Vatican City — US cardinal Bernard Law, a once-influential church figure forced to resign after failing to stop paedophile priests in one of the biggest crises in US Catholicism, has died, the Vatican said on Wednesday. He was 86. The former Boston cardinal had fallen from grace after he allegedly shielded priests involved in a wide-reaching sex abuse scandal that shook the Roman Catholic Church and eclipsed his long and at one-time venerated career. Allegations of molestation and cover-ups seemingly surfaced daily after the scandal erupted in Boston, where Law was forced to resign in 2002 for allegedly protecting predator priests despite evidence they had been abusing youngsters. In 2004, an investigation established that about 4,400 Catholic priests were paedophiles and that the number of victims from 1950-2002 stands at about 11,000. The scandal was broken by the Boston Globe newspaper’s Spotlight investigative reporting team, whose dogged uncovering of widespread abuse by priest...
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