LOS ANGELES (CA)
The Catholic Thing
By Robert Royal
Monday, 04 February 2013
The sexual abuse of children by American priests, which became a national scandal after a series of Boston Globe articles in 2002, is now entering its eleventh year. The satanic reality, of course, goes back much further. And the recent revelations about what happened in the Los Angeles archdiocese call for yet another effort at some sort of plausible explanation for this particularly repugnant instance of what St. Augustine called the “mystery of evil.”
A little background on those new revelations, before we get to a startling chart below.
If you haven’t been following the news, last Thursday, L. A. Archbishop José Gomez suspended his retired predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, and an active auxiliary bishop, Thomas Curry, from any further “administrative or public duties” (their priestly faculties, however, have not been suspended). Unsealed archdiocesan documents clearly show that both men conspired – the only accurate term – to keep known pedophiles from being arrested by the police.
Archbishop Gomez, a good and courageous man facing many other challenges in an archdiocese long mired in chaos and dissent, said in his official announcement about the abuse documents, “I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed.”
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