LOS ANGELES (CA)
National Catholic Reporter
by Joe Ferullo | Feb. 4, 2013
A few years ago, an official of the Los Angeles archdiocese pulls me over for a private conversation. This attack on the church for “child sex abuse” is inaccurate, he asserts. The vast majority of victims are in their late teens; they are “youths,” he notes, not really “children.” I am stunned for a moment, then advise him this is not an argument he might ever want to make to the general public. The official nods slowly.
At a dinner around the same time, a high-ranking cleric in the archdiocese complains to me and another person sitting next to us. Several states, including California, were then pushing through bills to extend the statute of limitations on child sex abuse as the sandal was gathering steam. This, the official charges, is unfair — this, he says, is changing the legal rules mid-stream. The church, he argues in all seriousness, just wants to play by the rules.
And so it went here out west, year after year, until the bubble burst, as we knew it eventually would, over the last few days. Los Angeles’ new archbishop, Jose Gomez, made public church files that details the depths of abuse and the lengths the cover-up went to in order to protect the church in the eyes of the law and the people.
The stories of abuse are harrowing, but the cover-up is worse. News accounts detail how parents and brothers and police investigators all reached out to Cardinal Roger Mahony and other church officials, firm in belief they would do the right thing in the face of such depravity. But as we have known for too long a time now, they did not.
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