LOS ANGELES (CA)
LA Observed
By Kevin Roderick | February 1, 2013
There are a couple of things that I think will be remembered about the open letter to Archbishop Jose Gomez that Cardinal Roger Mahony posted today on his personal blog. Neither will help Mahony regain his reputation, I suspect. Mahony bills his blog entry as a reply to Gomez’s statement yesterday expressing remorse for the sexual abuse that occured in the Los Angeles Archdiocese and stripping Mahony of any further public or administrative duties. In his entry, Mahony calls out the archbiship for not saying something sooner:
When you were formally received as our Archbishop on May 26, 2010, you began to become aware of all that had been done here over the years for the protection of children and youth. You became our official Archbishop on March 1, 2011 and you were personally involved with the Compliance Audit of 2012—again, in which we were deemed to be in full compliance.
Not once over these past years did you ever raise any questions about our policies, practices, or procedures in dealing with the problem of clergy sexual misconduct involving minors.
That certainly doesn’t sound very contrite. The National Catholic Reporter notes the unusual nature of this thinly veiled, and unnecessary, swipe at Gomez. “Typically seen as shying away from public criticisms of their peers, Catholic bishops rarely issue public responses to one another’s actions,” the NCR wrote today.
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