An NCR Editorial Speaks Truth About The LA Archdiocesan Leadership--Or Lack There OF

Seriously, Cardinal Mahony swears he wasn't taught anything about child sexual abuse in his MSW course work, which leaves me wondering what the heck they taught about evil in his seminary course work.

The National Catholic Reporter has just posted a hard hitting editorial on the situation in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Although I give Archbishop Gomez some credit for an attempt at accountability, the truth is Cardinal Mahony has lost very little of his input in Roman Catholicism.  He retains all of his perks as a Cardinal, including the right to vote in a conclave, and his priesthood has not been effected.  It is at best a slap on the wrist, typical of Pope Benedict's papacy when it comes to those bishops who covered for abusive priests. I have a very strong suspicion that AB Gomez would never have taken any such action against Cardinal Mahony if the Archdiocese had won the court battle over these released files.  This is not the action of a man of integrity.  It is the action of a man who lost in court and is now trying to both deflect all the blame to his predecessor and stem the current bleeding of Church credibility.

Editorial: In Los Angeles, a victory for truth

Editorial - National Catholic Reporter - 2/2/2013

To those familiar with the protocols of the Catholic hierarchy, the news was stunning. The archbishop of Los Angeles publicly rebuked his predecessor, a cardinal, for his failures in dealing with the priest sex abuse scandal.
The action by Archbishop Jose Gomez, relieving Cardinal Roger Mahony of “any administrative or public duties,” was remarkable on two levels.

First, it broke with the unspoken but nearly ironclad rule of the culture of Catholic hierarchy that bishops do not publicly criticize other bishops. That courtesy extended even to the most egregious examples of ecclesial malfeasance – the deliberate and persistent hiding of criminal activities by priests. No one to this point had uttered a word against a predecessor, not in New York or Connecticut, not in Philadelphia or Milwaukee, not in Seattle or Santa Fe. There were “mistakes made,” they would say, and offer vacuous apologies. For whatever reasons yet unknown, Gomez broke the code. (This isn't precisely true.  AB Martin of Dublin did have some very strong words for his fellow bishops including urging some of them to resign.)

Second, the language Gomez used was blunt and unqualified. The behavior he found in the files, he said, was “evil.” The acts themselves and the handling of these matters, as the files revealed, showed more than mistakes made, they showed a “terrible failure.”
“I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed,” Gomez wrote, who also referred to Mahony’s sorrow “for his failure to fully protect young people entrusted to his care.” (Except that AB Gomez was signing checks for the attorneys trying to keep these files out of the public domain and that makes it hard for me to believe in his sincerety.)

Gomez’s words are a direct contradiction of the weak defense that Mahony has advanced for years, all the while spending untold sums in attempts to keep the truth hidden. It is the same list of explanations that he repeated in a lengthy and testy response to Gomez’s statement. “Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem,” wrote Mahony. In studying for his master’s degree in social work, he said, no lecture or textbook ever referred to the sexual abuse of children. (This is a pathetic defense, but the MSW Mahony would have received in the early 60's would have been quite different than the same degree today with it's emphasis in counseling/therapy rather than social work.)

There is, of course, some truth to the “we didn’t know” defense. Few knew, years ago, the seriousness of the disease borne by those who molest children. Much of it remains a mystery today.
But the “we didn’t know” defense quickly wears thin against the details contained in the 12,000 pages of documents that were just released by the court in Los Angeles, just as it wore thin against the truth revealed when documents were released in other places like Philadelphia and Boston.

That’s why Mahony spent so much time and money over nearly a decade attempting to keep the documents sealed. It’s why, even after agreeing to release documents as part of a 2007 settlement with 508 victims costing $660 million, he continued to fight tooth and nail to keep the documents secret. It is why he and the diocese’s lawyers tried a last ditch and ultimately failed attempt to get the courts to redact the names of church officials from the documents so that it would be difficult to tell who did what. The documents put the lie to the “we didn’t know” defense.

What they demonstrate – and we have yet to read through all the thousands of pages -- is that diocesan officials, while they may not have understood the intricacies of the sex abuser’s mind and motivation, did know that laws were being broken, children were being raped and otherwise abused. They knew they had to take extraordinary lengths -- sending priests to counselors who were also lawyers so they could claim their conversations were privileged, sending some priests out of the country and others from parish to parish and diocese to diocese -- to avoid detection by the law and by the very Catholic community the officials were charged to serve. They knew enough to understand they had to hide the crimes and the behavior if they didn’t want to besmirch the good name of the clergy culture. Consideration of what was happening to the abused children and their families was incidental, at best. (No, the documents show the children were only considered in the context of being adversaries to the agenda of protecting the clerical culture.)

What Mahony and others  --  Cardinals Bernard Law, Justin Rigali, Edward Egan, Anthony Bevilacqua, and a host of archbishops and bishops  --  really didn’t understand was the degree to which their moral compasses had been distorted by the strong magnetic pull of the clergy culture. In their fierce allegiance to that exclusive club at all costs, in their willingness to preserve the façade of holiness and the faithful’s high notion of ordination, they lost sight of simple human decency and the most fundamental demands of the gospel.

It doesn’t take a master’s or a doctorate to understand that the first obligation of adults is to protect the children. When the first instinct became protection of the clergy and the institution, our leaders became disfigured at some deep and essential level. The Catholic community is still waiting for them to deal honestly with that reality, with what happens to them when their robes turn to purple.

Meanwhile, there are no heroes in any of this. Gomez may have broken with normal behaviors, but as many have already pointed out, he had access to the documents for two years and said nothing. And it is reasonable to expect that if Mahony and the lawyers had succeeded in keeping the documents sealed, nothing would have been said. The “evil” would have remained festering on some chancery shelf.
If Archbishop Gomez really wants to do a service to the people of God in Los Angeles, he will reveal how much of the archdiocese’s treasury was spent during the last decade on trying to hide that truth. By its own admission the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., diocese spent $1.39 million in a failed 18-month attempt to defend Bishop Robert Finn from charges of failing to report a child pornographer, and the Milwaukee archdiocese has spent $9 million in a two-year-long, far-from-settled bankruptcy case precipitated by sex abuse law suits. The amount of money the Los Angeles archdiocese has spent hiding these documents must be mind-boggling. That is evil, as well. (An evil AB Gomez has himself participated in.)

There are no heroes among the many other chancery officials and public relations advisors and lawyers who knew, some for many years, what crimes and sins had been committed against children.

There are no heroes in the Vatican structures, on up to the pope, among those who years ago could have demanded a review of the documents, come to the same conclusions as Gomez and removed Mahony long ago. It would have saved the church of Los Angeles years of suspense and enormous amounts of money. We say we believe that the truth will set us free. In too many dioceses today, the truth remains hidden and the church remains in chains fashioned by its bishops.

Endless speculation will swirl now about why Gomez did what he did and what precisely it means. None of that really matters. What matters is the truth that will outlast reporters, commentators, perpetrators, cardinals, bishops, victims and the rest. The revelation and preservation of that truth in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles just received a boost with the release of the documents.

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When Bishop Finn wrote his attack piece on the NCR, the cynical conspiracy theorizing part of my mind suspected that the Opus Dei Finn was providing cover for the Opus Dei Archbishop Gomez to come up with some response for the sick situation exposed in LA.  So here it is, a take down of Cardinal Mahony.  It's a good strategy in that Cardinal Mahony earned this takedown, (as ineffective as it is since Mahony hasn't lost much of anything except participating in confirmations in the Archdiocese) and it seemingly paints Gomez as  courageous for breaking ranks with the long purple line. But if one takes the time to actually read some of these documents, what AB Gomez has done amounts to nothing more than blowing smoke.  

 

Nothing is going to change until there is a completely different authority structure in the Church and a different concept of the priesthood, and that is never going to happen under the AB Gomez' of Roman Catholicism.  Much easier to rattle his crozier at Roger the not so artful Dodger than really and truly do something about the conditions that gave Mahony the sense of clerical entitlement that was the real motivation for Mahony and hundreds of other bishops to enact strategies that were both criminal and self protecting.  

 

I never ever forget that what this behavior really defines is the sad fact that when our leadership thinks of 'the Church' those thoughts do not include those who foot the bills--or their children.