BOSTON (MA)
Boston Herald
December 21, 2017
By Peter Gelzinis
No hiding sins of the cloth from God
“Bless me Father, for I have sinned.”
To grow up Catholic is to have those words burned into your consciousness by the age of seven. When I recited them for the first time, I was kneeling in the dark, confessing what few sins I could imagine to a voice on the other side of an opaque window.
But I still recall feeling “cleansed” when the priest forgave my childish sins and told me to say three “Hail Marys” and a good Act of Contrition.
In time, Catholics come to understand that the sacrament of penance, or confession, is actually a dress rehearsal for Judgment Day, when we will all have to come clean for real before the Lord.
For Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, Judgment Day arrived Tuesday, when at age 86, he departed the splendid banishment of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.
Exactly where he now dwells in the afterlife — heaven, hell or purgatory — none of us can say. But among a sprawling community of victims, sexually abused in silence by priests who were quietly shuttled around various parishes in Boston for decades, Bernard Law most likely rests in a place of eternal torment, where he cannot take refuge behind lawyers or non-disclosure agreements.
As a prince of the church, you can’t say you didn’t know. Or I thought I was doing the right thing. Or we couldn’t have the whole archdiocese knowing about this stuff.
Bernard Law had a Harvard degree. God is certainly aware of that. It’s one thing to try to play Mickey The Dunce down here, as he managed to do for years. It’s quite another to try to play that card with the Almighty.
God is simply not going to buy that.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.