Cardinal Bernard Law left Rome on Saturday and headed home to Boston to face the legal and moral music after his resignation over the worst scandal to hit the Roman Catholic church in its US history.
Cardinal Law (71) left Rome as quickly as he arrived a week ago for talks with Pope John Paul.
He first handed in his resignation over the Boston clergy sexual abuse scandal in April, but the pope rejected it then and had been reluctant before this week's discussions to see Law go.
The cardinal returns to a US church wounded by scandal, whose epicentre is in the archdiocese Law headed until yesterday.
The anger and hurt that has spread far from Boston was evident in an e-mail sent to a reporter in Rome from a grandmother in Staten Island, New York City.
The woman, who called herself a senior lay member of her parish, said: "What has gone on is disgraceful, whether in Boston or anywhere else.
"I honestly feel bad for the good people who are in the priesthood and doing a good job, but those who harmed children should be hung and treated no differently than any one of us that commits a crime," she said.
Apart from outrage from Church members, Law faces a subpoena served on him the day he left for Rome, to appear before a Massachusetts grand jury investigating sex abuse by priests, Boston sources familiar with the inquiry have said.
Also, angry protesters have urged criminal indictments against Law and his former top associates.
On Thursday Mr Tom Reilly, attorney general for Massachusetts, accused the archdiocese of endangering countless children by covering up the behavior of paedophile priests for decades and possibly generations.
Documents released last week under a court order showed that one priest had a history of molesting boys, another maintained a "double life" with a girlfriend and a third supplied cocaine to a teen-ager with whom he was having sex.
But the archdiocese gave all three men new jobs, even though the heirarchy knew about their records, the documents showed.