Former Archbishop Was Devout At Harvard, Destined for Priesthood

A few days before his 71st birthday, Bernard F. Law submitted his comments to the 50th Anniversary Report for the Class of 1953.

“What an age in which to be facing the most difficult challenges of one’s life!” he writes.

Over the past year and a half, Law has tumbled from his position as an archbishop and one of the most influential figures in the American Catholic church to a chaplain in a small convent in Clinton, Md.—and a place in American infamy.

Cardinal Law’s descent began in January 2002 when the Boston Globe reported that former Catholic priest John J. Geoghan had sexually abused children for years—and that Law knew about the abuse, but still allowed Geoghan to remain in contact with parishoners.

After the Geoghan story broke, further investigations uncovered a spate of sexual misconduct complaints against dozens of priests in the Archdiocese of Boston.

Priests, columnists and politicians called for Law to step down.

By mid-December, he had tendered his resignation as archbishop of Boston to Pope John Paul II, who accepted.

Law left his post disgraced, a symbol in many people’s eyes of the corruption responsible for crippling the Catholic Church. Catholicism became the target of many jokes and the faith of many of its devotees was shaken.

In the public eye of the recent past, Law has come to represent the worst of the Catholic Church.

Few who have followed the child abuse scandal would be able to discern in Law the vestiges of a college student who came across to many who knew him as the pious paragon of Catholic virtue.

Long before he became one of the most influential American prelates in the Church, friends say the Adams House resident embodied the dedication, temperance and good will that the Catholic Church has always advocated.

A Catholic Throughand Through

Friends who knew Law at Harvard were certain he was destined for the priesthood—and so was Law.

“Bernie always knew he wanted to be a priest,” says Raymond G. Ammar ’53, Law’s upperclass roommate for all three years in Adams. “His actions, his behavior, his entire interest was focused toward that end.”

Robert W. Oliver ’53, Law’s roommate throughout college, recalls that Law’s adherence to the tenets of Catholicism—which were far stricter in the 1950s than by the end of the following decade—distinguished him from other undergraduates.

When Law was a student here, the Church severely frowned upon the consumption of meat on Friday.

Oliver vividly remembers Law going out of his way to ensure that the vegetable soup served in the dining hall on Friday did not contain any beef stock.

“Most of the religious students at Harvard would not have pursued it,” Oliver says. “They would have been content with the vegetable soup because they were following the spirit of the law.”

Law followed the letters of the Church’s rules—and sought to promote them among other undergraduates. He served as vice president and then president of Harvard’s Catholic Club, according to Thomas L. Barrette ’52, who edged out Law by one vote for the presidency during Law’s junior year.

Law’s Catholic roots ran deep, having considered the priesthood since high school.

He was born in Torreòn, Mexico, and his family moved to St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, in the 1940s.

His Catholic father was a distinguished pilot and a colonel in the U.S. Army. While on the island, Law’s mother gave piano lessons, and her son developed the skill as well.

Law was close to his parents and while at Harvard stayed in touch with them by frequently writing letters home, according to Romanus Cessario, a Dominican priest who has known Law since the 1980s.

The Crimson was unable to reach Law for this story.

Cessario, who is still in contact with Law, says the cardinal was unavailable for an interview due to a trip to Rome.

Alfred Heath, Law’s classmate at Charlotte Amalie High School in St. Thomas, said Law had been editor of the high school newspaper and contributed to the local daily.

Even after becoming a priest, he remained involved in journalism, editing a diocesan newspaper in Mississippi while a parish priest there.

“He was going to go into journalism,” Heath says.

But Heath says Eldra Schulterbrandt, a guidance counselor who advised both Law and Heath, redirected the aspiring journalist towards service to the Church.

“Mrs. Schulterbrandt saw something he didn’t see—he was inclined toward the religious,” Heath says. “So she told him to take some philosophy classes, and the rest is history.”

Eugene H. Berkun ’53 lived with Law during their first month at Harvard and remembers a roommate uncertain about whether he should even be on campus.

Berkun says that before he moved out due to overcrowding in their Thayer room, the two first-years discussed the conflict between Law’s moral strictness and the College’s less restrictive atmosphere.

“He was debating entering the priesthood rather than coming to Harvard,” Berkun says. “He felt that the liberal set-up was just a little bit too much for someone pointed toward orthodoxy.”

Religiously Conservative, Socially Liberal

Friends say that Law’s conservative demeanor hid a tolerant—even liberal—social and political ideology.

“He is a liberal,” Ammar says confidently. “It’s just the acceptance of Church teachings that gets him cast as a conservative.”

Oliver recalls that Law “made an effort to be friendly” to a black student at Harvard at a time when minority students “were as scarce as hens’ teeth.”

Oliver, who is a Protestant, says Law at first tried to convince him to accept the beliefs of the Catholic Church.

“I think he gave up trying to convert me,” he says. “But he was very tolerant.”

Heath says Law was the only white student in his high school class, and that when he was ordained a priest in Natchez-Jackson, Miss. in 1961, he was heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement there, fighting for the rights of blacks.

“He was in the heat of it,” Heath says. “His life was threatened because of it.”

Law was generous with his time, according to friends. Heath particularly remembers giving piano lessons with Law to raise money for a local high school in St. Thomas.

“He always tries to help people,” Law’s high school classmate says.

But Law was not only generous with his time, according to Heath.

He fondly remembers a sailing trip he took with Law and another friend.

The friend, named John, “cursed like anything,” says Heath, not realizing he was on a boat with a bishop.

Heath, embarassed, says he wanted to tell his friend to stop, but Law told him not to worry about it.

When the local newspaper later ran a picture of Law announcing his visit to the island, John realized who his sailing companion had been and called up the bishop to apologize.

According to Heath, Law immediately put John at ease, calling him a “good man” and referring to his cursing simply as a “foreign tongue.”

This tolerance came from a man whose language only rarely dipped into cursing.

“I think the strongest word I ever heard him use was ‘damn,’” Oliver says.

The Famous Archbishop

After progressively moving through the ranks of the Catholic Church, Law landed at Archbishop of Boston in 1984.

A year later, Law became the first Harvard graduate to join the College of Cardinals, according to Cessario.

As archbishop, Law—who had moved from Mexico to Colombia to the Virgin Islands during his childhood—took stances on many international policy issues, calling for debt relief for third world countries and an end to the U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba.

His archdiocese was the fourth-largest in the country and included over two million Catholics. He wrote op-ed pieces for the Washington Post and spoke before President Clinton. In the United States, Law became a very public figure—a salient representative of Catholicism.

“The office of bishop is looked upon as a grace to be exercised,” Cessario says. “I’m sure he understood it that way.”

“He has all of the personal qualities that you would expect to find in a senator,” Cessario adds. “He’s a man of great personal presence, and of polished speech.”

Friends say they maintain respect and admiration for Law, in spite of the severe criticism he has received and any administrative mistakes he may have made.

“If ever I knew a saint, in terms of personal virtue, I think that he was the one,” Oliver said. “I’m not sure St. Francis would have made a good archbishop, though.”

Cessario and Ammar defend Law’s administrative choices as archbishop, saying he followed the rules of the Church in allowing Geoghan and others to remain in their posts without notifying parishioners of their misconduct.

“The cardinal followed and implemented the general prudence the Church had established for priests who behaved in any ways unbecoming of the priestly office,” Cessario says.

Cessario also says Law’s eventual removal of abusive priests from their clerical positions was actually an innovative response to misbehavior in a Church that had not done that before.

“I want to acknowledge publicly my responsibility for decisions which I now see were clearly wrong,” Law said at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in November. “I ask forgiveness of those who have been abused.”

Now, 50 years after he graduated from Harvard, Law has left the public eye for a small convent in Clinton, Md.

He modestly writes that the most rewarding experience of his life has been simply serving as a priest, and that his biggest regret is his failure to handle better the sexual abuse he discovered in his beloved Church.

The Catholic who realized his calling as a high school student and devoutly stuck by it through his Harvard years, realized his dream in the Church and met his public downfall in its flaws.

Still, he finds comfort in the words of the Gospel of Luke, quoting a Biblical passage to his Harvard classmates in his anniversary report entry.

“In the tender compassion of God/ The dawn from on high shall break upon us,” he writes.

—Staff writer Alexander J. Blenkinsopp can be reached at blenkins@fas.harvard.edu.