regret.
"It was said that if there was ever to be an American pope that Cardinal Law was to be that candidate," Post said ruefully. "He has the intelligence, the foundation, and he has been a remarkable leader within the church. The fall from grace has been breathtaking to witness."
Victims speak out
Victims, speaking at impromptu news conferences around the city, found forgiveness difficult to muster.
"Finally, you did the right thing by resigning," Patrick McSorley said to television cameras, but speaking directly the Law, who remained in Rome yesterday. "I'll try to keep him in my prayers," McSorley added, "but what about the victims?"
William R. Oberle, who said he was molested when he was 12, said he regards the archbishop's resignation as a precursor to healing. "It's still too much, too little, too late," he said. "Clean house. Don't stop with the cardinal."
"He was the point man. He was responsible. He took an active role in covering up the victimizations of possibly hundreds of victims. All the money in the world, all the resignations of the persons responsible, I will never forget that," Oberle said.
Bernie McDaid, who confided in his parents after being molested as a 12-year-old in 1969, is among 53 men who claim to have been abused by the late Rev. Joseph Birmingham, a man his attorney Roderick MacLeish Jr. called "a true monster who preyed on children ... until his death in 1989."
"I'm not glad, but we're getting respect," McDaid said. "It was like a curse when we came forward. When Shanley got arrested, the moral public tilted a little toward us. The fact that Rome moved so quick shows that we're on our way."
Not every Catholic regarded Law's departure as a quick fix for the archdiocese.
"It is a major, major beginning in our journey," said Joe Gallagher, an advocate for the Coalition of Catholics and Survivors. But without continuing investigations by law enforcement and litigation by the victims, Gallagher said, he has "little reason to believe the church will reform itself in this area."
'A crucifixion'
Kathleen Heck, a member of the archdiocesan pastoral council, who had worked closely with Law during the past year to help develop a training program to detect victims of pedophilia, was disappointed to learn that he had been forced out by his critics. "I didn't think I would live to see a crucifixion," Heck said. "Truthfully, the best friend of the victims went away and a light went out this morning, not withstanding all of the mistakes he made."
Shopping across the street from the cathedral, Renata Santos, 65, could barely contain her grief at Law's departure.
"It is a terrible thing to lose a cardinal," the former missionary said in a voice heavily accented by her Portuguese mother tongue. "I'm going to write a letter to the new bishop to tell him he must disband that group, the Voice of the Faithful."
The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, editor of America, a national Catholic weekly, and an authority on church hierarchy, said the Vatican will likely appoint a high-profile churchman as a permanent replacement.
"For his successor the Vatican will need to find someone who has instant credibility in Boston with the people, the clergy and the media, someone who will be immediately recognized as capable of handling this crisis quickly and correctly," he said.
"Bishop Wilton Gregory and Archbishop Harry Flynn are obvious candidates because both have national reputations for dealing well with sexual abuse issues, and both had to clean up dioceses with serious problems," Gregory in Belleville, Ill., and Flynn in Lafayette, La.
Gregory led the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as it formulated its new sexual abuse policy, and Flynn heads the bishops' committee that drafted the new policy.
As an alternative, Reese said, the Vatican could appoint an apostolic administrator "who would clean up the problem and then leave." That job could take a year or more, he said.