CALIFORNIA
KPCC
Susanne Whatley with Tony Pierce | February 2nd, 2013
Thursday the Los Angeles Archdiocese released the personnel files of Catholic priests accused of child moletation. LA Archbishop Jose Gomez described the files “brutal and painful” reading and called the behavior described in the files “terribly sad and evil.” Gomez announced that he was relieving Retired Cardinal Roger Mahony of his public and administrative duties and said he’d accepted the resignation of Monsignor Thomas Curry.
Father Thomas Doyle, a lawyer who investigated charges of sexual abuse in the ’80s told “Take Two” co-host Alex Cohen on Friday that “these priests have marauded victims for ages, they have been protected at an incredible cost to the faithful by the archdiocese. The only thing I think that could come close to any semblence of redemption is if the Archbishop doesn’t worry about how he will appear in the media but goes to meet the victims privately in their homes on their turf and listen to what they have to say.”
The stories within the files, Fr. Doyle said, are “worse than nightmare novels. But they’re real. They’re deadly real. And what’s so pathetic is that you have this horrendous reality of what was done to these men and women over decades by priests who were protected and moved around by Archbishops, by cardinals – by Mahoney and his predecessor and his whole crew.”
KPCC’s Susanne Whatley spoke to LA Archdocese lead attorney J. Michael Hennigan Friday during “All Things Considered” about the controversial files.
KPCC: Some of these victims are pushing the archdiocese to continue to investigate the problem of child abuse by clergy. What does the archdiocese intend to do going forward?
Hennigan: In the past ten years the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has taken magnificent strides in terms of dealing with this issue with respect to every single claim of abuse. They have five retired FBI agents who investigate every matter. They fingerprint every person who deals with children in the archdiocese. Every single person who has supervisory responsibility for children receives training about how to deal with childhood sexual abuse. And every child in the archdiocese who is in any school or otherwise gets training every year, age appropriate, about how to detect it, how to talk about it, and what to do about it.
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.