CALIFORNIA
Press-Telegram
Although the new reports released this week by the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese present a more complete admission of child abuse by priests than the church has so far acknowledged, the disclosure still fails to deliver the full story of the church's conspiracy.
So long as the church continues to control the flow of information it has actively sought to suppress, the public can have little faith that it has delivered all its information on priests who abused children. The many hundreds of cases meticulously assembled by victim advocacy groups suggest the church has barely scratched the surface.
Each partial disclosure, such as the one this week, does provide new evidence of a massive cover-up by the church, in which known child molesters were protected and reassigned to places where they were free to commit more crimes.
The documents released so far show that at least eight priests were reassigned after they confessed to abusing children. Reports from the New York Times, which was allowed to research more confidential records that are expected to be released in coming weeks, suggest that dozens and dozens of such cases exist among 126 files accessed by the newspaper.