Cardinal Law may have resigned from his leadership position in the Catholic Church, but his troubles probably won't be over for a long time. The criminal justice system in Massachusetts is very interested in him and in several of the bishops who served directly beneath him.

Although it didn't make as many front-page headlines as Law's ouster, the church's New Hampshire diocese admitted in writing earlier this week that it may have violated criminal law by failing to protect children from sexually abusive priests. In an agreement with prosecutors, Bishop John McCormack acknowledged that the state has ''evidence likely to sustain a conviction of a charge ... against the diocese.'' The Boston Globe story on the agreement, and the stunning admission, can be found here.

Down in Massachusetts, the state attorney general charged the other day that the church in Boston had developed an "elaborate scheme" to conceal sex crimes by priests from law enforcement officers. The attorney general, Thomas Reilly, confirmed that the problems in the church were not the ancient history that church leaders would like the public to believe, but rather were still present. As a New York Times article reported on Friday:

"We felt an obligation to go forward, particularly given our experience dealing with this institution," Mr. Reilly said. "We've had experience dealing with other institutions against which allegations, serious allegations, had been made.

"Our experience in the past is generally they do the right thing when it comes to children. And by doing the right thing I mean they clean house. And they cooperate and they try to work with us to get to the bottom of this and find out the truth. Obviously that has not happened here."

Even those of the faithful who might be willing to forgive sex between priests and teenage boys may feel very differently about alleged obstruction of a criminal investigation on top of it.

And the beat goes on: Yet another wave of blockbuster revelations will come if a diocese goes through with the threat of filing for bankruptcy. Public scrutiny of church finances would be unprecedented, and it is hard to imagine that when those rocks are turned over, some interesting critters will not be found underneath.