LOS ANGELES (CA)
PBS Newshour
By: Ray Suarez
Promising further documents, and promising to reveal hidden information in previously released documents, the Catholic Church in America’s second largest metropolitan area is struggling to contain the continuing storm over decades of priestly abuse of young people.
As a condition of its 2007 legal settlement with past victims of sexual misconduct, the Los Angeles Archdiocese promised to release documents in church archives that detail the church’s attempts to handle steady reports of priestly misconduct. Letters between church members and administrators, priests and bishops, therapists and bishops, expose a multi-decade attempt to address the accusations without publicity, and without handling law enforcement.
The story that emerges in the thousands of documents is not one that flatters the Catholic Church. Anguished families are urged to be quiet, clerics suspected of criminal activity are shipped off to other states with a full understanding of the statute of limitations on some of the suspected crimes. In the face of mounting evidence, a surplus of care, concern and sympathy is lavished on priests, while victims and families become potential problems that need to be handled. Again and again, the documents show, every last alternative is tried first, before priests are removed from their church responsibilities or returned to a lay state.
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