Again, How Did This Get Started, Anyhow?

A visitor who claims to be good at asking questions posed the following in an e-mail:

So many questions to ask Law. For being bishop of 'just' Springfield-Cape Girardeau, how did he get the job of helping the Anglicans, and how did he get Boston after that? Was Law even a canonist? Did Law & Stetson meet at Harvard?

Well, whether we can ever pose these to him directly will depend on where we wind up, and whether he's in the same place. A google search on Law isn't helpful; most stories focus on the Boston scandals and his role in covering them up, while we're interested in his earlier career. If someone can point me to a more complete and insightful biography on the web, I'll greatly appreciate it.

But here's what I've been able to find, starting with this 2003 story from Fox News:

Law was born on Nov. 4, 1931, in Torreon, Mexico, the only child of a U.S. Air Force colonel. He was educated in North America, South America and the Virgin Islands before graduating from Harvard in 1953 with a B.A. in medieval history. [Wikipedia adds that he studied philosophy at Saint Joseph Seminary College in St. Benedict, Louisiana, from 1953 to 1955, and theology at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Worthington, Ohio, from 1955 to 1961. From other sources, his father was Catholic; his mother converted from Presbyterian.]

He was ordained a priest in 1961, and became so involved in civil rights work in Mississippi that his name appeared on a hit list put together by segregationists.

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. He also held several other diocesan posts from 1963 to 1968, including director of the family life bureau and spiritual director of the minor seminary. His rise to national prominence began in 1968, when he took a job at the ecumenical office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The position allowed him to establish numerous influential contacts with bishops and diocesan leaders around the country.

. . . 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.

Back to Fox News:

He became bishop in the Springfield-Cape Girardeau diocese in Missouri in 1973, then landed the job in Boston in 1984 and was elevated to cardinal in 1985.

Law's concern for immigrants and minorities made him enormously popular in those communities from the start, and he received support from them even in the scandal's worst days.

But the Rev. Bernard McLaughlin, a frequent Law critic, said the cardinal never connected with common man. McLaughlin blamed Law's ambition for blinding him to the devastating problems in his archdiocese.

"His gaze was on someplace else, the horizon," McLaughlin said. "There was not that connection with the people, and in the end, that hurt him."

As someone who saw the Ivy League a dozen years after Law graduated from Harvard and lived through the 1960s, I think I can add a little perspective. I watched a recent television special on Ted Kaczynski that made a point I've often seen elsewhere, that Harvard in the 1950s was a very snobby place. (The Ivy League hadn't changed that much by the 1960s; its well-publicized civil rights and antiwar activity was elitist virtue signaling.) This may provide some background to Law's own civil rights activity; the Fox piece reflects some skepticism among Law's own colleagues.

The comment has frequently been made that the effects of Ivy League academic selectivity hadn't been felt in the early 1950s, and admission was generally for members of privileged families, with limited exceptions for prodigies like Ted Kaczynski. Exactly how Law made it in isn't clear, but William Stetson appears to have been a member of a prominent Massachusetts family. Indeed, Ivy League selection criteria continue to be highly confidential, but it is often alleged that a substantial number of positions in each new class is still reserved for children of alumni and other major donors.

In addition "protestant ecumenism" in the 1960s was often another way of saying "marching with Dr Martin Luther King, Jr". This was certainly the path for advancement for a prominent TEC bishop with an elite background, Paul Moore Jr. This all speaks to a shrewd careerism on Law's part, but it says nothing on why Law, midway in his career, would begin contacts with TEC dissidents. In fact, many "continuers" were to the right on the political spectrum and opposed to Paul Moore-style virtue signaling.

So far, in other words, I can't find a good explanation for why Law would become interested in Anglican "continuers", when "ecumenism" in the 1960s and 70s was more frequently associated with outreach to minorities. The only possible connection I can come up with would go back to Harvard and William Stetson, but we have very little information on what connection Law had with Stetson before the late 1970s.