This statement said that Lori, when he was chairman of the US bishop’s doctrine committee in 2008, fielded complaints about US nuns and provided the Vatican with copies of speeches then on the nuns’ website.

Moreover, both Magister and the columnist for The Tablet, Robert Mickens, traced the Vatican’s effort to exercise greater control over US nuns to 2008, when a Vatican committee on which Law served began a formal visitation, or audit, of Catholic women’s religious orders.

In April, a Vatican agency cited the Leadership Conference of Women Religious for using materials that “do not promote church teaching’’ on family life and sexuality. The Vatican also complained that the nuns sometimes took positions in opposition to the nation’s bishops and were “silent on the right to life from conception to natural death, a question that is part of the lively public debate about abortion and euthanasia in the United States.’’

Sister Annmarie Sanders, spokeswoman for the nuns’ organization, said the nuns know very little about the origins of the Vatican’s action.

But according to Magister, the 2008 visitation was regarded by nuns as a hostile move that eventually grew more conciliatory, especially after the appointment of a new prefect, a Brazilian cardinal, and a new secretary, Archbishop Joseph W. Tobin, an American. Tobin, in particular, seemed to go out of his way to mend fences with the nuns in public statements expressing his admiration for them. The Globe was not able to reach Tobin.

The new appointments, Magister writes, were “not at all to the liking of the cardinals from the United States,’’ including Law, none of whom attended Tobin’s appointment at St. Peter’s Basilica.

Law resigned as Boston’s archbishop in 2002 following articles in the Globe reporting that he had allowed priests accused of sexually molesting minors to continue serving in parish ministries where they persisted in abusing children.