UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
There are many needed reform actions Pope Francis has failed even to initiate after one year. The worst failure has been his avoiding making cardinals and bishops accountable for aiding predatory priests who hurt defenseless children. Kissing dozens of babies and washing prisoners’ feet make great photo ops, but fail to protect one defenseless child or comfort one abuse survivor.
President Obama will meet for the first time in less than two weeks on March 27 with Pope Francis. Obama can be expected to address this failure directly in private. Obama also needs to try to focus Francis on Russia’s President Putin. Francis recently, and perhaps naively, enhanced Putin’s prestige by welcoming him to the Vatican in a well publicized photo op. With Russia’s virtual invasion of Ukraine, Francis’ approach to Putin warrants a close review, as Germany’s concerned Chancellor Merkel would likely as well encourage Francis to undertake. She even may already have done so privately.
Please see my related recent Advice to President Obama on Pope Francis’ strategy here
While it may be debatable who has been the worst of the Catholic Church’s predator protecting hierarchs, Los Angeles’ Cardinal Mahony arguably tops the list. Almost a billion dollars of LA Catholics’ contributions have been needlessly expended so far on settling claims related to abusive priests that Mahony should, and in many cases probably could, have curtailed. He also seemingly wasted almost another 200 million dollars on an unnecessary new LA cathedral, the so called “Raj Mahal”, apparently mainly to satisfy his “edifice complex”.
On the day the UN Committee recently blasted the Vatican on its decades of child abuse prevention failures, Pope Francis said Mass with Mahony and then met privately with him. They discussed US Latino politically related issues, but not the priest child abuse scandal, per Mahony’s own personal website. Then again, who is the Pope to judge?
When the LA abuse scandal uproar was being widely reported a year ago as damning documents were then revealed about Mahony’s extensive complicity, LA’s Archbishop Gomez went through a well publicized “distancing” of the LA Archdiocese from any further active ministry for Mahony. So what’s the “good Cardinal” up to now?
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