Betrayal (23 page)

The racial climate in Boston had cooled considerably by the time Law arrived. The passion Law once brought to the civil rights movement as a young priest, he devoted to the pro-life movement once he became part of the hierarchy. In his first speech as archbishop in Boston in March 1984, Law described abortion as a “national disgrace” and the “primordial evil of our time.” Law and Cardinal O'Connor of New York, appointed as cardinals together in 1985, became the American tag team preaching Pope John Paul II's orthodoxy, lecturing the laity that abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and divorce were sins, even though polls showed a majority of Catholics considered those issues matters of personal conscience. The two cardinals became popularly known as “Law and Order,” laying down the Pope's law and ordering the laity to not even discuss the idea of women becoming priests or priests getting married or ending priestly celibacy.

Law's aggressive stance on abortion alienated many liberal Boston Catholics. Boston's archbishop traditionally addresses the graduating class at Boston College every year, and O'Connor said Law's first address at the 1984 commencement set the tone for what would be a strained relationship between Law and the preeminent Catholic university in New England. Two years later, he told another Boston College graduating class that the Jesuit school was losing its Catholic identity. “I was there, in the audience, and I remember people just gasping, listening to their archbishop say that BC had moved away from the Catholic tradition, that it was no longer a Catholic college, that changes had to be made. He alienated a lot of BC graduates, and yet it was a core of BC graduates who were his biggest financial backers,” O'Connor said.

Shortly after, he told a group of Catholic businessmen that they had “an obligation” to do more than just say they opposed abortion. A month later, Law made a dramatic and unprecedented appearance at a State House pro-life rally just as the Massachusetts legislature was about to consider an amendment that would restrict or prohibit abortion. Some suggested he was meddling with the constitutional separation of church and state. “If a preacher isn't meddling, he isn't really preaching,” said Law, sounding like one of the Pentecostal preachers he counted as friends in the Deep South.

Thomas P. O'Neill III, the son of the late U.S. Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O'Neill Jr., remembered that Law's intolerance of the liberal views held by many Boston Catholics irked not only his generation but his father's. “It's interesting to look at the two of them in comparison,” said O'Neill, a former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts who went on to found a successful public relations company. “The archbishop who came to Boston had a certain gravitas, especially on civil rights. But I've watched a lot of people come to power and have seen how power corrupts them and isolates them, cuts them off. My dad became big and powerful, but he never lost the common touch. He was never isolated from ordinary people, and he always knew what they thought. The cardinal came in and never understood the city, and that failure to understand the city eventually isolated him. It's a city that takes its tribalism seriously, and its Catholicism seriously. But it opens its arms to the disadvantaged and the dispossessed. And to be told, in this city, that you were somehow less a Catholic because you didn't agree with the Church's position on abortion or contraception was offensive.

“Cardinal Law came in here and judged people and politicians on one issue: abortion. It was almost as if the cardinal came in and said, ‘Boston, you've had it your way, but there's a new Pope, there's a new cardinal, there's a new conservatism, and we're here. You're too progressive, you're too liberal And it's going to change.’”

On December 30, 1994, a Catholic zealot named John Salvi walked into an abortion clinic in the Boston suburb of Brookline, the town where John R Kennedy was born, and shot a receptionist dead. He went to a second clinic and killed another receptionist. Shortly after Salvi opened fire, Law answered the phone in the chancery. Barbara Thorp, director of the archdiocese's Pro-Lite Office, was on the other end, crying. When Thorp finished explaining what had happened, the cardinal put down the phone and headed straight into his private chapel to pray and to write down his response to the murders. Law called for a moratorium on protests outside abortion clinics. Antiabortion activists were furious, saying Law gave ammunition to those who claimed Operation Rescue and other antiabortion demonstrators who took their protests and heated rhetoric to clinics were responsible for the murderous exploits of those like Salvi, Law's prohibition on protests was short lived — he lifted it five months later — but it showed how profoundly the murders had shaken him.

Even abortion rights activists gave Law credit for changing his rhetoric over the years. “If I had to produce lists of inflammatory language, my O'Connor list would be ten times longer than my Law list,” said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, a Washington lobbying group.

When he was a priest in the Deep South and later a bishop in Missouri, Law's commitment to ecumenism was as much an act of pragmatism as a theological imperative. In both places, Catholics were heavily outnumbered by Protestants, some of them hostile. These were places where the Ku Klux Klan once hated Catholics almost as much as they hated blacks. In Jackson, his first diocese, Catholics made up less than 3 percent of the population. In Missouri, they amounted to less than 5 percent. But in Boston, the Catholics were in the majority. Rather than the put-upon minority they were in other parts of the country, Catholics had power in Boston and sometimes used it to oppress others.

As he did in the Bible Bell, Law reached out to Protestants in Boston. But he especially reached out to Jews. This was, after all, a town where Nat Hentoff recalled in his memoir,
Boston Boy,
that Irish and Italian kids were taught in Catholic schools that the Jews killed Jesus Christ. Such teachings encouraged anti-Semitism. Gangs of Catholic boys would seek revenge on Jewish kids. Like many of his peers, Hentoff got beat up by the gangs. If a Boston cop intervened, he would be more likely to chastise the Jewish kid for being stupid enough to let himself get ambushed than he would be to hold the attackers accountable.

It was against that historical backdrop that Law sought to engage the Jews of Boston. They responded to him enthusiastically. “He really cares, and he really gets it,” said Leonard Zakim, the longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League of New England. “Cardinal Law understands anti-Semitism and the importance of the Church to confront it.”

When Zakim died of cancer at forty-six, Law leaned on an initially reluctant governor Paul Cellucci to name a new bridge spanning the Charles River after Zakim. Cellucci acquiesced this time. A year before, in 1999, Cellucci refused to bow to the cardinal's demands when Law urged the governor to reconsider the nomination of two judges. The cardinal implied that the women, Margaret Marshall and Judith Cowin, were anti-Catholic and had an “attitude and mentality which I find troubling.”

Law especially wanted to derail Marshall's elevation to chief justice of the state's highest court. Marshall, like Law, had a long commitment to racial justice. She came to prominence in her native South Africa while leading college students opposed to apartheid and was banned from her own country for her trouble. But she ran afoul of the cardinal in her job before she became a judge, when she rebuked one of the cardinal's closest advisers. That adviser, Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon, was ordered by Marshall, then Harvard's chief legal counsel, to stop using Harvard stationery in her antiabortion efforts.

In the wake of the Father Porter scandal, Cardinal Law announced that he had appointed a nine-member board, including Iaypcople, that would recommend to him action to be taken against priests accused of what he called “the sin of sexual abuse.” Still, the cardinal was determined to keep the Church's dirty laundry indoors. He ignored pleas that he institute a policy that would compel the archdiocese to turn allegations against priests over to civil authorities, and he envisioned returning offenders, once they had been treated, to parishes.

In May 1993, as the archdiocese tried to get a better handle on its abusive priests, the cardinal summoned to his residence a group of eminent experts in the field of child sexual abuse, a pair of husband-and-wife teams who were nationally known for their work.

It was a working lunch. Carolyn Newbergcr, a child psychologist, and her husband, Eli, a pediatrician, sat at the end of a large table with Ted and Carol Nadelson, a pair of well-regarded psychiatrists. At the other end of the table, the cardinal sat with the two priests, William F. Murphy and John B. McCormack, who were his point men in trying to get on top of the problem of priests abusing minors. “The scene struck me as something out of the Middle Ages,” Carolyn Newberger recalled. “You had all these priests in clerical garb on one side, all these secular Jewish experts on the other, and all these nuns serving us.”

The Jewish doctors respected the cardinal, in part because of his well-documented outreach to the Jewish community. They were flattered when Law explained that he had sought them out because they were nationally recognized experts in the field of pedophilia and the sexual abuse of minors. Carol Nadelson was the first female president of the American Psychiatric Association. But they realized early on, before the appetizers were cleared away, that the cardinal wasn't especially receptive to what they were telling him.

“The four of us were on the same page,” said Carolyn Newberger. “We told them that the way they had handled these cases was wrong and was endangering children. We stressed the importance of reporting these cases to the civil authorities. And we told them that, no matter what they thought about priests having been cured or having put these problems behind them, there was a strong likelihood of a repeat of this behavior.”

To illustrate their point, Newberger spoke at length about a case in Arizona. A boy who had been abused at a very young age was adopted by a family and was doing well until a priest molested the child again. Another priest had walked in while the abuse was occurring, but walked out without intervening.

“The boy went on to molest his own siblings,” said Newberger. “I used the case to emphasize the insidiousness of this abuse, how devastating it is not just to the individual child, but to the extended family. I tried not only to emphasize the facts of the case but to engage the cardinal and the other priests there to empathize with the victim.”

But neither Newberger nor her colleagues sensed they were getting through on the human level. While the experts talked about the real world, the priests seemed preoccupied with a higher realm.

“The cardinal said canon law had to be considered. We just looked at one another. Whatever we had just told him didn't seem to be registering,” Newberger said. “Canon law was irrelevant to us. Children were being abused. Sexual predators were being protected. Canon law should have nothing to do with it. But they were determined to keep this problem, and their response to it, within their culture.”

At the end of lunch, Newberger and the other experts offered to help the cardinal shape a new approach to aggressively rooting out the sexual abuse of minors by priests. Newberger said the cardinal smiled at them and looked deeply into their eyes as he shook their hands, thanking them. But he never contacted any of them again.

“I'm not Catholic, but I feel betrayed,” Carolyn Newberger said. “I look to spiritual leaders of all faiths to be moral. And the Church's response to this problem has not been moral. I'm angry in that the cardinal asked for our advice and then ignored it.”

In an ironic twist, Newberger was sought out by someone else: David Deakin, the prosecutor in charge of the sexual abuse unit in the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office in Boston. Now Newberger is a consultant for Boston prosecutors. The archdiocese's loss, it seems, was the prosecution's gain.

The next time the cardinal summoned a group to his residence to discuss his handling of sexually abusive priests, he expected a more sympathetic audience. In fact, many of the people called in on the morning of February 19,2002, had been with Law in Rome when he was elevated to cardinal seventeen years earlier. They were among those who stood patiently in line for up to two hours, on a warm spring night, to shake hands with their new cardinal.

Now, as they once again greeted Law, they pondered the scandal that threatened his future and their Church. The meeting had been put together by Dr. Michael Collins, who heads the archdiocese's hospital system, and Jack Connors Jr., the founder of the biggest advertising agency Boston had ever produced and a longtime mover and shaker in Catholic philanthropic circles. Connors had been a confidant of the cardinal's since Law arrived in Boston, and as the storm clouds swirled around Law in the wake of the Geoghan disclosures, Connors remained protective and supportive of the cardinal.

Collins and Connors had assembled a group of savvy, successful spin doctors, lawyers, and businesspeople to advise the cardinal on how to steer his way through the burgeoning crisis. It was a Who's Who of the Boston Catholic elite: Tom O'Neill; James Brett, a former state representative who heads a business group called the New England Council; R. Robert Popeo, a lawyer and one of the city's top litigators and power brokers; William Bulger, president of the University of Massachusetts; John L. Harrington, former CEO of the Red Sox; John Hamill, the CEO of Sovereign Bank in New England; Rev. William Leahy, president of Boston College; Paul La Camera, president and general manager of WCVB-TV, the ABC affiliate in Boston; Jack Shaughnessy Sr., whose success in the construction equipment business made him among the archdiocese's most generous patrons; John Drew, the head of the World Trade Center in Boston. The only woman at the table, Donna Latson Gittens, head of one of the region's few black-run marketing firms, was also the only person who wasn't white. The only non-Catholic at the table was Jeffrey Rudman, a Jewish lawyer with the white-shoe law firm of Hale and Dorr, who had offered his services pro bono in appreciation of Law's “resolute opposition to anti-Semitism.” Many of those called to the meeting were wealthy, people who gave and raised millions for the Church,