CALIFORNIA
LA Daily News
By Tim Rutten
dailynews.com
Posted: 03/07/2013
Cardinal Roger Mahony Sede vacante — “the seat is empty.” Thus the Roman Catholic Church, the world’s largest religious denomination, describes those interregna in which the throne of Peter, the West’s oldest monarchial institution, sits unoccupied, and there is no pope.
During this period, the church with its 1.2 billion members is governed by a daily meeting of the 207-member College of Cardinals, presided over by its carmerlengo, or chamberlain, the 78-year-old Italian Tarcisio Bertone. A close aid to pope emeritus Benedict XVI, he has said that any attempt to compel bishops to report pedophilic priests to civil authorities affronts “liberty of conscience” and that the church’s global abuse crisis stems from an “infiltration of homosexuals” into the priesthood.
Sometime in the next few days, the last of the 115 cardinal electors — only those under 80 can vote for the next pontiff — will arrive in Rome, and the college will decide on when to open the next papal conclave, probably by Monday. When it begins and despite all the controversy attendant upon his participation, there will be a number of reasons to welcome the presence of Los Angeles’ emeritus archbishop, Cardinal Roger Mahony, who did the right thing when he put aside demands that he not attend the conclave.
Thousands of pages of internal archdiocesan documents recently released as the final step in the 2007 legal settlement the Los Angeles church reached with more than 600 victims of clerical abuse
demonstrate once again that Mahony was sometimes malfeasant and frequently tragically mistaken in the way he dealt with priest-molesters in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, it’s long been known that these cases were hideously botched. After all, the archdiocese paid a $660 million cash settlement to the victims — the largest in the history of this wretched scandal — and Mahony has repeatedly and publicly apologized for his conduct, met often in person with those injured and, most important, implemented a set of child protection policies regarded as a national model of rigor.
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