From
Denver
Catholic Register 29 Jan03
El
Pueblo Católico
Myths about
Cardinal Law's resignation
…the
chief factor in Cardinal Law’s resignation was...Cardinal Law, George
Weigel 29 Jan03
Within
hours of Cardinal Bernard Law’s resignation this past December, the
myth-makers were at work, spinning tales of why this had happened and what it
all meant. Before two such myths congeal into “facts” of the
“everyone knows that...” variety, permit me to do some
demythologizing. What follows are neither impressions nor speculations. What
follows comes from on-site, personal knowledge of the Roman dynamics in play in
December, and from extensive conversations with many of those directly involved
in these dramatic events.
Myth
#1:
Cardinal Law was forced from office by the Vatican in response to irresistible
pressures from Boston clerical and lay activists.
This
is the master myth. It is wrong -- wrong about facts, and wrong about
causalities.
The
fact is that Cardinal Law, who had publicly acknowledged serious errors of
judgment and governance, had been prepared to lay down his charge in April. By
early December, the cardinal had become further convinced that he could not
give the Archdiocese of Boston the kind of leadership it desperately needed:
settling the legal and financial issues involved in the sexual abuse scandals
and getting on with thoroughgoing, radical, and authentically Catholic reform.
Cardinal Law persuaded the relevant officials at the Vatican, including the
Holy Father, of this. So the decision to accept the Cardinal’s
resignation was made.
In brief, the chief factor in Cardinal Law’s resignation was...Cardinal Law. Whatever you hear to the contrary from Voice of the Faithful, the Boston Priests’ Forum, Newsweek, or the Boston Globe is myth-making, usually agenda-driven.
Myth
#2:
Rome’s decision was heavily influenced by the public letter signed by
fifty-eight Boston-area priests, asking Cardinal Law to resign.
This
is the key secondary myth within the master myth. It, too, has no basis in
fact.
Didn’t the Vatican sit up and take notice when
fifty-eight priests took this unprecedented public step on December 9? Of
course the Vatican did. But what did the Holy See notice?
The
first thing officials in Rome likely noticed was that there are some 1,650
religious and diocesan priests in the Archdiocese of Boston; thus the
signatories represented about 3.5% of the Boston presbyterate. Not exactly a
landslide, that.
The second thing to be noticed and
pondered were the names on the list. However slow it has sometimes been to
measure accurately the breadth and depth of the crisis in the American Church,
the Vatican is not clueless. Officials in Rome could see that the signatories
included priests who had never truly accepted Cardinal Law’s authority;
their request for him to lay down an authority they had rarely acknowledged
rang rather hollow. Roman authorities could also see that priests whose
ministerial paths had not been without major potholes (to put it gently) were
among the signatories, and in some cases among the leaders, of this initiative
-- not precisely the men to whom one would first look for dispassionate
analysis and prudent counsel. Moreover, the Vatican was certainly
struck by the fact that men who had repeatedly and publicly denied the
Church’s teaching on the moral truth of things were among the
signatories: is it likely that their ecclesiastical judgments would be regarded
as sound?
The third thing no one in Rome could
have missed was the text of the priests’ letter itself. It praised
Cardinal Law for his ecumenical and inter-religious initiatives, his work for
immigrants and the homeless, and his opposition to capital punishment. But what
was blatantly and (it could only be assumed) deliberately missing was any
reference to Cardinal
Law’s major public policy concern for eighteen years -- his defense of
the right-to-life of the unborn. This particular non-barking dog clearly
demonstrated where these fifty-eight priests were coming from, so to
speak -- and where they wanted the Archdiocese of Boston to go. Which is not,
one expects, where the Vatican wants to Archdiocese of Boston to go.
Cardinal
Law did the right thing by laying down his charge. Some would argue, not
unreasonably, that the Church’s cause might have been better served if
what finally took place in December had happened in April. That being said,
however, no good is served, in Boston or elsewhere, by agenda-driven
myth-making. Enough of that is quite enough.
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