LOS ANGELES (CA)
Ms. Magazine
February 21, 2013 By Barbara Blaine
In the past few weeks, Los Angeles has been awash with news about decades of priest abuse after of the release of thousands of internal documents from the local Catholic archdiocese showing that former Archbishop (now Cardinal) Roger Mahoney had shielded abuser priests from law enforcement. In response, current L.A. Archbishop José Gomez relieved Mahony of all administrative and public duties and forced the resignation of Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry, Mahoney’s former vicar of clergy, who was part of the coverup. Despite the overwhelming evidence of how he protected priests from prosecution, Mahoney now whines on his blog about his own victimization.
Cardinal Mahony’s recent blog posts follow the typical pattern we have seen for decades–namely, a predator abuses, an enabler (usually the bishop) helps to shield and then transfers the predator. When they are found out, they both claim to be the victims.
I first saw this pattern in my own case in the 1980s when my perpetrator [a priest] cried “victim” as he was exposed to his superiors. However, they already knew of his abuses. The provincial and bishop claimed to be helpless to deal with my perpetrator and pretended to be victims alongside me. Apparently, my perpetrator had promised them that he wouldn’t do “it” anymore, they claimed that they trusted him and felt betrayed.
The 1990s saw more of this behavior from many perpetrators and bishops, including Mahony. He met with SNAP members [the author is founder and president of SNAP, the Survivor’s Network of Those Abused by Priests] in 1992, later claiming it was the most moving experience of his career. He pretended that he and other bishops now understood abuse, and henceforth would remove predators from ministry.
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