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Bowers organized a food pantry for hungry people and English-as-a-second-language classes taught by a volunteer Jewish doctor. Many of the unskilled workers taking ESL had no citizenship papers. He runs a good church, Rosie Piper told herself. She felt her $10 donation on Sunday was helping Bowers steer a parish full of life. Imagining Father Bowers thirty years on, she wrote a $100 check for the spring 2003 collection for the clergy retirement fund.

Borré assumed that when the deal was struck on the settlements for the 552 clergy abuse victims, grown now and with gladiatorial attorneys, the church coffers would take a hard dent that the new archbishop would repair over time. He thought Bowers a bit of a sentimental liberal, but he liked his work and saw how hard he gave to the parish.

Warm and outgoing, with an easy wit, Bowers had been inspired by Dorothy Day’s radical witness in the Catholic Worker Movement, where activists lived at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. He liked the liberation theology of Latin America and had been active in a group assisting the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. Bowers drew his values from an ideal of Jesus as a peacemaker, and peace as a living force of hope.

Born in 1960, Bob Bowers had grown up in Greater Boston, an attorney’s son with three older brothers by whom he now had eight nephews. On graduating from Boston College in 1982 with a B.A. in philosophy, Bowers entered St. John, the archdiocesan seminary in Brighton. As a priest, his assignments had been in comfortable parishes where, with one exception, he had felt welcome. His previous parish had been in Milton, six miles outside of Boston.

Bowers had gotten his new assignment from Cardinal Law two days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Exhausted from the jammed prayer services in Milton, he entered the chancery in a daze from the endless TV loop of airplanes smashing into skyscrapers, spitting back balls of fire and smoke.

Law, then sixty-nine, with white hair and a thick girth, rose from his desk with a smile. Too young to call him “Bernie” as certain older clergy did, Bowers issued a deferential “Your Eminence.” Law was a Boston potentate at ease with politicians, bankers, and CEOs. But he had an emotional distance that many priests noticed, a self-centeredness that some speculated came from his background as an only child, seeing himself as the pivot point in most situations. In 1985, when Law was invested as a cardinal, several hundred Bostonians traveled to Rome. At a reception in the North American College courtyard, Law declared, “This is the strongest moment for the church since the Reformation.”1

Strong is one way to describe Law’s presence at the Congregation for Bishops in Rome: he became the go-to prelate in choosing new men for the U.S. hierarchy. The prefect of Bishops, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, met with Pope John Paul II every Saturday; he saw the pope’s esteem for Law and acted accordingly.2 Law, a maker of bishops, made monthly trips to Rome. In Boston, he made late-night hospital rounds, visiting sick people, taking time to chat with his chaplains. Law was generally benevolent toward his priests, but he had a strain of cold arrogance. At a clergy conference on canon law issues, Law interrupted a lecturer to declare, “Father, while I am in this archdiocese, I am the Law!”3

Bowers’s previous encounter with Law had been in 1996, when the young priest asked to be reassigned; he shared a rectory with an alcoholic pastor whose rage made daily life toxic. Law sent him to Milton, where he thrived. But the old drunk had gotten under Bowers’s skin. “I want to share with you what it is like,” he had written in a National Catholic Reporter essay:

Some do not seem to know how to pastor or why. They prefer the title and the image, which is accountable to none. I have known them. I thought we were colleagues. I thought we would collaborate. I thought we would empower.