LOS ANGELES (CA)
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
February 2, 2013 By Max Lindenman
In the summer of 1945, following a three-week trial, a jury convicted Maréchal Philippe Pétain of treason and sentenced him to death. The verdict excited controversy. Though, in four years as France’s chief of state, he had created a generally repressive regime and collaborated with Hitler, there was plenty to be said in Pétain’s favor. During the First World War, he had led French forces in resisting the Germans at Verdun. In the war that followed, he justified seeking peace with Germany with a kind of patriotic realism. The duty of the government, Pétain argued, was not to flee to England, but “to remain in the country, or it could not longer be regarded as the government.”
In Cardinal Roger Mahony’s record as Los Angeles archbishop, it’s possible to see a broadly comparable mixture of good and evil, prescience and stupidity. On the credit side, Mahony presided over the archdiocese in the years when it doubled in size, becoming the largest in the nation. He blazed a trail in reaching out to Latinos, and he did it in a spirit of charity — Rocco Palmo has called the relationship a “love story.”
But Mahony’s record on curbing priestly sex abuse is abysmal. As memos exchanged by the future cardinal and Msgr. Thomas Curry reveal, Mahony effectively shielded three abusive priests from civil authorities. Each of the three priests faced multiple allegations from victims as young as 12. Mahony recognized that some of those allegations amounted to first-degree felonies. Yet when Curry’s plans to keep them out of the courts (and out of the papers) showed an ingenuity that verged on cunning, Mahony approved. After Fr. Michael Baker admitted privately to abusing young boys, Mahony wrote of Curry’s advice, that the information be concealed from psychiatrists, “sounds good — please proceed!”
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