By Cathy Lynn Grossman
USA Today
February 27, 2011
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2011/02/catholic-sex-abuse-cardinal-mahony/1
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Champion for social justice and immigration rights...
Builder of a new cathedral, a massive statement of Catholic influence in the heart of Los Angeles...
Those achievements might have dominated coverage of the retirement of Cardinal Roger Mahony this week as archbishop of the city.
But "tainted legacy" appears in the headline or the heart of every story as Mahony's 25-year-record is skewed by the Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal.
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It dominates Rachel Zoll's Associated Press story and makes off with the bulk of the Los Angeles Times coverage. They detail years of battling victims and their lawyers until the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was forced by courts to release damaging documents of pedophiles protected, even promoted, and shuffled from one unknowing parish to another. Finally, the archdiocese wound up paying $660 million in settlements to 500 victims.
As it says in the Times,
Mahony was "really a prophetic voice in the area of social justice, immigration and concern for Hispanics," said Father Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center.
And yet...
"When you go back, the dichotomy there is, you have his stance for immigrants, his stance for peace, his stance on being a voice for the downtrodden and the poor," said John C. Manly, a Newport Beach attorney who has represented many victims of sexual abuse by priests. "That's what a priest is supposed to do. And the great tragedy is, if he hadn't ... let these children be hurt, he could speak with moral authority on these things. And yet he squandered that moral authority, and for what?"
Get Religion commentator Brad Greenberg zeroes in on the sympathetic ending of the Times story where a friend of the archbishop, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, says,
He inherited a situation that nobody had predicted. He did as good a job as you can do … but obviously people are going to remember him more for that, which is sad."
Greenberg concludes that's a great quote that...
doesn't underplay Mahony's failings but it puts them in context of repeated mistakes made by Catholic bishops before the turn of the century. And it ends on an appropriately melancholy and mixed sentiment.
But... what exactly was the context?
That scores of U.S. bishops made the same mistake, protecting predatory priests and not their youthful victims? That no bishop has been prosecuted or even kicked out of his post for mismanaging the crisis, one they knew about since 1985?
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