Cardinal who fled Boston at height of child-molestation scandal dies in Rome

That people's anger is directed at the organization / the institution / the hierarchy, not at the faithful or the faith. What word other than "the Church" would you use to describe it?

I once was inspired to join a team of Electrolux salesmen. Both my mother and grandmother were Electrolux owners, so I was taught all about them at a very early age. Of course, as I grew up, I experimented with Hoovers and other brands (even a Dirt Devil), but my faith in Electrolux vacuums was never shaken.

So, in 1983, when I was looking for an extra part-time job, the advertisement for "small appliance salesman" at my local Electrolux store, sounded like fun. When I found out it meant lugging vacuum cleaners door-to-door and ringing strangers' doorbells, it sounded like less fun, but I believed in Electrolux, so I believed I could do it!

[sub]    ... unfortunately, this was in Ft. Lauderdale — in August[/sub]
[sup]people weren't opening their doors to strangers, let alone buying vacuum cleaners[/sup]

Before sending us out to canvass selected neighborhoods, the elder salesmen would first extoll upon the grandeur of Electrolux products, but then go on to preach gospels of cold calling and give sermons about hard selling. If selling door-to-door in the Florida heat wasn't hard enough, I just couldn't reconcile my faith; derived from my own, personal relationship with Electrolux vacuums; with the dogma spewing forth from the hierarchy, which was often cruel and hurtful to the people they purported to serve.

The one thing that stands out, is their insistence of only one, true, Genuine Electrolux filter bag. It was something (at the time) which could only be obtained by going in person to a local Electrolux store, or by an Electrolux salesman delivering salvation for your vacuum directly to your home.

We were instructed to always praise the Electrolux filter bag when speaking with customers, along with a stern warning — if you do not use a Genuine Electrolux filter bag, the motor on your vacuum cleaner will surely go to hell.

There were 2 archdiocese's where they hid and moved suspected priests in 2016 and 2017.
They have learned nothing.

I have changed my mind because of some changes that were put in place and ultimately a request from a classmate that put his own kid in the school which gave me a belief that changes were made to prevent future problems, at least to the extent you can fix these things.

Writing that sentence should have been the cue you needed to think "maybe I should recuse myself from this discussion" before clicking "Save," but I see you have chosen not to. So, if I have this straight: your principled stand against the largest institutional perpetrator of child rape in the last century was to stop giving money to your school, which you somehow managed to attend at the height of the abuse without so much as an inkling that something was wrong. You reneged on this principled stand, not because they made any demonstrable progress toward building processes for rooting out child rapists in their own midst, but because of a request from another classmate (who presumably never stopped giving money to the rapists). Now that you have resumed giving money to the organization whose figurehead elected to shelter one of the masterminds behind a nationwide coverup of institutional child rape, you are confident that this massive problem, which has plagued pretty much every organization that puts men in positions of unchecked power since the dawn of civilization, will no longer occur, despite numerous counterexamples WITHIN THE CHURCH in the last five years,. And you moreover qualify this totally unfounded hope with "at least to the extent you can fix things," with the clear implication that we just have to expect a certain base level of institutional coverup of systemic child rape because Catholics gonna Catholic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You pretty clearly do not give the faintest damn about child abuse, so long as it's perpetrated by someone wearing clergy robes. Which... OK, dude, you do you, but don't you dare act like you're making a principled stand on that in a public forum like this and expect it to go unremarked on.

In a cult there is one person at the top who made the whole thing up. In a religion that person is dead.

The usual excuse used by people who want to allow powerful criminals to escape punishment. Law was a criminal -- an accessory after the fact of multiple rapes of children. He should have been tried as the criminal he was, and punished after conviction. Ask some of the victims of his crimes how his escape helped their "healing."

What they were "supposed to do" was to allow him to be arrested and tried. That they didn't was more proof that the RCC holds itself above the law, and will do anything to try and protect its reputation and its criminals.

I shake my head in wonder every time I see something like this.

What were they supposed to do?

I can think of a lot of things they could have done other than whisking him off to a sinecure job in Rome.

For example, chaining him to a rock and letting vultures rip his flesh from his bones. Or opening up the records to the civil authorities and helping them to prosecute him.

was well on his way to being totally out of it when Law resigned. Ratzinger and a few others were calling the shots by then. Law was also plugged into the Opus Dei/ conservative power center in Rome, most of whose adherents felt he was being victimized. Several cardinals were quoted in the Italian press at the time calling his treatment a “witch hunt”. Even when he had all his marbles, JP II was loathe to discipline allies. Just look at Maciel, founder of the Legionnaires of Christ for whom Hell would be a much too temperate climate.

To answer the question, “what were they supposed to do?”— what had been done in the past: send the person to a remote monastery or missionary outpost to repent. That’s what was done to the Irish cardinal caught having fathered a child. He was sent to a mission in Ecuador, if I remember correctly.