CALIFORNIA
LA Weekly
by Jeffrey Anderson
Confidential documents and sworn statements by Cardinal Roger Mahony were released last week, ending two years of legal maneuvers to shield "his eminence" from examination in the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal. The cardinal’s testimony, memos and letters offer a rare glimpse into Mahony’s formative years as a priest and young bishop in Fresno and Stockton from 1962 to 1985, and reflect on his moral standing as shepherd of 5 million Catholics in Los Angeles and ranking prelate in the United States.
Mahony emerges as a man of contradictions and memory problems. A man who claims never to have known a priest to have sex before 1968, who struggles to remember steps he took — or did not take — to address a pedophilia crisis of epic proportions. A man whose fitness to lead must now be examined in light of whether he is telling the truth or not.
Compelled by the court after months of resistance, Mahony was deposed recently at his lawyer’s office in downtown Los Angeles. Five lawyers representing hundreds of sex-abuse victims questioned Mahony for six hours about how he responded to accusations that priests in his charge had molested children. His stubborn refusal to answer all questions with candor was a virtual dare to his adversaries to dig deeper for the truth.
Victims who witnessed the deposition struggled to contain their emotions as Mahony’s attorneys coached the cardinal and cajoled victims’ lawyers, who in their blunt questioning conveyed a sense of moral outrage on behalf of people whose lives were ruined by a priest who might have been stopped had the cardinal done more. At stake was not only the tenuous negotiations of hundreds of lawsuits alleging sexual abuse, or the pending prosecution of a few rogue priests, or even the possibility of broader conspiracy charges against Mahony and his colleagues, but the credibility of the last remaining symbol of influence, power and authority in the U.S. Catholic Church.
Posted by kshaw at December 15, 2004 09:34 PM