OSTON, Aug. 13 — Hours of videotaped testimony of Cardinal Bernard F. Law were released today, detailing his responses to sexual abuse accusations against numerous priests and questions about actions he failed to take to prevent further abuse.
In seven hours of deposition in June as a defendant in a lawsuit over accusations against the Rev. Paul R. Shanley, Cardinal Law testified that he had allowed priests accused of sexual abuse — and even those who admitted the abuse — to return to parish ministry without informing parishioners of the accusations or admissions.
"I did not, as a matter of policy, in 1984, '85, '86, '87, '88, '89, '90, '91, '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '97, '98, '99, 2000, 2001, go to parishes on the occasion of dealing with a priest against whom an allegation of sexual abuse of a child had been made," Cardinal Law testified. "I see now that that should have been done, but we did not do that."
He added, "Did I think that I should have informed the parish and then not done it? No. I simply didn't have that as part of our response to these cases."
He said the policy continued until the scandal erupted this January. The cardinal said he stuck to that policy in 1993, when he said he learned about accusations against Father Shanley, but did not inform the parish where Father Shanley had previously been pastor. Cardinal Law testified he had promoted Father Shanley to head the parish in 1985 without asking to check church records about the priest.
Those records, kept in a locked cabinet to which only senior church officials had access, would have revealed several complaints against Father Shanley starting in 1966, when another priest wrote that Father Shanley had been accused of molesting a boy.
And the cardinal said he did not know that in 1994, the archdiocese's liaison to people who complained about abusive priests recommended that a notice be put in parish bulletins alerting parishioners that one of their priests might have molested children.
The deposition released today was taken June 5 and 7. The archdiocese had requested that this and other depositions not be released until the cardinal had completed his testimony. But a judge last week ordered the release today. In May, transcripts were released of one day of his testimony in a case involving Father John J. Geoghan. The depositions are compelling because at least some of the detailed questions the cardinal was required to answer would probably never be allowed to be asked at trial.
Legal experts said it was unusual for depositions to be videotaped and for the tape to be made public. But the extraordinary public interest motivated the judge's decision.
Today, local television stations broadcast the cardinal's deposition almost in its entirety. As the tape was broadcasting, Cardinal Law was being deposed for a third day in the Shanley case. Transcripts and tapes of that session will be released in about 30 days, and the cardinal will be deposed again on Wednesday.
The cardinal, the senior Roman Catholic prelate in the United States, appeared somber and sometimes weary on the tapes, dressed in his clerical garb and alternately wearing and removing his wire-rimmed glasses. He occasionally jousted with the plaintiffs' lawyer, Roderick MacLeish Jr.
At one point, the cardinal said, "Mr. MacLeish, I thought I answered that question previously," and added, "You indicated to counsel a moment ago that this was not the trial, that this was a deposition."
Mr. MacLeish said, "It is, in fact."
"Sometimes I feel you're conducting it as though it were a trial," the cardinal said.
Today, one of the archdiocese's lawyers, Wilson Rogers Jr., said the cardinal was "here to participate in the process and respond to appropriate questions and he's doing that truthfully and fully."
Mr. MacLeish represents four young men who are suing the cardinal for negligence, saying that Father Shanley molested them. Father Shanley, 71, faces criminal charges of child rape involving four children.
The depositions were released amid legal maneuvering by both sides. Although settlement talks broke down late last month, archdiocesan lawyers said today that as recently as Monday lawyers for both sides mentioned the idea of a settlement.
But the lawyers are also conducting aggressive litigation. Archdiocesan lawyers planned to depose several witnesses, including the mother of a Shanley accuser, and plaintiffs' lawyers planned to seek church records on 72 other priests.
In the deposition, Cardinal Law said he did not remember reading a 1985 letter from a woman, Wilma M. Higgs, complaining that Father Shanley had given a speech saying "when adults have sex with children, the children seduced them."
Mr. MacLeish showed Cardinal Law two letters written by a top aide, the Rev. John B. McCormack, which mentioned that the cardinal had received the Higgs letter and suggested he had read it. The cardinal then testified that it appeared he had seen the Higgs letter before. But later he said he now does not believe he read the Higgs letter. He said that Father McCormack might have been referring to a stamp on the letter that said it had been received by the archbishop, not any discussion with the cardinal about the letter.
The cardinal also said he was never told about complaints the archdiocese receive about Father Shanley before the cardinal's tenure began in 1984. Some of those complaints involved Father Shanley's participation in the North American Man-Boy Love Association, and after those complaints in the late 1970's, Father Shanley was removed from his job as a "street priest" ministering to "alienated youth," and placed in a parish in Newton, Mass. He is accused of molesting several boys at that parish.
Many of the Shanley complaints in the 1970's and early 1980's were fielded by Bishop Thomas V. Daily, now head of the Brooklyn diocese, who was second-in-command in Boston when Cardinal Law arrived.
