Abuse row cardinal faces revolt

The Catholic church in Boston is facing an outright rebellion from a group of its own priests that may soon demand that Cardinal Bernard Law should resign because of his handling of a sexual abuse scandal that will not go away.

The crisis deepened suddenly after a court last week forced the public release of 11,000 church documents detailing the cases of several rogue priests. The pages included instances of priests sexually abusing aspiring nuns, having children out of wedlock and sharing cocaine with young men.

Making matters still worse, the church leadership, which has been accused of knowingly shuffling offending priests from parish to parish, threatened to declare bankruptcy, apparently as a manoeuvre to stop lawyers pursuing civil suits on behalf of about 450 plaintiffs who say they have been abused by priests.

While priests in Boston have individually called on Cardinal Law to resign before, they have never done so collectively. "That would signal open revolt," agreed Stephen Pope, chair of the Theology Department at Boston College.

Nearly three dozen of the city's priests gathered at the church of the Reverend Walter Cuenin, in the suburb of Newton late on Friday, defying an order from Cardinal Law banning archdiocesan gatherings there. "We do whatever we want," Fr Cuenin said of the order. He added that the group would draft a statement and deliver it to the Cardinal. "I think there's a strong feeling among many priests, not just here, that we need new leadership in the diocese."

Boston has been at the epicentre of the child abuse scandal that has been rocking all of the American Catholic church this year. It burst into the open with the trial of one priest in January, which led to the release of papers confirming that the church hierarchy had been allowing abusers to remain in the ministry.