Bernard Francis Law

Bernard Francis Cardinal Law (November 4, 1931 – December 20, 2017) was a senior-ranking prelate of the Catholic Church, known largely for covering up the serial rape of children by Catholic priests.

Law was born in Torreón, Coahuila, Mexico, on November 4, 1931, the only child of Bernard Aloysius Law (1890–1955) and Helen A. Law (née Stubblefield; 1911–1991).

His father was a United States Air Force colonel and a veteran pilot of World War I.

Law grew up on military bases in the United States and Latin America.

He attended schools in New York; Florida; Georgia; Barranquilla, Colombia; and graduated from Charlotte Amalie High School in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.

While in high school, he was employed by The Virgin Islands Daily News.

He graduated from Harvard College with a major in medieval history before studying philosophy at Saint Joseph Seminary College in St. Benedict, Louisiana, from 1953 to 1955, and theology at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Worthington, Ohio, from 1955 to 1961.

On May 21, 1961, Law was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson in Mississippi.

He served two years as an assistant pastor of St. Paul's Catholic Church in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he was the editor of The Mississippi Register, the diocesan newspaper.

He also held several other diocesan posts from 1963 to 1968, including director of the family life bureau and spiritual director of the minor seminary.

The young Fr. Law was a civil rights activist.

He was a member of the Mississippi Leadership Conference and Mississippi Human Relations Council.

For his civil rights activities and his strong positions on civil rights in the Mississippi Register, of which he was editor, he received death threats.

Charles Evers, activist and brother of murdered civil rights activist Medgar Evers, praised Law and said he acted "not for the Negro, but for justice and what is right."

Law's brave civil rights activity led him to develop ties with Protestant church leaders and he received national attention for his work for ecumenism, and in 1968 he was tapped for his first national post, as executive director of the US Bishops' Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

In the late 1970s, Law would also chair the U.S. bishops' Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

Pope Paul VI named Law bishop of the Diocese of Springfield–Cape Girardeau in Missouri on October 22, 1973, and he was consecrated on December 5 of that year.

Law's predecessor in Springfield–Cape Girardeau was William Wakefield Baum, another future cardinal.

In 1975, he arranged for the resettlement in his diocese of 166 Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the United States, and were members of a Vietnamese religious congregation, the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix.

In continuing his ecumenical work, Law formed the Missouri Christian Leadership Conference.

He was made a member of the Vatican's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and served from 1976 to 1981 as a consultor to its Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.

In the mid-1980s, Law chaired the bishops' Committee on Pastoral Research and Practices at the time it distributed a report on Freemasonry.

The bishops' report concluded that "the principles and basic rituals of Masonry embody a naturalistic religion, active participation in which is incompatible with Christian faith and practice".

In 1981, Law was named the Vatican delegate to develop and oversee a program instituted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in which U.S. Episcopal priests would be accepted into the Catholic priesthood.

In the program's first year, sixty-four Episcopal priests applied for acceptance.

This brought married priests with their families into U.S. Roman Catholic dioceses for the first time.

On January 11, 1984, Law was appointed Archbishop of Boston by Pope John Paul II and was installed on March 23, 1984.

That same year, Law reassigned a local priest, Fr John Geoghan, to St. Julia's in Weston, on the recommendation of medical professionals.

Geoghan had previously been known to abuse children, and at least one auxiliary bishop in Boston warned Law that the priest was unfit to return to parish ministry.

On May 25, 1985, Law was appointed a member of the College of Cardinals, where he was also appointed the Cardinal Priest of the church of Santa Susanna.

In 1985, delivering one of the few speeches in Latin at the Synod of Bishops, he called for the creation of a "universal catechism" to guard against dissent, especially by theologians.

He was the second prelate to call for such a document, which became the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992).

Law oversaw the first draft of its English translation.

Law was Archbishop of Boston from 1984 until his resignation on December 13, 2002, after his involvement in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston sex abuse scandal became public knowledge.

Law was proven to have ignored or concealed the molestation of numerous underage children; Church documents demonstrate that he had extensive knowledge concerning widespread child sexual abuse committed by dozens of Catholic priests within his archdiocese over a period of almost two decades, and that he failed to report these crimes to the authorities, instead merely transferring the accused priests between parishes.

One priest in Law's archdiocese, John Geoghan, raped or molested more than 130 children in six different parishes in a career which spanned 30 years.

Law was widely denounced for his handling of the sexual abuse cases, and outside the church his public image was irreparably tarnished in the aftermath of the scandal.

Two years after Law resigned from his position in Boston, an act which Bishop William S. Skylstad called "an important step in the healing process", Pope John Paul II appointed him Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome in 2004.

He served as Archbishop of Boston, archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, and Cardinal Priest of Santa Susanna, which was the American parish in Rome until 2017, when the American community was relocated to San Patrizio.

He resigned from this position upon reaching the age of 80 in November 2011 and died in Rome on December 20, 2017, at the age of 86.