I’m not sure Cardinal Law was gay himself or was an abuser but he certainly covered up repeat child abusers. I don’t know what he was thinking when he did it. Perhaps he felt a bad priest was better than no priest at all. He was wrong and he broke the law. The Vatican is still covering for him.
I got to know Cardinal Law fairly well (though not often face to face) when we were in Boston visiting family fairly regularly. Indeed, he presided over my Aunt’s funeral.
He was an orthodox bishop, who usually got into trouble for trying to bring dissident liberal priests back into line. His writings in the diocesan newspaper were always orthodox, unlike some other bishops I could name.
The chief sex offender villain was a priest who publicly argued in favor of NAMBLA and gay rights. The Boston papers, of course, supported him in this. While somewhat contradictorily lambasting the church as a den of pederasty.
In the end, Cardinal Law did indeed fail to do his job. But the basic problem was not so much anything to do with him as the fact that he had to preside over a diocese that was absolutely stuffed full of dissidents. His reputation was that of a mean conservative. If he had defrocked all of the offenders, there would hardly have been anyone left to say Mass.
In hindsight, he should have somehow handled it differently. But he was NOT a gay-enabler or a liberal sympathizer like, say, Rembert Weakland. He simply was confronted with more problems than he could manage.
That’s my take on it. All of this came out more or less after he left, so no one really had any chance to discuss it with him, as far as I know. Indeed, it was not the kind of thing that could be discussed, with the lawyers all gathering like vultures and the diocese being stripped of all the money it needed for basic building maintenance and charities.
The Communist Guardian, of course, hates Catholics and the Pope, and never misses a chance to demonize them. The more unfair the charges, the better.