Cessario and Ammar defend Law’s administrative choices as archbishop, saying he followed the rules of the Church in allowing Geoghan and others to remain in their posts without notifying parishioners of their misconduct.

“The cardinal followed and implemented the general prudence the Church had established for priests who behaved in any ways unbecoming of the priestly office,” Cessario says.

Cessario also says Law’s eventual removal of abusive priests from their clerical positions was actually an innovative response to misbehavior in a Church that had not done that before.

“I want to acknowledge publicly my responsibility for decisions which I now see were clearly wrong,” Law said at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in November. “I ask forgiveness of those who have been abused.”

Now, 50 years after he graduated from Harvard, Law has left the public eye for a small convent in Clinton, Md.

He modestly writes that the most rewarding experience of his life has been simply serving as a priest, and that his biggest regret is his failure to handle better the sexual abuse he discovered in his beloved Church.

The Catholic who realized his calling as a high school student and devoutly stuck by it through his Harvard years, realized his dream in the Church and met his public downfall in its flaws.

Still, he finds comfort in the words of the Gospel of Luke, quoting a Biblical passage to his Harvard classmates in his anniversary report entry.

“In the tender compassion of God/ The dawn from on high shall break upon us,” he writes.

—Staff writer Alexander J. Blenkinsopp can be reached at blenkins@fas.harvard.edu.