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As the American bishops in 1921 had resisted passing judgment on Boston’s cardinal O’Connell for his nephew’s secret marriage and misuse of money, so the hierarchs in 2002 avoided talk of Cardinal Law’s disaster. His Eminence had apologized as the meeting began. No need of punishment there; thus they turned to more pressing matters. Encased in their small Tower of Babel, the prelates and princes ran late for a news conference. Castrillón and Bertone drafted a communiqué in Italian; three English texts circulated—so many ideas to distill. When the briefing finally began that night, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., normally at ease with the press, faltered when asked why the document said nothing about laypeople: “I was looking for it … we had it in there last night.” Of Catholics in the pews who had watched the church battered and stained day upon day for nearly five months, the noted author David Gibson wrote: “No reference to their sorrow, their anger, or their possible role in ensuring that such a scandal would never happen again.”23

The worst Catholic crisis since the Reformation produced a statement that endorsed celibacy as “a gift of God.” The cardinals and archbishops called on pastors to “reprimand individuals who spread dissent.” The Vatican would conduct a visitation of U.S. seminaries. Bishops would hold a special day of prayer for victims and work on a process to expel “notorious” priests from the priesthood. Many of them were already going to prison.

“Where is Law?” a reporter asked. “Is he dodging us?” asked another. “I do not believe so,” said the other official at the briefing, Archbishop Wilton Gregory, president of the USCCB. “But I could not tell you why he is not here.”24

Law flew back to Boston, expecting to resolve the lawsuits with the John Geoghan victims, hoping to salvage some of the standing he had built up in four decades and lost in four months.

In the prosperous suburb of Wellesley, a group had formed called Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), which quickly drew several thousand members. They wanted to support the abuse survivors, affirm priests of integrity, and press the hierarchy for changes. Money was an emotion-charged issue. Joe Finn, a CPA long active on archdiocesan projects, worried about parishioners’ funds going for settlements. The archdiocese had an $18 million operating budget, of which $14 million came from the annual Cardinal’s Appeal. “They’re in steep decline,” Finn told VOTF members. “They’re already cutting like crazy … Look around! There are five hundred cases, five hundred. It’s nuclear winter here in Boston.”25

Finn sought an opinion from a canon lawyer for the wealthy Bostonians who served on Law’s Finance Council. These were the people who worked the phones, raising the big money when the cardinal asked. Finn sent them the canonist’s opinion, which said they could veto a settlement. He added, “You guys have the power to say no.” When the Finance Council did just that at a meeting with Law, the legal negotiations hit a wall. A furious Mitchell Garabedian, the plaintiff attorney, accused his counterpart Wilson Rodgers of double-crossing the survivors. Cardinal Law, meanwhile, was in a stew, unable to approve a settlement and move on.

The Boston agreement was in limbo when the bishops arrived in Dallas that June. The Binder spin-control team helped the USCCB planners orchestrate a drama of crisis-and-response. The bishops sat in a meeting room; journalists in a spacious reception hall watched by closed-circuit video as four abuse victims, in shaky voices, told the bishops about their lives. The bishops’ grim faces joined the harrowing prelude to a vote, the parliamentary procedure by which they adopted a youth protection charter. They pledged to remove any priest with a single past transgression, a “zero tolerance” policy that made international headlines and assured a bottleneck of dismissal cases for Ratzinger’s staff in the Sant’Uffizio. The bishops agreed