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.