Posted on 12/16/2002 1:38:43 PM PST by GeneD
Cardinal Bernard F. Law, making his first public appearance since resigning as archbishop, offered another apology and asked for forgiveness Monday for his role in the clergy sex abuse scandal that rocked the Boston Archdiocese.
"As I said last Friday, it is my hope and it's my prayer that my resignation as archbishop might help the Archdiocese of Boston to experience healing, to experience reconciliation and to experience unity," Law told reporters at a brief news conference. He left without taking any questions.
Law, 71, said new policies and programs have been put in place in the past 11 months that he hoped would prevent future abuses by priests. Although he had hoped to remain head of the fourth-largest U.S. archdiocese, "It came to be ever more clear to me that the most effective way I might serve the church at this moment was to resign.
In a statement released in Rome after Pope John Paul II accepted his resignation Friday, Law begged for forgiveness from "all those who have suffered" from his failure to crack down on rogue priests who molested children for decades.
He has apologized several times over the past year for his role in moving priests accused of abuse from parish to parish.
The Most Rev. Richard Lennon, an auxiliary bishop in Boston, has been named to take temporary charge of an archdiocese.
Shouldn't he have, er, quit while he was ahead?
more specifically, what they did was a pedophilia expression of their homosexuality...
they simply have no business in the church...
We don't need a statement from bishops about how to handle these incidents. We need to see clergy treated exactly the same as anyone off the street picked up for sexual crimes. If they're guilty, then the state has the opportunity to prove its case. If not, then that's the only way to achieve proper exoneration.
Any denmomination is perpetually tarnished if they fail to do these few things.
I already lost track of who is apologizing and for what.
People who either do not mean the apology or do not know how to fake it seem to be condemned to "apologize" forever.
Yes, and they can have a Brenda Lee sing-a-long starting with I'm Sorry...
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