Cocaine and child pornography priest sent to parish in 2001
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AMERICA'S most senior Catholic, Cardinal Bernard Law, under intense fire in a U.S. sexual abuse scandal, resigned last night as Archbishop of Boston.
Pope John Paul II, who made Dr Law a cardinal in 1985, accepted his resignation during an audience at the Vatican, putting the once-respected leader of the Boston faithful out of his self-made misery. Dr Law begged for "forgiveness" for shortcomings in his handling of a series of sex abuse scandals involving priests in his diocese. "I am profoundly grateful to the Holy Father for having accepted my resignation as Archbishop of Boston," he said in a statement released by the Vatican. "It is my fervent prayer that this action may help the archdiocese of Boston to experience the healing, reconciliation and unity which are so desperately needed. "To all those who have suffered from my shortcomings and mistakes, I both apologise and from them beg forgiveness. "The particular circumstances of this time suggest a quiet departure. Please keep me in your prayers." Abandoned by 58 of his own priests and many of his stunned flock, Dr Law secretly flew to Rome last weekend, a day after it emerged that he and five of his underlings were subpoenaed to appear before a Massachusetts grand jury investigating sex abuse by priests and the actions of officials who supervised them. |
State Attorney-General Tom Reilly
accused Boston church officials of an "elaborate system" over a period of
"decades, and perhaps generations" to shield priests who allegedly abused children.
The dramatic escalation in the scandal followed the release of documents last week that revealed a pattern of concealment of sins of the flesh by priests. There also were indications the archdiocese would go into bankruptcy to limit claims by victims. In one case, a cocaine-snorting pastor who admitted to "extensive" downloading of child porn from the internet was placed on health leave by Dr Law, then re-assigned last year to another parish when a man accused him of sexual molestation during the 1970s. The release on Wednesday of disgraced priest Paul Shanley, 71, on $US300,000 ($530,000) bail was the last straw for some, with speculation rampant that Shanley must have something sensational on leaders of the Boston church to be able to raise that much cash. "It's that kind of complete aura of suspicion that surrounds the leadership," said James Post, president of Voice of the Faithful, a group of lay Catholics set |
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up in February after the sex scandal first became public, who called for Dr Law's
resignation, a step its members previously had been unwilling to take.
The vote was done "with great sadness, but also great conviction that this had to be done -- that the moral integrity of the church has been so compromised," he said. "This whole sordid mess has been covered up and that's what I think the Attorney-General is finally responding to." The vote by parishioners followed a rebellion on Monday by 58 priests who |
took the extraordinary step of writing to demand the cardinal's resignation.
The turning point for the priests and ordinary church-goers was the revelation predatory priests were sent to often unsuspecting parishes and potential claimants were paid off as the Boston bishops tried to keep the lid on the scandal. "Almost certainly, tens of millions of dollars have been diverted from the work of the church in terms of ministering to the needy to protecting these predators and keeping them safe from prosecution," Mr Post said. |
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