LOS ANGELES (CA)
National Catholic Reporter
by Eugene Cullen Kennedy | Mar. 4, 2013
Bulletins from the Human Side
A major eastern newspaper says Cardinal Roger Mahony, retired archbishop of Los Angeles, is lucky not to be in jail after recently released archdiocesan documents were cited as evidence that he covered up many priests accused of sexually abusing those in their care, avoided reporting them to the police, and allowed them, after treatment and admonishment, to return quasi-purified to work as priests again.
Many victims with unhealed wounds from sexual abuse by priests feel that, if these allegations are true, Mahony should be barred from the forthcoming conclave to elect a new pope. Rome-based Cardinal Velasio de Paolis tells La Repubblica, in the tones of a godfather ordering a hit, that “persuasion” should be used on Mahony by “someone with great authority” in a “private interview” to convince him that “he should not take part” in the forthcoming election.
Mahony’s successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez, claims he just learned from the recently released records — oh, the horrors of it all — that clerical sex abuse occurred when Mahony presided in Los Angeles. With theatrical self-righteousness, he has forbidden Mahony — sending a “What a good boy am I” message to Rome — to perform any sacramental functions publicly.
Worse than Gomez’s apparent amnesia about the clerical sex abuse in San Antonio when he was its archbishop and his now doing everything but sending his hat size to Rome for the red one he ambitions by condemning Mahony, whom he previously termed a “mentor,” was its being played against a cruelly ironic backstory. This was the swell of sympathy that rolled like a cleansing tide over mass-murderer Christopher Dorner while he was still on the run. Are we surprised that some celebrities joined the ever-pious do-gooders in a desperate effort to discover Dorner’s latent nobility and to reopen the case against the Los Angeles Police Department, whose loss Dorner sought to avenge through killing cops and their relatives? None of these do-gooders, referred to in Chicago politics as “goo goos” because of the lint-covered lollipops of their ill-placed interventions, evinced any such interest in trying to understand or defend Mahony.
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