LOS ANGELES (CA)
Catholic Culture
By Dr. Jeff Mirus February 04, 2013
Call me naïve, but I was somewhat surprised to see Cardinal Roger Mahony issue an open letter to Archbishop José Gomez in which, at this late date, he seeks once again to excuse himself for his irresponsible handling of sexual abuse by his clergy, especially in the late 1980s. Apparently the Cardinal wants us to understand that his failure to remove pedophile priests from ministry can be explained as a mistake caused by inadequate training and knowledge.
The problem with Cardinal Mahony’s explanation is that we can grant all of his premises and still not come close to justifying his behavior, or the behavior of other bishops who acted in exactly the same way. First, we can grant that Mahony was not instructed in sex abuse when he earned a Master’s Degree in Social Work in the 1960s. But all this means is that he did not study the problem of sexual abuse in an academic setting, nor the steps that might be taken to reduce its incidence, nor the reparative therapies which may or may not have worked for either abusers or their victims.
If Cardinal Mahony were a social worker, a counselor, a psychologist or a doctor attempting to treat people who engaged in or were harmed by sexual abuse, then we could be sympathetic to the difficulty of breaking new ground, of operating without guidance. But he was none of those things. He was a Catholic bishop. His responsibility was not to provide the best therapy to priests and victims. His responsibility was the spiritual and moral well-being of the faithful in his diocese. And his first task in fulfilling this responsibility was to ensure the moral and spiritual quality of his clergy, including their fitness for the priesthood in general.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.