Key U.S. Clerics Plan to Push for Law’s Removal

Several senior American cardinals will urge the Vatican today to ask Cardinal Bernard Law to resign as archbishop of Boston in the face of an escalating sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Two American clerics--a bishop and a cardinal--said that America’s Catholic bishops are all but unanimous in believing that Law must leave Boston for the good of the church.

The cardinal, who asked to remain anonymous, said Sunday that he had been “commissioned” by other senior prelates to take their case against Law directly to Pope John Paul II’s inner circle. He said that he, as well as others, would do so today during private meetings at the Vatican. Today’s meetings come a day before two days of talks between America’s cardinals and Vatican leaders on the abuse scandal.

“If the Holy See wants to send a strong signal of quality and standards of leadership,” the cardinal told The Times, Law “will have to be replaced. This cannot be a phaseout.” The cardinal said he did not want to undermine his efforts by publicly disclosing his name before speaking to the Vatican.

The bishop, also speaking on a confidential basis, told The Times, “Many bishops are of the mind that the healing process really can’t begin until there’s a change of leadership in Boston.”

The rare move against a fellow cardinal underscored Law’s increasingly precarious position in the wake of his handling of the scandal in his archdiocese, and the growing determination by the U.S. hierarchy to call for dramatic steps to extricate the American church from one of its worst crises in modern times.

A week ago Law flew to Rome to confer privately with the pope and other Vatican officials about his future. He returned to Boston and announced that he would continue as archbishop as long, he said, as God would permit him to serve. On Sunday, Law received a standing ovation when he told churchgoers at Holy Cross Cathedral that he wished that he could “undo the harm” caused by his handling of cases involving the sexual abuse of minors by priests.

Since the scandal erupted in January in Boston, it has spread across the country as sexual abuse allegations, many of them based on molestations going back decades, surfaced in other dioceses, including Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and West Palm Beach, Fla.

“He [Law] created the impression that nobody did anything, and that’s what infuriated a lot of us,” the cardinal said.

Father Ciro Benedettini, a Vatican spokesman, would not acknowledge or comment on continuing pressure for Law’s resignation. It is “pure speculation” that Law’s job could become a topic of discussion at the meetings this week, he said Sunday.

Other American church officials, noting that Law had met a week ago with the pope, said his tenure as archbishop was an issue between the two men only.

“I believe the question must remain in the hands of Cardinal Law, taking into account his own perception of the feelings of his priests and his parishioners and his dialogue with the Holy Father,” Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, an American in the Vatican hierarchy, told the Roman newspaper La Repubblica. “I cannot judge.”

But Bishop William S. Skylstad, archbishop of Spokane, Wash., and vice president of the U.S. bishops conference, told ABC News Sunday before leaving for Rome that Law “is in a very difficult situation.”

Earlier this month, Los Angeles’ Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, asked to comment on Law’s future, said he would find it difficult to walk down an aisle in church if he had been guilty of gross negligence.

Call to Close Loopholes

The cardinal who spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity said he hoped that Law would step down “soon.” In any case, he said, Law should not delay his resignation beyond the June meeting in Dallas of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who are poised to impose a new and mandatory protocol on all U.S. bishops for handling and preventing sexual abuse in their 195 dioceses.

The details of the protocol are to be worked out during the two-day, closed door consultation beginning Tuesday between the eight U.S. cardinal-archbishops and the pope and the highest-ranking cardinals in the Vatican. The Americans hope to win Rome’s approval for imposing binding standards on all U.S. bishops.

Mahony said he will call for worldwide standards. He said many U.S. archdioceses rely on foreign priests, some of whom are “problem priests.” Yet, he said, often their home bishops or religious order superiors fail to inform their American counterpart of a priest’s failings. A worldwide protocol would help close such loopholes.

Sex scandals in America, in which dozens of priests have been accused of abusing children, have shaken the faith of American Catholics, cost the church millions of dollars in settlements and raised questions about American bishops’ handling of investigations.

Bishops in Florida, Ireland and Poland have resigned because of the scandals. But most of the criticism has focused on Law, who allowed pedophile priests to continue their ministries. Two cases in which Boston area priests were transferred from parish to parish and continued to molest minors outraged Catholic leaders in his archdiocese, who called for his resignation and vowed to tighten their purse strings.

Now the lobbying against Law has reached the Vatican.

Talks May Backfire

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said he did not know about the effort to press the Vatican for Law’s removal. He said he was surprised to hear of it and had no immediate position on it.

“I’m not a part of it,” he said. “I’m not going to judge what other bishops are doing. Every bishop does what he feels he has to do for the good of the church. I’m not going to respond to it. I haven’t had time to think about it.”

George S. Weigel, an American theologian and papal biographer who has spent the last three weeks in Rome, predicted that any church official who advocates Law’s resignation this week will “marginalize himself in the discussion.”

“People may talk about how far this situation has gone and what other situations have to be looked at,” Weigel said. “But this is not a meeting to discuss Boston. The temper here is not for that kind of discussion. That’s not the way the church works.”

The Vatican does not respond to “the press fervor of the moment,” he said, adding that the cardinals were more likely to discuss the criteria under which any bishop who has mishandled a sex abuse case should step down.

But Father Thomas Williams, dean of theology at the pontifical university Regina Apostolorum in Rome, said the debate over Law’s position “is good in the sense that everyone should be heard.”

“There’s a variety of opinions about what should be done [about Law] among those who are sincerely looking after the best interests of the church,” Williams said. “All the issues have to come out, all the arguments.”

New York Cardinal Edward M. Egan, who has also come under fire for mishandling sexual abuse cases, said before leaving his archdiocese for the Rome meeting that he was “deeply sorry” for any errors he made and vowed to take steps to prevent them in the future.

“You should expect nothing less of me, and the other leaders of our church,” he wrote in a letter Saturday to Catholics in his archdiocese.

In St. Peter’s Basilica on Sunday, John Paul celebrated Mass for 20 newly ordained priests, telling them that Jesus expects a “higher loyalty” from them, a rigorous life of poverty and humility.

“He asks of you to be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect,” the pope said. “In a word, the Lord wants you to be holy. . . . If every vocation in the church is in the service of holiness, some--such as the vocation of ordained ministry and the consecrated life--are that in a singular way.”

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Times staff writer William Lobdell contributed to this report.

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