Bernard Francis Law (November 4, 1931 – December 20, 2017) was a Mexican-born American prelate of the Catholic Church who served as Archbishop of Boston from 1984 to 2002. Once considered an influential voice in the American Catholic hierarchy and in Boston as a supporter of Church orthodoxy, social justice and ecumenism, a 2002 exposé revealed that he covered up the serial rape of children by Catholic priests. This led to his resignation as Archbishop of Boston in December of that year.
Law previously served as Bishop of Springfield–Cape Girardeau from 1973 to 1984. After resigning from the Archdiocese of Boston, he served in largely ceremonial roles as archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore from 2004 to 2011 and as Cardinal Priest of Santa Susanna in Rome from 1985 until his death in 2017.
Church documents demonstrate that Law had extensive knowledge of widespread child sexual abuse committed by dozens of Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese over almost two decades; he failed to report these crimes to the authorities, instead merely transferring the accused priests between parishes.
Law was born in Torreón, Coahuila, Mexico, on November 4, 1931, the only child of Bernard Aloysius Law and Helen A. Law (née Stubblefield). 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.
Priestly ministry in the civil rights era
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 the 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 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.
Bishop of Springfield–Cape Girardeau
Pope Paul VI named Law bishop of the 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 late 1970s, Law would also chair the U.S. bishops' Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
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. 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.