Examining how Catholic bystanders responded to abuse raises questions about the normative frameworks that supported the development and acceptance of asymmetrical power structures in the Catholic Church. Although various normative frameworks, including doctrinal instruction, moral teachings and legal regulations, played a role in establishing and maintaining strong asymmetrical dependencies within the church, examining each framework individually cannot fully explain why many Catholics granted clerics extensive power—despite widespread knowledge of clerical misconduct. This lends weight to the thesis that the power to stabilise asymmetrical dependencies that supported abuse derived from a strategic combination of diverse normative messages, such as from doctrinal teachings on the role and function of clerics, the theory of one power drawn from a divine source, and the moral devaluation of sex and gender issues. In any case, this paper argues that these doctrinal and moral resources for establishing asymmetrical power depended on the law to gain traction. Until today, the law of the church has supported systemic imbalance by institutionalising structures of dominance: of clerics over laypeople, men over women, and adults over minors. Although these asymmetries originate in ecclesiastical doctrine and moral teaching, the law plays a vital role in transforming them into structures and immunising them against criticism. Law is a form of normativity that is particularly difficult to challenge. It has a "hard surface" that defies contestation. Based on this observation, the paper explores how the law has contributed to the establishment and maintenance of asymmetrical power in church by immunising even blatantly abusive structures against fundamental contestation.