Who brought down the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston? A survey of print and broadcast media around the country produces no dissent from the answer: Bernard Law was brought down by the agitation of lay people and priests who are regularly described as “reformers,” and by determined investigative reporters who relentlessly exposed his sins of nonfeasance and malfeasance. After his fall, there were occasional expressions of regret, statements that he was a good man who let things get out of control, and even talk about Greek tragedy.
There were sobering reflections also from non-Catholics. The Reverend Peter J. Gomes, a black minister of the American Baptist Church and longtime Harvard chaplain, wrote in the Boston Globe : “When lawyers, the courts, and the media all seem complicit in the cycle of vengeance and blood and no closure short of decapitation seems acceptable, then we have reason to worry about the climate for justice, mercy, and charity; and Salem in 1692 seems not so far removed in moral climate from Boston in 2002.” Then there are those who all along have attributed the Boston storm, and the entire scandalmongering of the past year and more, to anti-Catholicism. That view gets impressive scholarly support from Philip Jenkins’ book, The New Anti-Catholicism, out soon from Oxford University Press.
