US: Speaking in a low, contrite voice, Cardinal Bernard Law told the congregation at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston on Sunday that, "We pray for the victims of this crime, this sin," the sexual abuse of children by priests.
Outside, demonstrators carrying signs saying "Law must go" and "Moral bankruptcy" were in an unforgiving mood.
They were protesting about the sudden prospect of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston filing for bankruptcy as a less expensive way of dealing with hundreds of legal actions over paedophile priests.
The Boston Globe reported that financial advisers to Cardinal Law had unanimously supported the idea, which would mean that all 450 claimants against the archdiocese would be lumped together and no new lawsuits could be filed.
It would also delay for years payment of compensation and damages while the church reorganised its finances. Filing for bankruptcy would mean the archdiocese was admitting it was liable, but Cardinal Law would no longer have to answer questions in pre-trial depositions, and archdiocese lawyers would not have to release any more personnel files on priests to plaintiffs' lawyers.
This week, lawyers for alleged victims will make public personnel files of 65 priests turned over to them by court order. By taking such drastic action, "the immediate effect is to recreate a feeling of instability and mistrust among the laity", Mr Thomas O'Connor, a professor of history at Boston College and author of Boston Catholics, said yesterday.
"Things had begun to stabilise, the Cardinal had come out of his bunker, he had become more public and met with victims and the Voice of the Faithful," he said. "Suddenly this has put an end to all that."
Voice of the Faithful is a lay group formed in response to the crisis, and has been prevented from using church property. Prof O'Connor said he could not recall a case where a Catholic Church diocese had declared bankruptcy and "it would be even more extraordinary in a diocese this size".
If it was simply a threat to pressurise plaintiffs' lawyers to settle quickly for lesser amounts, it was a dangerous tactic, as it would cause many of the laity to question the value of future contributions to the archdiocese, he said. Already the Cardinal's $350 million (€352 million) capital fund-raising campaign has virtually ground to a halt. The tactic of threatening bankruptcy has, however, been used successfully by another American diocese.
In 1997, lawyers won a $119.6 million (€120.3 million)jury verdict from the Dallas Diocese for 11 victims of an abusive priest, Father Rudolph Kos, but after the diocese threatened to file for bankruptcy, the case was settled for $31 million.
Two lawyers whose firm represents 219 alleged victims of sexual abuse in Boston said they would abandon settlement negotiations if they did not receive assurances that the archdiocese would not file for bankruptcy.
The Boston Globe reported yesterday that some victims said bankruptcy would give the church a way to avoid its responsibility while shielding Cardinal Law from questions about his oversight of known paedophile priests. It quoted church officials who said that seeking bankruptcy protection would ultimately prove to be the church's best option, and that the alternative would be years of costly and damaging litigation.
Boston has been the epicentre of the scandal of abusive priests in the United States, and Cardinal Law has been under intense pressure to step down. "He seems to be going from crisis to crisis, putting out fires without any semblance of an overall diocesan policy," said Prof O'Connor. The archdiocese's real estate holdings exceed $1.3 billion in assessed value but the real value may be much greater.