Reaction mixed over Cardinal Law's duties

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ROME -- About two months after Cardinal Bernard Law was appointed to run one of the most famous churches in Rome, congregations in the Eternal City are reacting with a mixture of compassion and horror at receiving spiritual guidance from the former archbishop of Boston, the Roman press reports.

Cardinal Law was forced to resign amid a scandal over his failure to defrock John Geoghan, a priest in his archdiocese accused of abusing more than 100 minors from 1962 to 1995. Pope John Paul II named the American prelate on May 27 to the relatively ceremonial post of archpriest of the basilica of St. Mary Major, a stone's throw from the Colosseum.

Cardinal Law's new job is largely administrative, running one of the largest and most architecturally imposing churches in the Italian capital. It traditionally has been a recommended place of pilgrimage for Roman Catholics visiting the city.

But critics of the appointment, especially among the Anglo-Saxon Catholic community in Rome, say the job is more congenial and prestigious than is appropriate. They note that Cardinal Law occupies a comfortable apartment in the basilica that goes with the post.

Some think it would have been better for the image of the church had Cardinal Law taken a less visible position, perhaps in a minor American parish.

Other Vatican watchers compare the treatment given the cardinal with the "banishment" of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the former head of the Institute for Religious Works, the Vatican Bank.

He was sent to work as an obscure parish priest in Illinois after being accused of involvement in the Banco Ambrosiano scandal in the 1980s. The scandal climaxed with the death under unresolved circumstances of Roberto Calvi, the financier known as "God's banker," who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982.

"It would have been better if Law had just walked into the night," said one veteran priest in Rome's Anglo-Saxon community.

Cardinal Law presided over a Mass at St. Mary Major for the first time this month. The Mass is celebrated each year to recall the appearance of the Madonna in a dream to Pope Liberius and to a Roman nobleman on Aug. 5 in the year 352.

During the apparition, Mary told the two men to build a church in the place where snow would fall the next morning. Church lore says snow fell at the site where the basilica now stands.