From the Commonweal Blog on Cardinal Law

Posted by Barbara
on December 7th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
What is or ought to be the bitterest irony is that the Church was forced to conform its conduct to the law, and really, its own teaching by none other than the “dictatorship of relativism” that the Church so loves to sneer at. If Law had been the superintendent of the Boston school system he would be in jail — or more likely, and to what ought to be our greater sorrow, he would have acted differently.

And next in line for repulsiveness is the fact that the Church was granted a good faith exemption by the state from child abuse reporting laws in order to protect priests from being forced to break their vows of confessional secrecy, and that exemption was used to hide the sins of the confessors and protect them from the consequences of their crimes against some of their most vulnerable sheep.

And yet, the irony of this, and its impact on the credibility and authority of the Church is simply lost on many in the Church, who to this day reserve their greatest moral outrage for the Boston Globe.