Cardinal Law And Money

I discovered an article on the underreported Papal Foundation scandal by Rod Dreher from last August that begins, "I learned this week that under John Paul II, there were three people who always showed up at the Vatican with lots of money: Father Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Bernard Law, and Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, who was made a cardinal by JP2." He attributes McCarrick's influence to the Papal Foundation, which McCarrick was instrumental in founding.

But I was intrigued, since Cardinal Law was listed as another moneyman. I asked my informant on matters Law if he knew where the money came from. He answered, "That would be an unknown for me. I do know Law was a fundraising specialist with worldwide ties. I would see Opus Dei networks in there somewhere, before the fall of their Banco Santander. Seems I heard that Domino's Pizza magnate was at Law's beck and call for funding. I am sure that Law was at work in big ways once he was catapaulted to Rome."

Well, I'm coming to the view that John Paul II accomplished one or two big things -- with Reagan, he was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union without direct armed confrontation, and secondarily, he pushed back on "liberation theology" and a certain degree of US clerical corruption, exemplified by Fr Robert Drinan. You probably can't expect much more from a single human.

But his inaction over Maciel was a definite bad call. Per Wikipedia,

In 1997, a group of nine men went public with accusations that they had been abused as youths and young men by Maciel while studying under him in Spain and Rome in the 1940s and 1950s. The group, which included respectable academics and former priests, lodged formal charges at the Vatican in 1998. They were told the following year, in 1999, that the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, was not moving forward with a direct prosecution. It is not publicly known if this decision was made by Pope John Paul II or Cardinal Ratzinger himself.

Ratzinger/Benedict did move against Maciel by 2005/6, probably at a time when John Paul was infirm.

The amount of money Opus Dei was able to send to Rome is generally regarded as the source of the movement's favor under John Paul II, including its designation as a personal prelature. While Opus Dei has been allied with several cardinals, my informant thinks Law, potentially through William Stetson or other associates, may have been able to take credit for Opus Dei money coming to Rome.

My own view is that the Pastoral Provision was a bad call by John Paul, though a minor one; on the other hand, for him to put the brakes on Anglicanorum coetibus in 1993 was better. For Benedict to issue it was a bigger mistake, though I'm increasingly convinced that his retirement makes everything else fade into inconsequence.

However, financial scandal could be another path to driving reform in the Church. I'm reminded of the 1992 United Way scandal:

William Aramony served for 22 years as president and CEO of United Way of America (UWA), the umbrella group for thousands of local United Way organizations that fund social and human service projects nationwide. In 1992, Aramony resigned amidst allegations that he siphoned money from UWA through spin-off companies he helped to create. . . . In 1995, Aramony and two conspirators, Thomas Merlo and Stephen Paulachak, were convicted of defrauding UWA. . . .

For instance, he used UWA cash to woo a girl, Lori Villasor, who was only 17 years old when they began dating; Aramony was 59. He met Villasor while dating her slightly older sister. Both young women were added to UWA's payroll. For his notoriously young girlfriend, Aramony spent $450,000 of the charity's money to purchase and lavishly furnish a New York condo; $78,000 to chauffeur her around New York City; and $4,800 to renovate her home in Florida. The couple vacationed in Egypt, London, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City.

It seems to me that the mixture of sexual and financial impropriety is also a pattern in the current crisis, and it's likely that McCarrick and others misappropriated funds for their own amorous pursuits. This angle hasn't been followed as fully as it should be. Whether taking away the Church's tax exempt status is only a remote possibility, it's likely that pursuing individual dioceses for fraud or violation of specific IRS regulations is a very productive course.

More On RICO And The Church

Doing more research on what may be up with a federal investigation into child abuse (or other potential crimes) in the Church, I find so far that Church Militant has done the most coverage, and it seems fairly level-headed. It's worth pointing out that most crimes, including sex crimes, are handled at the state and local level. A federal crime normally involves a specific violation of a federal statute. But there are otheer gotchas.

This report from August 29 is worth revisiting:

Church Militant was able to independently confirm that the Department of Justice is taking great interest in the possibility of a nationwide investigation into allegations of Catholic clerical sex abuse.

In the aftermath of the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, there was talk about the possibility of prosecuting the Catholic Church under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

RICO is a federal law created in 1970 to combat organized crime. It enables prosecutors to go after a criminal organization in and of itself, rather than targeting the specific crimes of individuals connected to it.

Some say the Church leaders who covered up abusive priests were acting like Mafia bosses, but others pointed out that it would be hard to prosecute the Catholic hierarchy under RICO because of specific details in how the law is written. For instance, sex abuse is not listed among the offenses that an organization must be connected with to be prosecuted under RICO.

This report from the Cumberland, MD Herald-Mail goes somewhat further into the issues and options for litigation:

And now, as we have learned more about the Catholic church’s conspiracy of silence and cover-up regarding sex crimes against children dating back decades, there is the appearance that RICO could come into play.

Some wonder if it could be used to go after the church hierarchy, holding it criminally responsible for the sins of the hundreds of priests who preyed on children, as outlined in the Pennsylvania grand jury report that found widespread abuse in a half-dozen of the state’s dioceses.

Well, about that.

While civil suits filed against the church have resulted in billions of dollars in settlements for victims of abuse, there have been no attempts to hold the church criminally responsible for its actions.

“The lawyers who have been involved in these cases have always thought that the church operated like a criminal enterprise,” said Steve Rubino, a New Jersey lawyer who sued the Archdiocese of Camden under the civil provisions of the RICO law in 1993, the first time the law had been applied to cases involving the church.

. . . RICO, at least the criminal version, lists specific crimes that can be cited as “predicate offenses,” mostly crimes that serve to enrich the organization, the kinds of crimes that are the business of criminal organizations. Child abuse is not among them.

. . . Civil RICO cases have been filed against the Catholic church with mixed success. The 1993 case filed by Rubino was quickly settled for an undisclosed amount.

It doesn't sound like the threat of civil RICO litigation alone would be enough to remove the entrenched network of corrupt US bishops and cardinals, although a continued attrition of Church resources from a new stream of penalties or settlements would pose a problem. There would naturally be low-level embarrassments, but the media, at least under the current obsolescent paradigm, has been sympathetic to overt liberals like Mahony.

In the YouTube I linked in yesterday's post, Michael Voris suggests there may be a different theory developing in the Justice Department, involving prosecution of bishops for coordinating transfers of violators across state lines, or sending/bringing violators across national boundaries.

This could potentially be more powerful, since under a civil-litigation-only remedy, bishops or cardinals may be embarrassed and lose their titles very late in their careers, but they continue to live well and certainly don't go to prison. That the Vatican would need to assert sovereign immunity to keep Cardinal Ladaria from testifying in France suggests this may not last forever.

Letter From US Attorney McSwain To Cardinal DiNardo

A few sources, including USA Today and Church Militant, are carrying the story of a letter from U.S. Attorney William McSwain of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, President of the USCCB, putting "every archdiocese, diocese and Catholic entity on notice to preserve and not destroy evidence of priest abuse or a cover-up."

Government sources confirmed with Church Militant that the DOJ was seriously considering the possibility of a RICO prosecution of the Catholic Church. McSwain's Oct. 9 letter to the U.S. bishops further signals a move in that direction, based on whatever evidence is gathered in the preliminary investigation.

Michael Voris in a YouTube presentation goes somewhat farther in speculating about the implications.

The matters under investigation, according to Voris, include the transfer of priest violators across state lines and international borders, which he feels signals the beginning of a RICO investigation. I suspect that McCarrick and Wuerl will not be the last to be affected.

My impression, though, is that Voris tends to be overoptimistic about how much reform could result, and I very much doubt that loss of the Church's tax exemption would take place -- first, you'd have to go after the Scientologists, for instance.

But what I think this does reflect is an upending of what had been a generations-long tacit deal, under which the US bishops allowed prominent Catholic politicians to skate on life and public morality issues, while in return, politicians of both parties avoided or minimized serious prosecution of the Church on matters of abuse, as well as financial improprieties. Donald Trump has been changing US politics and culture on many levels. Trump won a majority of rank-and-file Catholics in 2016, and McSwain is a Trump appointee. His district doesn't include Pittsburgh, so there must be other targets in mind.

As I look more closely at the crisis, it seems to me that Engle's The Rite of Sodomy gives only an incomplete (and not fully reliable) picture of the networks of corruption, and allowing limited numbers of cardinals like Law, Mahony, Wuerl, and McCarrick to take the fall for a much bigger problem is not an adequate solution. But it will take more than one pope and more than one saint to set things right.

Bernard Law: The Anglican Stuff

My informant gave me additional insight into Law's ecumenical activities when he said Law routinely met with Protestant pastors of many denominations, not just Anglicans, who were interested in becoming Catholic priests. This adds just one more question to the list of unanswered ones I have: what was Law's role in bringing the celibate Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus into the Catholic Church? This took place in 1990, when Law was maintaining back-channel contacts with Episcopalians like Jeffrey Steenson and Clarence Pope as well.

Neuhaus was "conservative" for the time, although as a close adviser to Bush fils he was more of a neocon, of a stripe that quite possibly would be a never-Trumper now. This, however, seems compatible with Law's outlook, since by my informant's account, Law found many Protestants "too conservative". As the story of federal investigations into systematic Church coverup of abuse unfolds in the current Second Crisis, one issue that's worth pursuing is how much of a consensus existed across the political spectrum not to press the Church on these matters -- in return for not pushing Catholics to vote on matters like abortion and keep pro-abortion politicians in office, those same politicians would look the other way on abuse and gay clergy.

Law, as a powerful figure in the Church, would have been shepherding issues like this through, and although he took the fall for the First Crisis, the practices he apparently condoned or encouraged in Boston were and continue to be widespread in the Church, including in Latin America, where Law was a familiar figure. I suspect the Anglican outreach project will eventually prove to be consistent with other parts of Law's overall purpose, however inchoate.

I've spent a good part of six years looking at the Pastoral Provision and Anglicanorum coetibus here, and I'm not going to go into detail. However, one conclusion I've drawn on extensive reflection is that Anglican outreach in the Pastoral Provision was poorly thought through and poorly executed. Two individuals who've written histories of the Pastoral Provision, Fr Jack Barker (history here) and Msgr William Stetson (history here) leave a great deal unsaid. There's lots of bureaucratic hemming and hawing about Cardinal Seper and Secretary Levada, but nothing is said about then-Bishop Law in Stetson's narrative until 1980. The earliest mention in Barker's narrative is "in the days following" the 1976 TEC General Convention:

Fr. Parker was contacted by Bishop Bernard Law of Springfield Cape-Girardeaux, Missouri who said he would speak to the Apostolic Delegate to make it easier to get an appointment. he also referred him to Bishop Raymond Lessard of the diocese of Savannah, Georgia for personal contact It should be noted that both Bishops Law and Lessard were members of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) Ad Hoc Committee formed to deal with the question of receiving convert married ministers into the Catholic Church. Bishop Law was also the only American member of the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity. A meeting took place at the Archbishop’s residence in Washington D.C. in April 1977. At this meeting were Fr. James Parker, the Provincial of the Society, Fr. Larry Lossing of New Smyrna Beach, Florida representing southeast members of the Society, and Fr. John D. Barker of Los Angeles, California representing the west coast members of the Society. The meeting was to explore what possibilities there might be for receiving Episcopal priests of this Society into the Roman Catholic Church; the stated goal was to be able to continue to function as Roman Catholic priests, even if married.

Somebody, for instance, encouraged and coordinated the efforts of Canon DuBois, Fr Barker, and others following the 1976 TEC General Convention that led five Episcopalian parishes to leave the denomination on the same Sunday in early 1977. They didn't just hold meetings over cups of tea, it would seem. Frs Brown and Barker went to Rome, and not just to look at the fountains. Who arranged this? Who vouched for Brown and Barker? Almost certainly Law was involved, although even now, for this to become public would cause some consternation in both New York and Rome. But even in the fall of 1976, Law must have had a firm impression of the movement that couldn't have been based on impulse. If these guys weren't solid, they were at least useful as idiots.

What continues to strike me after looking at this story over a period of years is how half-baked the whole Anglican scheme was and continues to be. The histories give vague descriptions of the Society of the Holy Cross, and the Pro-Diocese of St Augustine of Canterbury, but these were organizations of no particular authority. It wasn't until 1978 that any steps were taken to set up an ecclesiastical structure. Per Barker:

Bishop Bernard Law invited Frs. Barker and Brown to meet with a canonist in Chicago to explore together the form of an Anglican "common identity" in the Catholic Church. In addition to the above, representatives of SSC and the Evangelical Catholic Mission (ECM) 13 were also invited by Bishop Law. The three groups met with Bishop Law’s Canonist at the Hilton Hotel at O’Hare Airport. The Anglicans present favored the proposal on structure modeled on the Military Ordinariate, but the small number of parochial communities, the death of Cardinal Seper who had taken a personal interest in this cause, together with the reluctance on the part of the American Catholic hierarchy mitigated against such a possibility.

But first, they had to hold a synod to figure out what the "Anglican patrimony" was. Meantime, multimillion-dollar litigation was under way, the parishes that had left TEC could not perform any function that required a bishop; the parishes had no adult supervision, and there was no definite plan or schedule for them to resolve any of these things. But Law was getting things done!

It would take more than a decade for Frs Barker and Brown to be ordained Catholic priests, which was one of the main initial goals. Their parishes never went in -- but two generations of lawyers put their kids through college with the proceeds of the resulting litigation. We're back to "by their fruits". What problem was Bernard Law trying to solve? And as of 1978, we're still decades away from Anglicanorum coetibus and that whole debacle.

Bernard Law: Bishop Of Springfield-Cape Girardeau

When Law was consecrated Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in 1973, he was 42, quite young for a bishop, though not 38, as Joseph Bernardin had been, or 40, like Steven Lopes. My informant, who knew him fairly well during this period, says that in somewhat later years, he did all he could to suppress photos of himself taken during this time, since he felt he looked too young. However, my informant says that Law also suddenly became a blonde, although earlier photos show him with dark hair. All the more reason to suppress those photos.

Blonde or brunette, Law, according to my informant, was an extraordinarily handsome and charismatic individual. He characterizes him as "hyperactively gregarious", but although he'd shake hands warmly, my informant always had the sense that he was looking over your shoulder to see if there was someone else nearby he should cultivate more intensely. He traveled extensively, not just in the US, but frequently to Rome, as well as to South and Central America, where his fluent Spanish stood him in good stead with prelates there.

My informant says, in fact, that Law's Spanish wasn't just good, it was perfect, lacking any gringo accent, completely idiomatic. He vacationed in Argentina and maintained close ties with the hierarchy there, although not specifically with Bergoglio. All of this continues to suggest to me that if Law was "conservative", he kept it well hidden, and he was clearly a popular figure. Certainly the very liberal kingmaker Bernardin saw no obstacles to Law's continued advancement.

My informant also noticed that, apparently even before his overtures to disgruntled Anglicans, Law entertained visits from other Protestant pastors exploring the option of becoming Catholic. His position on ecumenism with the USCCB would have made this logical. But interestingly, Law sometimes put them off by claiming they'd be "too conservative" in their theology for the Catholic Church of the 1970s. This raises questions about his overall agenda: it doesn't appear that he had a single view of bringing Anglicans or other Protestants into the Church because they supported traditional liturgy, or indeed because they found male priesthood or teachings on the sixth commandment attractive -- at least, that is, until John Paul II.

But I'll deal with the question of Anglican outreach separately in my next post.

My informant raises an intriguing question: we get a pretty clear picture that Law was working for himself, and a "conservative" agenda seems always to have been either secondary or well hidden. But who else was he working for? Law, my informant observes, knew the CIA was called "the company" by insiders, and he referred to it that way himself. His father appears to have been involved in intelligence work of some sort, possibly even from the time of the Mexican Punitive Expedition of 1916, since many aspects of it remain classified.

Bernard Aloysius spent a good part of his working career in Latin America, possibly under some sort of cover as an airline employee, while maintaining his status in the Air Force. But my informant says, "intelligence is a family", and George HW Bush, whose family was friendly with Law, was Director of Central Intelligence in 1976-77, although he almost certainly had intelligence connections before that time and certainly afterward as vice president and president.

Law was also well acquainted with Thomas Comerford Lawler, a well-connected and active Catholic author who also spent 26 years with the CIA and, according to my informant, made a point of his continued intelligence work after his retirement. He apparently met frequently with Law during his time in Springfield.

So it's reasonable to ask on more than one level who Law was working for -- and the Bushes, keep in mind, were and are not "conservative", and neither is the agenda of the CIA.

Bernard Law: The USCCB

After his first stint in Mississippi, Law made a move. According to Wikipedia:

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.

As I've mentioned here before, "ecumenism" in the 1960s was another way of saying "marching with Dr King", and it's hard to avoid thinking Law was taking cues from Episcopalian and other liberal Protestant counterparts in using this means to advance his career -- as Flannery O'Connor has indirectly pointed out, the Deep South wasn't especially Catholic, and New Orleans was one of the few foci for 19th-century Catholic immigration in the region. Catholics were a secondary target of the Klan, but because they were less visible, they remained secondary.

Beyond that, when I was an Episcopalian, I was in two parishes whose rectors had had real pastoral experience integrating Southern parishes in the 1960s. One was actually in Jackson, MS, and while he didn't face violence or violent threats, as far as I know, he nevertheless spoke of having to threaten excommunication with parishioners who resisted integration. The other was in fact severely beaten by the Klan. These men were in the front lines, not the same thing as marching for the cameras. We know very little of what Law actually did in this period besides edit a diocesan paper.

It appears that Law came to the attention of Joseph Bernardin, who was only three years older, but whose rise in the US Catholic Church had been meteoric. According to Wikipedia,

On April 26, 1952, Bernardin was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Charleston by John J. Russell at St. Joseph Church. This diocese covers the entire state of South Carolina. During his 14-year tenure at the Diocese of Charleston, Father Bernardin served under four bishops in capacities including chancellor, vicar general, diocesan counselor, and, when the See was vacant, diocesan administrator. In 1959, Pope John XXIII named Bernardin a Papal Chamberlain with the title Very Reverend Monsignor.

On March 9, 1966 Pope Paul VI appointed Monsignor Bernardin titular Bishop of Liguria and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Atlanta. His episcopal consecration took place on April 26, 1966 at the hands of his mentor, the Archbishop of Atlanta, Paul Hallinan. Bernardin, only 38 years old, thus became the youngest bishop in America.

. . . In 1968, he resigned as auxiliary bishop of Atlanta to become the first General Secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, a post he held until 1972. In 1969 Bishop Bernadin was instrumental in founding one of the conference's most influential and successful programs, the anti-poverty Campaign for Human Development.

Engle in The Rite of Sodomy adds that in going to the USCCB, Bernardin became "the first of a long, virtually unbroken line of homosexual and pro-homosexual clerics to hold the position of General Secretary and/or Presidency of the NCCB/USCC" (p 892). Engle lists a large number of gay clergy, many of whom eventually became bishops, in Bernardin's inner circle at the USCCB, but Law is not among them.

It appears, though, that Bernardin picked Law at the start for a key post in what he saw as a progressive agenda for his term at the USCCB. In 1971, Law left the USCCB and became vicar general of his former Diocese of Natchez-Jackson under Bishop Joseph Brunini. This, of course, put Law in a good position for a bishopric.

Joseph Bernardin left his position as General Secretary of the USCCB in 1972 to become Archbishop of Cincinnati. However, Engle points out,

Much of the ten years Bernardin served as Archbishop of Cincinnati was spent in Washington, D.C. as the President of the NCCB. For all practical purposes he was the new “Kingmaker” with a much broader base of operation and control than Cardinal Spellman ever enjoyed as Archbishop of New York. The appointment of Archbishop Bernardin to the Archdiocese of Chicago on July 10, 1982 by Pope John Paul II confirmed his kingship over AmChurch. (p 897)

My informant tells me that Law's version of why he left his position with the USCCB was due to the amount of "drinking" that took place among the bureaucrats in Washington. Whatever the reason, it doesn't appear that there was any sort of rift with Bernardin.

When Law was consecrated Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau on December 5, 1973, his co-consecrators were William Wakefield Baum, Law's immediate predecessor in Springfield-Cape Girardeau and newly appointed Archbishop of Washington, DC, and Joseph Bernardin. Bernardin has a fairly extensive record as a homosexualist bishop and cardinal. Baum's record is less clear, although he would have been a member of what Engle calls the Chicago-Washington axis of the Church.

Baum was instrumental in ordaining Michael Peterson a priest. According to Engle,

In 1962, at age 19, while an undergraduate at Stanford University, Michael entered the Catholic Church. Tall, thin and handsome, he was pretty much a loner looking to find his niche in life.

He found that niche in the early 1970s when he returned to the University of California San Francisco Medical School to attend graduate school. Having left a rather mundane job at the National Institutes in Health in Washington, D.C., he joined Dr. Leon Epstein, Vice-Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical School. Here he discovered the world of sexual perversion beginning with exhibitionism and proceeding to transsexuality, clinical pedophilia, and same-sex attraction.

. . . {In 1975,] Peterson decided to enter the priesthood. His candidacy was approved by Archbishop William Baum of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. Baum, overly impressed by Peterson’s medical and psychiatric credentials, broke all established rules to get Peterson ordained in a record three years time. To him, Peterson represented an exciting new breed of priests active in professional ministries in the post-Conciliar era. (pp 586-7)

Peterson's superiors in seminary noted that he spent little time in class, appeared to be actively gay, and also appeared to have a problem with amphetamines. Nevertheless,

With the backing of Cardinal Baum and later Cardinal Hickey, psychiatrist- priest Michael Peterson became the American bishops’ guru on all things sexual.

For his part, as an active member of the Homosexual Collective, Peterson actively promoted the Collective’s ideological agenda and foundational concepts among the American hierarchy from the time of the founding of St.Luke in 1981 to his death eight years later from complications associated with AIDS. (p 589)

Law was thought of as a "conservative", but two major promoters of the gay agenda in the US Church, including the "kingmaker" Bernardin, had no problem with making him a bishop. It seems to me that Ms Engle in over 1000 pages has only scratched the surface of the networks.

Bernard Law: Ordination And Early Assignments

According to Wikipedia, "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." The photo at left shows him in effect vamping for the camera at some point during this period, giving his best imitation of J Edgar Hoover. There's nothing pastoral in his visage as he glowers out, hunched over, apparently in the process of reviewing some sort of thick dossier. The photo is thoroughly posed, of course, because it looks like Law is already a media figure.

Wikipedia makes the point that "Law was a civil rights activist." But as I reflect on the civil rights era, which I lived through, it seems to me that the heavy lifting, Brown v Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott, the National Guard called up by Eisenhower in Little Rock, had been done in the mid 1950s. By the early 1960s, a national consensus had in fact been fully established. Reflecting on this, I looked up the Norman Rockwell painting "The Problem We All Live With", which first appeared in a centerfold in Look magazine in 1964.

It depicts a specific episode that occurred in New Orleans in 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, but there was certainly nothing new about it; the circumstances had been established in 1954 by a unanimous Supreme Court decision, and Eisenhower had made it plain that the federal government would use the military and law enforcement to enforce that decision in 1957. By 1964, national media was already aware that it could make money by virtue-signaling in the wake of the last murderous efforts by the Klan to hold back the tide. To run the Rockwell painting in a centerfold was a fully vetted business decision by Look; the Klan didn't read magazines, after all.

By the 1960s, the civil rights movement had become a long-running media event, which included, then as now, sporadic episodes of murderous violence that are arguably stoked by media focus -- and the episodes themselves then generate more frenzy that, by the way, results in profitable headlines, clicks, and commercials. And clergy hopped on board this bandwagon, because it brought media attention, advanced careers, and oh-by-the-way, sold books. A parallel career is that of Episcopalian priest Malcolm Boyd:

Boyd went on to become a minister in the American Civil Rights Movement, promoting integration and voting rights. He participated as one of the Freedom Riders in 1961. Later that year he became the Episcopal Chaplain at Wayne State University in Detroit. . . . Boyd was the author of over 30 books, including a bestselling collection of prayers, Are You Running with Me, Jesus? (1965). Are You Running With Me, Jesus was a great success, and gained Boyd a reasonable amount of public attention and fame, which continued throughout his life.

Another parallel career was that of TEC Bishop Paul Moore, Jr:

In 1957, he was named Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis, Indiana. Moore introduced the conservative Midwestern capital to social activism through his work in the inner city. Moore served in Indianapolis until he was elected Suffragan Bishop of Washington, D.C., in 1964.

During his time in Washington he became nationally known as an advocate of civil rights and an opponent of the Vietnam War. He knew Martin Luther King, Jr., and marched with him in Selma and elsewhere. In 1970, he was elected as coadjutor and successor to Bishop Horace Donegan in New York City. He was installed as Bishop of the Diocese of New York in 1972 and held that position until 1989.

I remember one of my better professors at the elite school where I did my undergraduate work. In the middle of a lecture, he went into a digression: "You guys can dress up as Indians and build bonfires and go to parties and get drunk. But you're always going to be Ivy Leaguers. Like it or not, you're part of the genteel tradition. You're never going to be able to get rid of that." Bernard Law went to Harvard and lived at Adams House. Paul Moore went to St Paul's and Yale, and both he and his wife came from old money. The civil rights work could never be more than a pose.

The start of Law's clerical career occurred in a clear context. Beyond that, Law in Mississippi gained a reputation as a liberal through the civil rights work. My informant tells me that Law had a continuing fan base there, but it grew disillusioned after Law became Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, when he began to adopt a more conservative image. My informant tells me that when people from Mississippi would bring this up with him during his time in Missouri, he'd turn to my informant and slyly wink.

News From The Alternate Universe

Via an IBM Selectric 251 typewriter, I recently received a news digest from the alternate universe -- that is, the one in which Dr Walter Bishop is Secretary of Defense, and the Nixon dollar is US currency.

WASHINGTON: Longtime Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court William H Stetson today announced his retirement. Stetson is best known as the author of the majority opinion in the Green v Burton case, in which the court, citing the impact on birth rates and the particular damage done to minority communities, ruled that the state has a compelling interest in banning abortions except in a limited number of cases.

However, Stetson was the author of numerous opinions that on one hand sought to sustain the best interests of the poor, while promoting overall social cohesion by applying what he frequently cited as "natural law".

Stetson, a Harvard Law graduate in 1957, has long been rumored to be a high-ranking member, called a "numerary", in the Roman Catholic Opus Dei prelature. However, Stetson has kept a low personal profile throughout his time on the bench, and Opus Dei policy discourages members from acknowledging their membership in the secretive organization.

Opus Dei recruits members at the beginning of their professional careers who seem likely to achieve influential positions in their fields, so that they can promote policies that, in the view of the Roman Catholic Church, will work to the good of society and further spiritual goals.

Stetson was first appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nelson Rockefeller.

Now, I have no idea what else is going on in that universe, except I believe Honorius V is now pope over there. But it looks like Opus Dei is working much more as it was meant to. On this side, the situation is more like what we see in this discussion:

Although Opus Dei never discloses the numbers of its members by category and function, my guess is that the majority of the numeraries today are employed in education, ecclesiastical jobs and the internal bureaucracy. . . . Little by little, Opus Dei has become clerical, and nowadays, the majority of its regional and national hierarchy are priests. A kind of social endogamy and fortress mentality is experienced as protection by those inside [the] ghetto [from] those outside. Many of the numeraries come from supernumeraries' homes, attend Opus Dei schools, graduate to its universities, go to Rome, and once trained, are assigned to the internal bureaucracy or the educational network without exercising a secular profession or having worldly experience.

Bernard Law: Vocation And Seminary

The source and circumstances of Bernard Law's vocation to the priesthood are puzzling. The Gueguen history portrays Law as a central member of the group beginning The Work in Boston, but just as the group is ready to move into Trimount House, Law graduates and leaves for seminary via the Roman Catholic Diocese of Natchez-Jackson, MS. He first studied philosophy at Saint Joseph Seminary College in St. Benedict, Louisiana, which is a seminary associated with the province of Mobile, AL, of which the Jackson diocese is a part, from 1953 to 1955. This is an undergraduate seminary that offers a two-year pre-theology program for students who have already attained a college degree, which appears to be Law's circumstance as of 1953.

A seminarian is normally sponsored by a home parish, and a diocese normally requires that he be well known to clergy and others in the diocese. This requirement can be waived in special circumstances, including for children of military families, and this was probably the case for Law. But exactly why he went in via the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson still isn't completely clear. Bernard Aloysius Law retired from the Air Force in 1950, and he is recorded as passing away in Jackson, MS in 1955. Whether Law's parents relocated to Jackson to be near him (though he would have been in seminary in Louisiana most of the time), or whether he went to Jackson to be near his parents isn't clear.

In addition, neither parent was very Catholic. His mother was a Presbyterian married to a Catholic who apparently never regularized the circumstances of his second marriage, so neither would have been eligible to receive communion in a Catholic parish. Law variously claimed in later life that his mother became Catholic while Law was at Harvard, or in 1955 after her husband's death, but my informant says this didn't happen until Law was in Boston. This means Law himself would probably have needed to join a Mississippi parish on his own, though it's likely he hadn't been confirmed in his youth. This would be another problem that would have had to be addressed before he went to seminary; it's possible he did this at Harvard. That he would apparently be an enthusiastic recruit to Opus Dei and then drop his involvement is just another incongruity.

In the authorized biography and in newspaper interviews, he attributes his vocation to Fr Lawrence Riley, who was chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Club during 1951-52, but elsewhere he says he didn't decide on his vocation until the spring of 1953. (It's worth noting that even in 1953, a Harvard undergraduate degree in medieval history, the major he consistently gives, would have equipped him only to be a dilettante.) It does appear that he was required to go back to square one in his formation and complete two years of pre-theology at a Catholic undergraduate seminary. Whatever credentials he had, they got him into pre-seminary, but he was by no means on a fast track.

The authorized biography says Fr Riley "encouraged him to give his talents to a part of the Church that was more in need of priests" (p xx), which presumably was the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson, though another explanation could simply be that Riley thought his chances of being accepted in a diocese where demand was high would be better. Riley might well have made a recommendation to the vocation director there, just to smooth a process that might well have needed smoothing.

In light of the public image Law later fostered for himself of civil rights crusader, it seems unlikely that he went to Jackson, MS with any intent to further social justice, whatever his later activities may have been. Key early developments in US civil rights history came after Law's arrival in Mississippi, and the earliest ones focused elsewhere, too.

• May 17, 1954, US Supreme Court rules in Brown v Board of Education that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional
• December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks initiates a bus boycott, refusing to observe segregation laws
• September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus precipitates the Little Rock Crisis, in which President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to integrate Little Rock public schools.

Once he completed the two-year pre-theology program at St Joseph, we went on to the Pontifical College Josephinium in Worthington, OH. My informant has always been curious about what happened there. Wikipedia lists his dates of attendance as 1955 to 1961, a remarkable six years. He told me that Law told him he'd asked to take more time because he didn't feel comfortable with the formation he'd had. I replied that as far as I knew, seminarians didn't ask to take more time, they were told they needed more time, and my informant agreed.

This is just yet one more mystery associated with the guy. Neither the official bio nor press interviews that I've run across covers the extra time in seminary.

Bernard Law's Harvard Days -- IV

I kept reflecting on what happened to the Harvard Catholic Club in the early 1950s after yesterday's post. I'm old enough to remember warnings that were common at that time from figures like J Edgar Hoover that Stalinist groups could take over moribund community organizations and remake them as organs to promote their own agenda, and it's hard to avoid thinking something like that happened at Harvard.

By the time of the Gueguen history, the early 1950s, the Catholic Club was occupied mostly in recruiting for The Work, and it's plain that the only recruits were male, with the goal of moving them into the new Opus Dei center, Trimount House. We must assume the culture there would have been consistent with other Opus Dei centers, with strict segregation of the sexes (if women were there at all other than as housekeepers) and a misogynistic atmosphere.

Presumably this phase ended, and the Harvard Catholic Club is now called the Harvard Catholic Center, "to better represent the entire University Catholic community".

This does raise the question of what the appeal of Catholicism actually was for Bernard Law as an undergraduate. The authorized biography, Boston's Cardinal: Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness, mentions a letter home in his freshman year that "remarked of a freshman smoker that included 'night club' acts: 'It really was incongruous to have this disgustingly base entertainment in a building that once served as a Church.'" (p xviii)

Yet we've already seen that he was in Adams House, where the Harvard Crimson said in 1949, the same year as Law's complaint, that residents

wear their share of dirty white shoes and striped ties, and drink brandy or sherry freely. The house’s dignified yet comfortable atmosphere is well-suited to impress a date.

Other histories of Adams House note that multiple entries allowed residents to avoid curfew or parietal hours, a positive feature, and to wear a bathing suit in the house swimming pool was "not done". Other activities included campy formal readings of Winnie the Pooh. Er, if any of this bothered Law at the time, couldn't he have moved out? Instead, he was there all four years.

My informant has provided what I think is a very credible suggestion on who the "angel" was who helped Law get into Harvard -- again, I'm skeptical that he could have made it in purely as a walk-on. A very good candidate for helping Law would be William Henry Hastie:

In the early 1930s William H. Hastie worked first as a race relations advisor to the Roosevelt administration, and then in 1933 became assistant solicitor of the Department of the Interior.

In 1937 Hastie became the first African-American federal judge when President Roosevelt appointed him to the bench of the Federal District Court in the Virgin Islands.

. . . Between 1946 and 1949 Hastie returned to the Virgin Islands, this time as its first African-American governor. Then in 1949 he was appointed to the Third United States Circuit Court of Appeals, the highest judicial position attained by an African American to that time.

Hastie, a Harvard Law School graduate, would have been a member of the Democrat Establishment. As governor of the Virgin Islands, he had apparently already appointed Law's father to be head of the islands' development authority, so he had a history of doing favors for the family.

It's also possible that Bernard Aloysius Law by this time was double- or even triple-dipping, collecting a likely generous salary as head of the development authority, continuing to receive Air Force pay or a pension after 1950, and potentially receiving pay for intelligence work beyond that. This in fact could have sustained young Bernard Francis at Adams House.

Bernard Law's Harvard Days -- III: Was He Opus Dei?

From the outline of the Fr Feeney case in the last post, it's hard to avoid thinking that the Archdiocese of Boston, having done all it could, including excommunicating students at the St Benedict Center, to kill enthusiasm among Catholic students at Harvard, then went looking for a way to rekindle Catholic enthusiasm at Harvard. Cardinal Cushing then settled on Opus Dei, a new arrival in the US. It had established a first foothold in Chicago, but it began a second effort in Boston. Its main focus was on the Harvard Catholic Club, which had been in existence under different names since the 1890s, but which had apparently faded as interest in the St Benedict Center grew.

As we saw in yesterday's post, Fr Joseph Muzquiz, an Opus Dei priest assigned to create a US presence for the movement in the early 1950s, met in 1951 with Fr Lawrence Riley, Cardinal Cushing's secretary and briefly the chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Club, about establishing an Opus Dei presence at Harvard. Cushing approved the idea, and the Opus Dei organization grew at Harvard via the Catholic Club in the period between 1951 and 1953.

My own view of Opus Dei continues to be a version of "by their fruits": the movement became active and increasingly influential in the Vatican, as well as in the US, from the late 1940s onward. That period can hardly have been more disastrous for the practice of Christian morality, whatever the influence Opus Dei has been able to exert in the Church or the world. This discussion refers to Opus Dei's influence in Spain, where the movement started, and where it has continued to wield political and economic influence:

Things did not go well [in the 1950s] for the network of interests and enterprises woven around the "Work", as they internally called the institution. Mostly led by people without experience, the group ventures into the realms of finance, publishing, and international trade, ended in internal and external conflicts, spectacular failures, and a reputation for immorality and arbitrariness that have subsequently characterized the business ventures of men whose mentors proclaimed the idea of sanctification of work.

I've repeatedly characterized Msgr William Stetson, an Opus Dei priest and highly influential figure in The Work in the US, in this blog as a "bungler", and the more I learn, the more I'm inclined to say that he's not an exception. Still, I recognize that there are devout and sincere people in the movement.

Interestingly, although Opus Dei prefers to keep a low profile and discourages members from identifying themselves as such, there are two major histories of Opus Dei activities in Boston and at Harvard that cover the time Bernard Law and William Stetson were there. One is linked above, by Frederico M Requena and focuses more on the later 1950s, although it's valuable in covering the early meetings with Cushing and Riley. The other has frequently been referenced here, by John Arthur Gueguen, Jr, himself apparently an Opus Dei numerary. I quoted extensively from it here on September 8. The relevant part is worth repeating:

Searching online, I discovered a document The Early Days of Opus Dei in Boston As Recalled by the First Generation (1946-1956), by John Arthur Gueguen, Jr. This was compiled primarily from the memories of the principals, including Msgr Stetson. On page 73, we find in a footnote,

Stetson and Law had met at the Harvard Catholic Club in fall 1950, shortly after Stetson entered Harvard College. Law introduced Stetson to other Catholic students, including Carl Schmitt, then a senior.

On p 74, in a footnote:

Law, Stetson, Bucciarelli and others met frequently at the early Mass at St. Paul’s, the parish that served Harvard students. Several of them sang in the choir.

In a footnote on p 85:

In his senior year, Law served as the [Catholic] Club’s vice-president and sang in St. Paul’s student choir with Stetson.

On pp 102-103:

Like Bucciarelli, Bill Stetson had been introduced to the Work by Bernard Law during the 1952-53 school year, when he was a junior.

Clearly by this account, Law had become a big wheel in the Catholic Club and is portrayed as being the center of the group that was attracted to Opus Dei via the club. In fact, one might reasonably conclude that the Harvard Catholic Club, moribund following the St Benedict Center fiasco, had been taken over by Opus Dei and was from this period effectively functioning as an Opus Dei front. And Law was at its center.

However, although the Trimount House Opus Dei residence was complete by the summer of 1953, Law graduated from Harvard in June of that year and moved on to seminary, so his direct involvement ends there. However, this site lists Law, at the time Archpriest of St Mary Major in Rome, among "Cardinals who promote or are linked to Opus Dei, not necessarily members".

My informant, who was acquainted with Law during his time as Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, said that William Stetson during this period had some type of traveling assignment with Opus Dei, which would have preceded his time as vicar in Chicago, and he met frequently with Law on his various itineraries. He also reported that Law had "a bookshelf about ten feet long with books on Opus Dei" in his personal library at the time -- but that could be attributed simply to Law's general interest in new developments in the Church.

There can be little question that Law was very familiar with Opus Dei, he was generally sympathetic to it, and he found it very useful at various times in advancing his own career. However, Opus Dei by itself is not a sole explanation for Law's advancement, and his agenda was not driven exclusively by Opus Dei.

Bernard Law's Harvard Days -- II

Law's arrival at Harvard in the fall of 1949 coincided with the denouement of the Father Feeney Case, otherwise known as the Boston Heresy Case. Feeney proclaimed the established Catholic doctrine Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, which in Boston was viewed as heterodox, outmoded, and inconvenient and led to his ultimate excommunication.

In the fall of 1941, [Jesuit] Father Feeney, then an instructor at the Weston seminary, became involved with Saint Benedict Center, a Catholic library apostolate serving the Catholic students at Harvard, Radcliffe, and other institutions of higher learning in the Cambridge area. . . . During his years at the Center Feeney is known to have received more than 200 young people. . . into the Catholic Church,

. . . . Tension between Saint Benedict Center, the elite universities in the Cambridge area, and the hierarchy began mounting in the early postwar years. The Center increasingly became repulsed by the complacency Jesuits studying at Harvard when the Catholic faith was ridiculed. Per [Center foundress Catherine] Clarke:

Our students often saw the priests sit, apparently unmoved, in the classes of atheists and Marxist sympathizers. The priests listened while these professors frequently denied Christ, questioned His claims, belittled Him, or cast reflections on devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Through it all, the priests remained, if not smiling and serene, at least without the open protest and complaint, the kind that any true priest is required to give under circumstances like these.

Father Feeney forbade these hypocritical Jesuits from attending Saint Benedict Center in 1947. In addition to converts, many Harvard and Radcliffe students attending Saint Benedict Center began to see a conflict between their studies and their faith. Some even resigned, penning letters to administrators explaining their reasons for doing so. While Feeney never pushed students to take so drastic a sacrifice, he celebrated those who took the brave step.

Prompted by influential figures at Boston College and Harvard, sanctions were gradually placed against Fr Feeney and the Saint Benedict Center, and in October 1949, Fr Feeney was expelled from the Jesuits for "serious and permanent disobedience". He was excommunicated by the Holy Office (predecessor of the CDF) for "heresy" in 1953. However, the excommunication was lifted in 1972 with no recantation required from Feeney. The Feeney case has since been characterized as "the first of several times the archbishops of Boston would compromise the Catholic faith for the sake of good politics and cordial relations with the secular powers that be".

I don't think there was actually much difference between an elite-school education in the 1940s and the one I had 20 years later. Standard reading required of freshmen and sophomores would have included Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, which has since been accused of academic fraud, and B F Skinner's Walden Two. Darwinian theory was routinely taught, and it was generally implied in all empirical science courses that scientific materialism was the only intellectually respectable world view. Harvard PhD, and later professor, B F Skinner's views dominated psychology. Philosophy courses focused on Sartre, Wittgenstein, and William James, with Aquinas as a discredited footnote.

I simply don't know how Law, whose roommate, as we've already seen, suggested he was something of a squish over Catholicism, would have responded to Fr Feeney. However, Cardinal Cushing, not a Feeney supporter, had already begun to address the issue of hard-line Catholicism at Harvard. According to this account,

With the beginning of the 1950-51 school year, Archbishop Cushing adopted a provisional solution [to the Feeney problem]: as chaplain of the Catholic Club he named his own secretary, Fr. Lawrence J. Riley, who was also on the faculty of St. John’s Seminary.

Fr. Riley continued as chaplain through the 1951 school year. In a report on his first year in that position, he informed the Archbishop about the status of the programs at the Club, which involved between 30 and 40 people. Fr Riley added, in an unenthusiastic tone, "For neither activity was there much support from the members of the Club."

The article later cites Fr Joseph Muzquiz, an early Opus Dei priest assigned to create a US presence for the movement in the early 1950s, who met in 1951 with Fr Riley about the situation at

Harvard, the most prestigious university in America, where the only Catholic group was unfortunately the St Benedict Center, which continued to oppose the hierarchy of the Church, and the Archbishop had excommunicated those who continued to attend their activites.

Actually, the Harvard Catholic Club had been a prestigious institution since the late 19th century, but it appears that interest had faded with the establishment of the Saint Benedict Center, which seems to have had much greater appeal for serious Catholic students in the area. Fr Riley's own efforts to rekindle Catholic participation in the Catholic Club seem to have met with only a lukewarm response, and according to the article linked here, Fr Riley was chaplain of the Catholic Club only in the 1951-52 school year, while elsewhere, Law says he made his final decision about a vocation in the spring of 1953.

Nevertheless, my informant tells me that Law cited Fr Riley as a key influence in discerning his vocation, and this article that appeared in the Boston College campus paper at the time of Law's arrival in Boston as archbishop says Law

stated publicly that he owed his vocation to the priesthood to the Most Reverend Lawrence J. Riley, who is an auxilary bishop in the Boston Archdiocese. Bishop Riley is a graduate of the Boston College Class of 1936 and was the chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Club when Bernard Law was a Harvard undergraduate.

The odd thing is that Riley appears to have been a much less inspiring figure than poor Fr Feeney, but there must have been something about him that inspired the young Bernard Law. In light of later characterizations of Law as a conservative or hard-liner, this seems incongruous -- as does the account we've already seen of Law's Baptist Adams House roommate, who said Law never attempted to proselytize.

Another question is how, or even whether, he was catechized and confirmed, either in his early teens or at the Harvard Catholic Club. The picture that's emerged is that the family wasn't observant, and he doesn't seem to have had religious instruction in childhood. Why the Catholic Club all of a sudden? Did he even know what Catholic is?

Bernard Law's Harvard Days -- I

Let's back up and look at something I didn't understand at all when I was an undergraduate at an elite school (not Harvard) in the 1960s. By then, all the Ivies had nominally become academically selective, although many studies from that time forward, like Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich, made, and make, the point that in the Ivies and similar schools, one can fly coach, or one can fly first class. Those flying coach have the impression that everyone is subject to academic competition, and admission is primarily determined by grades, extracurriculars, and SAT scores.

The coach passengers, like me, were and are flattered by the idea that we've been through a rigorous and merit-based selection process, and we're the ones who've come out on top, unlike the poor slobs who wound up at the safety schools. Run down to the bookstore and get the decals for your parents' car windows and shell out for the licensed merchandise! What we weren't told, and what many still don't understand, is that the Ivies are only partly merit-based, and a percentage of entering classes is still reserved for legacies and other major-donor offspring. The exact size of this percentage, those flying first class, is a closely guarded secret. However, this is simply an extension of policies that have always been in place in the Ivy League.

I was a pretty dense kid back then. I'd wonder, "Gee, Clotty Shipworth has the same name as Shipworth Hall! What a weird coincidence," and I'd think no more of it. Or I'd notice that there was a certain stuffy air of English boarding-school culture, various styles of hazing and certain aspects of preppiness that I'd never seen as a public-school kid, and I'd just chalk it up to -- well, I don't know what I just chalked it up to. What I didn't understand was that the Establishment had found it convenient in the late 1940s to seem merit-based and egalitarian and tone down traditional Ivy exclusivity.

Various social historians from Lundberg onward, as well as communications to Ivy alumni from the 1940s time period, make the point, however, that there's still a first-class cabin, and in effect, it's just a continuation of the old Ivy culture that dates from before 1776. But if you think about it, it was in the Establishment's interest to change the visuals -- if someone now says he went to Princeton, everyone gets to assume he scored really well on tests and got good grades. But Princeton didn't even admit blacks until just before World War II, and the Jewish roommates Law mentions at Harvard in a Boston Globe interview were there under a quota that, according to Alan Dershowitz, has never been lifted, just remarketed as a "diversity" program.

Harvard in the late 1940s, when Bernard Law was considering applying, was only in the process of making that minimal transition. Even now, commentators of the Lundberg school make the point that where one attended prep school is a much more accurate social indicator than where one went to college. If I went to St Paul's and Yale, it says far more about me socially than if I simply went to Yale. Anyone can go to Yale, they just need good SATs and stuff. Not everyone can go to St Paul's.

The egalitarian pose that downplayed this attitude had only partly begun to take hold in the late 1940s, and in fact, the pseudo-aristocratic ideal has never completely disappeared. My parents, anxious to get me into an Ivy in the 1960s, were still careful to ply family connections and get me a recommendation from an authentic Establishment alumnus. It worked. Would I have gotten in without it? Who knows? I think this represents something of the dilemma the Law family must have faced in considering Harvard in the late 1940s.

My informant thinks it might be worth trying to find out if any Catholic parish schools on the upper West Side of Manhattan had any record of the cardinal's time there. I tend to doubt it. What we do know is that his parents sent him to the largely black public school in St Thomas when they lived there. (A Catholic high school, founded in 1946, was in fact available in St Thomas.) His parents weren't very Catholic; neither would have been eligible to receive communion if they ever went to mass. I strongly suspect he was sent to New York public schools as well. A fuzzy memory of his whole childhood would have suited the cardinal in his later years and forestalled any inquiry into whether he'd been to Catholic school at all.

But this adds to the dilemma: Harvard even now apparently reserves a substantial quota in entering classes for applicants from prestigious prep schools. In the late 1940s, this would have been even more the case. That he would come from a working-class and military background via a largely black high school in the Virgin Islands might make him an intriguing curiosity case, but not much more. I suspect his chances at Dartmouth, an Ivy with a more established preference for outliers, would have been better, but this isn't among the schools he said he applied for in the official bio. And Dartmouth at the time would have been just as interested in a pedigree.

Beyond that, it's hard to determine the Law family's true financial circumstances. My informant has discovered that Bernard A. Law authored a 1940 book, Fighting Planes of the World, that may have been an attempt to shore up family finances. In any case, it doesn't appear that the Law family, whether Law's later story about Wedgewood china is true, was inclined to send Bernard to any sort of private school before Harvard.

We don't know if he attended Harvard under any sort of scholarship. However, the evidence we have is that he lived the whole four years at Adams House, the socially prestigious residence with its own swimming pool that calls itself the "gold coast". Surely there would have been less expensive places to live in Cambridge. Beyond that, travel expenses from Jackson, MS or the Virgin Islands, where his parents lived while he was at Harvard, would have been significant in themselves.

It's hard to avoid thinking that someone put in a good word for Law with the Harvard admissions office, and somehow his above-average lifestyle there was accommodated. It's hard to avoid thinking that, struggling even to fly coach, he somehow got a first-class upgrade. As yesterday's visitor put it, "It almost begs the question with Law? Who 'made' him & why?"

The Meaning Of A Spanish Word And Yet More On The Law Family

I was going to move on to Law's time at Harvard today, but I found quite a bit more on Ancestry.com regarding Bernard Law's father, Bernard Aloysius Law, and the family background, so Harvard will be deferred. Sometimes on Ancestry.com, which I'd already checked several times, you have to know exactly what questions to ask, and this is what happened here.

My informant also pointed out that in the Mexican newspaper story I quoted yesterday, the full sense does not come out in the Google translation of "The birth of Law in Torreón was circumstantial". He says,

Usual translation of circunstancial is unplanned, accidental, unintentional. Google is good in Spanish but misses nuances at times. Wonder how the reporter found that out? . . . I'm sure the polo club was not impressed.

Another visitor noted,

Interesting that Law was born 5 months after his parents were wed. Must have been quite a scandal. I don't think many 5-month-old preemies survived in '31. Is there a church of record for Law's parents' marriage? . . . Why so many discrepancies? We wonder in politics who is sponsoring a candidate or an issue. It almost begs the question with Law? Who 'made' him & why?

Indeed. Well, the discrepancies, and the questions, just keep on coming! Via Ancestry.com, I learned that Bernard Aloysius's father, Bernard Francis's paternal grandfather, was John P Law (1848-1914), himself the son of Irish immigrants, which by the way contradicts the statement in the official biography that Law was of Scots descent (the Stubblefields were Washington State pioneer stock).

John P Law was a conductor on the Lackawanna Railroad throughout his career. It would have been steady work at the peak of the rail industry, but with dangerous conditions and long hours, and it would not have created a family fortune. John P had many children from two wives (the first one passed away; Bernard Aloysius was from the second). By the time of John P's death, the family had gravitated to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. At that time, Bernard Aloysius, in his early twenties, was working as a store clerk. He had completed four years of high school, but had no college.

On April 24, 1914, he enlisted in the New York State National Guard as an enlisted man. By 1916, he was serving with General Pershing in the Mexican punitive expedition on the border. This lasted from ‎March 14, 1916 to February 7, 1917. President Wilson ordered a full division of the New York Guard for service in this campaign. As the link indicates, because the end of the expedition coincided with the start of US involvement in World War I, little attention has been paid to it, but my informant, something of an intelligence buff, tells me that many details remain classified, apparently because the expedition itself nearly led to war with Mexico, and the circumstances remain extremely sensitive.

Bernard Aloysius Law was honorably discharged from the New York Guard on March 2, 1917 to begin flight training in the Air Corps as a commissioned officer in Coronado, CA. On April 6, 1917, the US declared war on Germany, and Bernard Aloysius went to France and served as a pilot. He was discharged with the rank of captain on March 21, 1919. However, Cardinal Law refers to his father as being "in and out of the Air [Corps]" over the subsequent decades, the Mexican newspaper story refers to him as a major in the 1930s, and via Ancestry.com records, he retired in 1950 as a colonel. We have only sketchy information on what he was doing during that time.

We must conclude that Bernard Aloysius made very, very good contacts while in service with the Mexican punitive expedition who were able to further his subsequent career. Beyond that, we know very little, except that he appears to have been doing work that may have been connected with political developments in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s.

By sometime in 1919, though, Bernard Aloysius found himself in Houston, TX, where he married a Louise Elizabeth Lindsey (1898-1982). Louise had already had one previous marriage, and had a daughter from that marriage. The ex-husband was still living. Divorce at that time was still a major scandal. We don't know how long the marrriage to Louise Lindsey lasted, but it had presumably ended in divorce before Bernard Aloysius's second marriage to Helen Stubblefield.

Naturally, assuming Bernard Aloysius Law was Catholic (his father was buried in a Catholic cemetery, so this is probably the case), we're beginning to see a complex canonical situation, to which we don't have all the necessary information. If the marriage to Louise Lindsey was civil, in addition to her divorce, the Church's position would presumably be that this marriage was simply a cohabitation, although Bernard Aloysius would not be eligible for communion as long as it lasted.

Since he apparently later divorced Louise Lindsey, he would be eligible to marry Helen Stubblefield, although since she was not Catholic, we must presume the rushed El Paso wedding was also civil. Had Bernard Aloysius wished to marry Helen in a Presbyterian (or other Protestant) ceremony, he would have been required to get the local bishop's approval. Considering the circumstances, he probably didn't.

What we do know is that Bernard Aloysius passed away in 1955. Public statements from Cardinal Law variously indicate that Helen converted to Catholicism "while I was at Harvard" (which would have been before 1953) or "in 1955", which strongly suggests that she and her son were aware of the canonical situation, and she could not have become Catholic until after the death of her husband. However, my informant says that Helen did not in fact convert until Cardinal Law was in Boston, another of many discrepancies in the record.

The final piece in today's puzzle is the family's residence in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Bernard Aloysius's 1942 draft card, available through Ancestry.com, gives his address as 601 West 110th St (also known as Cathedral Parkway) in Manhattan. Information in the 1940 census indicates the family had lived there at least since 1935. This corresponds with the Mexican newspaper story that the Law family left Torreón for New York at some point in the 1930s. However, it appears that the family lived at that address for at least seven years, which contradicts Law's frequent public statements that the family moved often, and he had little memory of where they lived.

601 West 110th St in Manhattan appears to be the same building it was in the 1930s, an upscale apartment-condo, part of which is now used as a student residence for Barnard College. It's in the neighborhood of Columbia University and the Episcopalian cathedral. Bernard Aloysius Law's occupation in the 1940 census is given as "aviator". As "class of worker", he gave "working on own account" (which today might correspond to "contractor"). He worked 60 hours per week, 52 weeks in the past year. His income is listed as "0". Under "income other source" is listed as "yes".

Where was the future cardinal in school during this time, which would have been between ages 5 and 12? Did he have any relation at all to the Catholic Church? We don't know. Was he in fact eating exclusively from Wedgewood china? What is the real timeline of his family's places of residence? We don't know. In fact, we know very little, and probably as we learn more, we know less and less, except that Law's public statements about himself, and his official bio, seem less and less reliable.

I'll try again to get to the Harvard puzzles tomorrow.

More On Cardinal Law's Family And Early Life

My informant has located a number of additional sources on Law's parents and his childhood, including accounts by Law himself in later interviews. Law's versions, as well as the version in the official biography, are often in conflict and also at variance with the known public record.

My informant did, thanks to his very good Spanish, locate a version in a Torreón newspaper that was published at the time the film Spotlight was released. My own Spanish is at best halting LA Spanglish, so I am going to rely on Google Translate without emendation for the quote below. Those more adept can follow the link for the original.

The birth of Law in Torreón was circumstantial and is linked to the extinct Transport Aeronautics Corporation (CAT) SA that since the late 20s offered the service of passenger transport and mail between several cities in the United States and Mexico, including Torreón. It was a novel service for a young city that was recovering from the ravages of the Revolution and began, not without difficulties, to regain its economic vigor. Bernard Francis' father was Bernard A. Law, an officer of the United States Air Force who was assigned as CAT Transit superintendent in Torreón in those years.

According to the registry of Genealogies of Mexico (www.genealogia.org.mx) the greater Law was born in Kingston, Penssylvania, in 1891, approximately. In the Hemerographic archive of El Siglo de Torreón (h.elsiglodetorreon.com.mx) there are several references to the life of the father of the cardinal and archbishop. One of them indicates that he participated in the Great War, known today as the First World War. Upon his return to the United States, in 1918, he joined the Air Club of America. By 1929 he was already in Torreón working for the CAT.

Bernard Francis's mother was Helen Stubblefield, originally from Walla Walla, Washington State and born in 1912. Social reviews published by this newspaper in the early 1930s mention her as an excellent piano performer. Helen and Bernard met during a trip that she made at the end of the 20s to Torreón to visit the family of her uncle who lived here. The American colony in La Laguna was one of the most important at that time.

Despite the religious and age differences, the couple formalized their relationship. According to the biographical book "Boston's Cardinal: Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness," Helen came from a Presbyterian family and Bernard from one of Catholics. She was 20 years old and he was 40 when they got married on June 3, 1931 in El Paso, Texas. Only five months later, Bernard Francis would be born in Torreón, who in the end would end up professing his father's religion. According to the referred text, the couple was united by the "love of music and literature".

Although not professionally, now Mrs. Law continued playing the piano. Account of it gives a review of the 5 of November of 1932 published by the Century of Torreón in which it is related that, in spite of being "a little indisposed", the Mrs. of Law could show "the irreproachable technique, the purity and precision of his execution and his great artistic temperament ". The recital was held on the night of 4 in the late Teatro Princesa with the aim of raising funds to help children with limited resources in the city. That day Bernard Francis was one year old. From his mother he inherited a taste for the piano that he learned to play alone.

The Law family had an active social life in the first half of the decade of the 30s. In the newspaper library they are mentioned in personalities receptions, pleasure trips, altruistic activities and participation and organization of sports jousts, such as the meeting of polo that was carried out in 1933. According to a mention in a social column that refers to the convalescence of Mrs. Law in November 1934, the family lived in the house marked with the number 5 on the Avenida Hidalgo west, where there is now a self-service store.

The reference to polo is tantalizing and would fit a version of Law's early life that included eating from Wedgewood china, as well as Adams House at Harvard, but beyond that, we know nothing. In a 1984 Boston Globe interview, Law himself in part gave this version:

During most of Bishop Law's childhood, his father was in and out of the Air Force, barnstorming in airplanes and running small airlines or airports, he recalled yesterday in a telephone interview. There was so much travel during those days that "it is really too hard to recall," he said. "There was a lot of moving, but they were very happy years. My mother and father and I were a very close-knit family."

His father was Catholic and his mother Presbyterian, but she converted to Catholicism while her son was at Harvard. "It was not a particularly church-going family," he noted.

My informant, in fact, says that Law would mention that he was "raised Methodist". This may have been a minor fault of memory on my informant's part, or it may have been just a different story from Law himself. One would guess, on one hand, that his mother would have had more influence on his early religious formation, such as it may have been.

But the reference to travel suggests the family was never tied to any parish of any denomination, and i would suggest that, whether Law was baptized Catholic, he at least makes no mention of first communion or confirmation in the Church. My informant's suspicion that Law was not a cradle Catholic seems well-founded.

Farther down in the 1984 interview, we see:

In his freshman year in Cambridge, Law roomed with Robert Wayne Oliver, a Southern Baptist, and two Jewish students.

Now an attorney who works as an adviser to Oregon's Gov. Victor Atiyeh, Oliver said that although he and Law became close friends and roomed together [which must have been in Adams House] for four years, "He did not try to proselytize me. . . At the same time, he gave me a very good understanding and appreciation of the nature of his church and manner in which he practiced his faith.

"He had a great sense of humor. He was firm in his faith, but in no way was he a zealot. He respected other people's divergent views. He was not provocative. Nor did he make anyone feel he was a lost sinner."

But this still raises the question of where Law received any real faith formation, even if, by the time he got to Adams House, he was representing himself as Catholic, if not a very fervent one.

Tomorrow I'll take a closer look at Harvard and Law's vocation to the priesthood. Nevertheless, I'd be interested to hear from anyone familiar with how Catholic vocation directors work what the reaction of a real vocation director would be to this background.

Cardinal Law's Biography, I Now See, Poses Daunting Challenges

I spent more than an hour on the phone last night with an individual who became acquainted with Bernard Law when he was Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau and followed his subsequent career. In the course of their acquaintanceship, Law offered confidences that, as this individual has reflected on them, may or may not have been sincere or authentic, but are certainly reflective of the man. My impression of last night's conversation is that very little in the public record about Bernard Law is reliable -- even hard data like his date and place of birth are subject to serious reinterpretation.

Let's start with Law's father, Bernard Aloysius Law (1890-1955). Wikipedia and the cardinal's obituaries say he was an Air Corps/Air Force pilot and a colonel, and in fact this is inscribed on his grave marker. But "Air Corps" and "pilot" turn out to cover a lot of territory, and this goes to the question of the cardinal's birthplace, Torreón, Mexico. What was Colonel Law doing there as an Air Corps pilot? Apparently it was something like what's in the photo at left, a vaguely defined sort of military operation on the US-Mexican border.

The illustration isn't of Colonel Law or his plane, but it is in fact of some sort of border deployment about 1920, and it would appear that stuff like this was going on for some time in the wake of the Mexican revolution. These days, I believe we would characterize it as black ops. At some point in the colonel's career, he seems to have gone into intelligence work, and for some part of this time, he was working under cover. We'll probably never know what he was doing in Torreón. Don't ask!

My informant brought to my attention an authorized biography, Boston's Cardinal: Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness that, in his view, is almost entirely unreliable, going even to the question of whether Law, as he often claimed, was a cradle Catholic. The book, my informant points out, was published in 2002, not long before the First Crisis led to the cardinal's resignation and relocation to Rome. Work on the book began because Law, in the preceding years, expected John Paul II's deteriorating health to result in a conclave sooner than actually took place, and Law expected to become pope. The book project was meant to coincide with that.

While he was in Springfield, Law's housekeeper told my informant that Law said he'd grown up eating exclusively from Wedgewood china. This suggests there was some level of money and refinement in the family background, but whether it was from his father's side or his mother's, we simply don't know. It may be a lead that explains Adams House at Harvard, or it may not. Wikipedia says Law

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.

Even here there's more, and less, than meets the eye. Charlotte Amalie High School is the public high school for the town of Saint Thomas, and it's largely black. Why would a child who'd grown up eating from Wedgewood china and would be headed to Adams House at Harvard go there? If money and refinement were in the family background, why wasn't he shipped off to St Paul's or Groton, or a Catholic equivalent? (But remember, we're not completely sure if he was raised Catholic.) Beyond that, how did he wind up in St Thomas, VI?

Well, the colonel was working for Pan American-Grace Airways (Panagra), understood to have been a CIA front at the time of the cardinal's high school years. Apparently by this time, he wasn't a pilot, and his connections with air transport were vague indeed. Beyond that, my informant tells me Law never mentioned the Virgin Islands Daily News, but said he'd worked instead in a high-end tourist shop in St Thomas while he was in high school.

This brings us to the question of Harvard. Law confided to my informant that while he was there, he would travel sometimes to Washington to meet his father at the offices of a vague organization where his father worked when he was in town, or sometimes to Panama, where he had to go through security guards to visit his father's office. My informant thinks the colonel may by then have been a CIA station chief there. The story Law told my informant, echoed somewhat in the authorized biography, is that a teacher at Charlotte Amalie inspired him to choose Harvard. But Harvard and Yale have traditionally had an intelligence connection, and if Law had in fact grown up eating from Wedgewood china, there may be other reasons for Harvard.

We do know that Cardinal Law was a close friend of the Bush family, and he met frequently with George HW Bush in later years. Since Bush was Director of Central Intelligence in 1976-77, there could well have been an intelligence connection in the mix. As my informant puts it, "intelligence is a family". My informant thinks it's reasonable to ask if Cardinal Law himself had a CIA connection, which raises a very reasonable question of exactly who Law was working for at any particular time.

We aren't the first to ask this. A 1990 Boston Globe story has the same question: "Does Cardinal Bernard Law serve the pope or the president? Is he prelate or politician -- or both?"

But there are many more questions than just these.

Michael Voris's Answer

Yesterday I asked why Francis accepted Donald Wuerl's resignation as Archbishop of Washington, since I didn't think the conventional explanations were sufficient. Today Michael Voris offers a different theory.

He thinks the Second Crisis is waking Catholics up, and internet attention became too much for the Vatican to resist. He also mentions the 15 additional state attorney general investigations, as well as the potential for a RICO case against the Church, which may be more credible. I think he's more optimistic about the power of the Internet than I am, but I wouldn't be doing this myself if I didn't think it could accomplish some good.

Reply From The Passionist Provincial, Fr Moons

On September 29, I posted a letter I sent to Fr. Joe Moons, CP, Provincial Superior of the Passionist western US province. In it, I expressed my concern that the Mater Dolorosa Retreat Center staff had fully embraced the “centering prayer” movement, which they represent as coming from the desert fathers, St Theresa of Avila, and St John of the Cross. However, there is nothing traditional about the movement, as it was developed in the 1970s at St Joseph Abbey in Spencer, MA, in consultation with Buddhist representatives.

I pointed out that the CDF had already spoken on "centering prayer" and similar traditions, making it plain that they are not Catholic and do not represent the traditions of St Theresa of Avila and others. Here's his reply:

October 4, 2018

Dear Mr. Bruce,

Thank you for your letter of the September 25, 2018, concerning the use of Centering Prayer at Mater Dolorosa and other retreat centers in the Passionist Community. Centering Prayer is an ancient Christian tradition dating back to the Desert Fathers and has been a mainstay of Contemplative Prayer in the Christian tradition for many centuries.

This prayer form has been reintroduced to a wider range of the community in the 1970's with the birth of the movement. Fr. Keating and Fr. Pennington have both introduced Centering Prayer at our Retreat Centers in the past. This has been a tradition of the Passionists and part of the rich heritage of the Catholic Church and its teaching. There are many thousands of practitioners in the Church today, and we offer regular Centering Prayer retreats in our Passionist Retreat Centers (including Mater Dolorosa) around the United States.

Seeking God's will is a key element in Centering Prayer. It is a prayer of consent, a willingness to open and listen to the will of God. This is not a Buddhist practice. Centering Prayer is focused on the indwelling of the Holy Trinity with the intention to "rest in the Peace of Christ", in line with our theme for the retreat at Mater Dolorosa this year.

From Spiritual Direction according to St. Paul of the Cross by Bennet Kelly, C.P.:

This awareness that we should accept and follow God's will is common to all Christians. We all say, "Thy will be done" in the Our Father. We need patience with ourselves as we only gradually surrender to his will, even though deep down we would doubtless prefer to surrender everything immediately.

Centering Prayer helps us in this process. It complements our other prayers and like all prayer forms, may not be the perfect fit for each of us. This is the reason the Church, as a big tent, has a wide range of spiritual paths, and many different prayer forms.

In our Retreat Centers we have the unique opportunity to introduce and practice these many prayer forms, from Eucharistic Adoration to Lectio Divina, from Ignatian Imaginative prayer to Visio Divina. Many of these forms are contemplative in nature, and Centering Prayer is just another one of them. We never know what is going to impact a retreatant; we can only offer up the richness of our tradition and faith and leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.

I hope this helps you to understand how Centering Prayer fits into the wide range of spiritual traditions available to us faith-filled Catholics. I can assure you that these rich traditions of prayer forms are important and vital to the spiritual life of the members of our Church and its teaching as represented in all our province ministries, including the Passionist ministry at Mater Dolorosa. Thank you for your concern.

Be assured of my prayers as I would appreciate yours.

The other day I was browsing volumes from the Beginning Apologetics series in our parish adoration chapel. Volume 4 covers atheists and the new age movement, and it makes the important point that new-agers will take Christian and Catholic theological terms and redefine them to fit new age concepts. Fr Moons is doing this here, though he's playing footsie with it.

He speaks of "the indwelling of the Holy Trinity with the intention to 'rest in the Peace of Christ'", but he's talking about it in terms of the objectives of Transcendental Meditation, to become a void, rather than active prayer as in CCC 2627, which ascends to the Holy Spirit -- it doesn't indwell, rest, or "center".

I think syncretism is one problem the current Church faces, in this case syncretism with new age. However, as I've said here for some time, I think Anglicanorum coetibus exposes the Church to syncretism with certain types of Protestantism.

I'm inclined to think Fr Moons isn't especially well equipped to deal with theological issues like these, even though the CDF has made the Church's position quite clear several times. There's not much point in trying to argue with him further, but syncretism is a subject I'll deal with here as opportunities come up.

So, Exactly Why Was Wuerl's Resignation Accepted?

Fr Raymond de Souza's take on EWTN raises an intriguing question:

At about 1:30, de Souza says that although the Pennsylvania grand jury report was critical of Wuerl's handling of abuse cases in Pittsburgh, these were 30 years old, and Wuerl's "record throughout the Church is widely acknowledged as very good on sexual abuse". He goes on to say that this would not have been a factor for the Holy Father, which is perhaps credible, but then he says the real reason was that Wuerl claimed never to have heard about Cardinal McCarrick's conduct, and this was why both the priests of the Archdiocese of Washington and Francis felt he had to go.

This is peculiar. Politicians and executives tell convenient public lies all the time. It's not a terminable offense. But let's go to another take, Msgr Charles Pope's blog post from Friday:

On this significant day for the Archdiocese of Washington and the universal Church, I want you to know that I receive the news of the Holy Father’s acceptance of Cardinal Donald Wuerl’s resignation with mixed feelings.

I hope you will understand that he has been a spiritual Father to me since 2006 when he came to Washington as our Archbishop. I have flourished under his leadership. He appointed me in 2007 as pastor to my current parish, which I love so much. I have served him and the Archdiocese on the Priest Council, the College of Consultors, the Priest Personnel Board, and as a Dean. I have also been the coordinator for the Traditional Latin Mass and worked closely with the Communications Office for many years.

. . . . In all these ways and more I found him to be a top-notch administrator, careful, just, cautious and measured; even if, at times to a fault. Sometimes I wanted him to be passionate and fiery about this or that issue! Though some in recent news cycles have called him arrogant and extravagant, I have found him to be often shy and very aware that a bishop does not have unlimited powers. His lifestyle, from my limited vantage point was not extravagant but simple, even austere.

His concerns actually appear to be quite mild, but he also agreed with the other priests of the archdiocese that it was time for him to go. Why? I don't know. But two priests familiar with the question seem to be unintentionally suggesting that public explanations fall short.

I have some thoughts based on the picture I'm trying to sketch for myself on what's happening in the Church. I first became aware of Wuerl when he was the delegate for implementing Anglicanorum coetibus in 2011. My first impression was good, he was an attractive and well-spoken figure. On the other hand, he was of course operating through then-Fr Hurd and Msgr Stetson, and over the following months, I got to see from a center-court seat how badly the job was botched in the case of St Mary of the Angels Hollywood. This was a prosperous parish that should have been a well-publicized early success for the OCSP. Instead, along with the denial of votum to David Moyer and the non-entry of Our Lady of the Atonement, it set a tone of disappointment.

One would think that someone like Wuerl, charged with the objective to make the project a success, a "top-notch administrator", would have been fully aware of deficiencies in Hurd, Stetson, and Steenson and could have insightfully worked through them for better results. Apparently not. By their fruits you shall know them.

Then, in February 2012, while I was still intensely focused on Wuerl, came the Father Guarnizo case, in which an avowed lesbian set a priest up to deny her communion so that she could make a public issue of it. At best, this was poorly handled by the archdiocese, and it was on Wuerl's watch. Consider that any Catholic institution in the 21st century must be aware that the gay lobby will take any opportunity to create public conflicts over the Church's teaching.

Consider that good managers make contingency plans of various sorts. The circumstances of the Guarnizo case provided the archdiocese with advance notice that should have let the priest and his superiors have a sense of what might occur: the woman made a point of introducing herself as a lesbian to him before mass, entering the sacristy and introducing another woman as her “lover.” A good policy would have been in place to let all priests of the archdiocese know that when anything like that happens, the priest should contact a designated officer in the chancery immediately and not take any potentially controversial action before that. Indeed, if nobody in the chancery is available on weekends, the policy should cover this as well.

This was simply another situation that Wuerl let go out of control. Msgr Pope says he never saw any indication that Wuerl's lifestyle was extravagant, but all indications are that in both Pittsburgh and Washington, Wuerl lived in highly luxurious accommodations, but that the Archdiocese of Washington in particular was extremely secretive about them. This suggests that Msgr Pope, who would have no reason to be excessively curious about such things, was among those kept in the dark.

I would guess that the little details I noticed about Wuerl from the start are probably just small wisps of smoke that emanated from much greater corruption that, so far, hasn't come to light. So commentators wonder why, if what Wuerl is publicly accused of doesn't seem that great -- 30-year-old sex abuse cases covered up, nothing new, an "I knew nothing" about McCarrick -- the guy should suddenly have to go. I would say that in the context of other corrupt cardinals in recent decades, Wuerl was adept at letting those around him make of him what they wanted to see. But my sixth sense tells me there's much more we haven't learned, and we never may. Again, though, we shouldn't need J Edgar to suss it out; it's probably all an open secret.