I thought I'd written about all I could stomach writing on the seemingly bottomless pedophilia and pederasty scandals involving the Catholic church. Here and in other spaces, I've written about the scandal itself; the abysmal media coverage of it (covering everyone except the victims); the dithering, clueless Pope and his minions; the men-only hierarchy that makes such cluelessness possible; and the vast majority of good priests also victimized by their sick, criminal brethren. I thought that about covered it.

But then, last week, a report in the Boston Globe suggests that Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law has sunk to a new low.

The nadir comes in a response, filed in April by Law's lawyers, to a lawsuit brought by a boy named Gregory Ford and his parents. It alleges that Rev. Paul Stanley began abusing Ford when he was six years old, and that Stanley's bosses knew or should have known that Stanley was not just a practitioner, but a long-time advocate of sex between adults and young kids.

Law's reply contains a lot of the sort of standard denials that you'd expect when lawyers get involved. But it also includes the following:

"The defendant says that the Plaintiffs were not in the exercise of due care, but rather the negligence of the Plaintiffs contributed to cause the injury or damage complained of."

What Law is saying, in other words, is that six-year-old Gregory was, indeed, victimized by the lecherous Reverend Stanley--but that at least in part this was Gregory's fault. And/or the fault of his parents. (Both of whom are the Plaintiffs.)

Think about that for a moment. No, better yet, don't. You'll just lose your last meal. Because what Law's lawyers are claiming is not just the standard conservative refrain of blaming the victims--or, as happens when bad things occur to or are done by kids, asking where the parents were when it happened. (In this case, Cardinal Law, they were trusting their small child to a man presumably of the Lord.) This is worse. This is blaming the victim when the victim is a small child, and the crime committed is considered one of the most heinous and despicable our troubled society has to offer.

I will confess, to any and all, that I was pretty skeptical when Law and his colleagues came back from Rome, pronouncements in hand, and piously proclaimed that the Pope had prepared unprecedented procedures for removing predatory priests from position of power. (Sorry if saying that sentence involved a lot of spitting.) As we all heard and read, that process would kick in only if a priest were considered to be a "serial offender," and then only if his superiors deemed the man a threat. (You think so?)

Of course, if they thought a priest was a threat, they would have done something in some of the 2,000 or so cases now plaguing the church, ranging from decades ago to weeks ago. But they didn't, because the attitude that seems to pervade this guys' club is that sex with minors--be they promiscuous teens or small children--is a public relations problem, or a personnel problem. It's not, of course. It's a felony, an act that can and does scar people for life. Firing someone on the second offense, maybe, isn't what you do when you learn that a serious crime has been committed. What you do is you turn the guy in.

The obliviousness of the Catholic church, from the Pope on down, couldn't be captured any better than it was by Law's lawyers in their response to the lawsuit by poor Gregory Ford and his family. Deny everything. Protect each other. Blame everyone else. But whatever you do, don't show an ounce of compassion for the people whose lives you may have destroyed.

In our society, a lot of people in power respond in that fashion when calamity calls. But one of the reasons we use the word "sacred" when we talk about the church is that we believe there to be some basic ethics--moral laws about how we humans conduct ourselves--and that churches are the one institution in our society whose sole purpose is to help all of us aspire to those higher laws.

And then there's Cardinal Law, apparently blaming a six-year-old for being partly responsible for his victimization by a man of God.

Any diety I've ever read about would be embarrassed to have such people claiming to act in His name.