I don't think there is any chance that Cardinal Law would be indicted in Boston.
Until very recently, Church officials were not obliged to report child abuse under the same regulations that apply to teachers and social workers. Even today, if you were a manger of a company, and you had reason to believe an employee had molested a child, you would not be obliged to report it to the authorities. This is not just a legal technicality, because you would have no way of knowing whether the incident truly constituted a crime (lots of these incidents occur within families). Most of the incidents Cardinal Law may have been known about occurred 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. Attitudes then were quite different from what they are today, and what we now consider child abuse (e.g., "improper touching") was not necessarily recognized as a crime then. In those days, "dirty old men" were scorned, possibly required to undergo evaluation and treatment in a mental institution ... but seldom prosecuted and imprisoned.
We have hardened out attitudes toward such incidents over time, but you can't apply current laws and attitudes retroactively to incidents that occurred many years ago. I don't believe prosecutors in Boston would ever attempt to do so. |
