LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times
By Paul Thornton
December 3, 2013
During the Roman Catholic Church’s decades-long sex abuse crisis, then-Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony went to great lengths to keep law enforcement uninvolved. Instead of handing priests accused of abuse over to police, he would send them to therapists he knew could keep a secret or to faraway rehab programs. Under his watch, the church discouraged abuse victims from talking to authorities.
That’s according to The Times’ two-part series Sunday and Monday on the 23,000 pages of documents ordered released by the courts that detail Mahony’s efforts to keep accusations of abuse in the Los Angeles Archdiocese from erupting into a public scandal. The stories portray Mahony, who retired as archbishop in 2011, as a politically active prelate whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering to cover up the abuse stands in stark contrast to the image of social consciousness he projected in public.
We’ve received more than two dozen letters on the series so far, and only two have defended Mahony. Some of the letters are from Catholics disgusted by their leaders’ conduct; a handful come from readers who say they’ve been abused themselves.
The reaction to Times articles on abuse in the church hasn’t always been this one-sided. As the scandal unfolded through the years, a good portion of the letters we received accused The Times of being too harsh on Mahony or of harboring an anti-Catholic bias. They said the cardinal possessed many redeeming qualities or did more than most bishops to rid his parish of sex abuse.
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