LOS ANGELES (CA)
euronews
Top US Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony, who is currently in the Sistine Chapel voting for the next Pope, has agreed to pay a total of nearly $10 million (7.7 million euros) to settle four child sex abuse cases brought against his former archdiocese in Los Angeles, lawyers for the victims said on Tuesday.
Mahony, who retired in 2011 as head of the largest US archdiocese and is now part of the Papal conclave, was accused of helping a confessed paedophile priest evade law enforcement by sending him to an out-of-state Church-run treatment centre, before placing the priest back in the Los Angeles ministry.
The former priest named in all four cases is Michael Baker, imprisoned in 2007 on 12 criminal counts of oral copulation with a minor involving two boys, who had both reached a previous settlement with the Church. The latest agreement comes four weeks before the start of civil suits brought by two men, now in their 20s, who claimed they were molested as 12-year-olds in the late 1990s.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.