Facts Blow Holes in Cardinal Roger Mahony's Accounts

By Doug McIntyre
LA Daily Nes
January 22, 2013

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He has index cards, says the Holy Man. And on those index cards are names. He prays in his chapel nightly for the names on those index cards.

They're the names of children molested - even raped - by priests in his charge.

"I was naive" about abuse, says the Holy Man. "I'm sorry," he says.

Which is not what he says in internal church documents, 30,000 unredacted pages worth, finally brought into the light of day after years of foot-dragging, stonewalling and legal maneuvering.

The Holy Man is the former head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony.

In these documents we find the Smoking Cassock proving Mahony complicit in the cover-up of the worst crime short of murder, child molestation.

"This is all intolerable and unacceptable to me," Mahony wrote in 1991.

Yet he continued to tolerate it. He continued to accept it.

What the Holy Man wouldn't tolerate or accept was the potential legal liability, loss of church assets and disastrous bad press.

"That really scares the daylights out of me!!" wrote the Holy Man with double exclamation points while dismissing the suggestion he take to the pulpit and report to his parishioners directly on the Rev. Michael Baker's notorious crimes against children.

"We could open up another firestorm - and it takes us years to recover from those."

Clearly unconcerned about how many years it would take Father Baker's victims to recover.

Cardinal Mahony and his chief lieutenant, then-Monsignor Thomas J. Curry, strategized on how to thwart possible criminal investigations, with Curry actually suggesting notorious abuser Michael Wempe be sent to "a lawyer who is also a psychiatrist" which would keep any psychiatric reports out of the hands of investigators under "the protection of privilege."

This is the dialogue of Holy Men? It reads more like outtakes from "The Sopranos?"

Despite warnings from Monsignor Richard Loomis that the cover-up was "immoral and unethical," Mahony and Curry schemed to send rapists and molesters out of state and out of the reach of investigators.

They were warned repeatedly by Loomis and other priests disgusted and horrified by the crimes perpetrated in their ranks, including graphic details of serial abuser, Monsignor Peter Garcia, who specialized in preying upon illegal immigrant children - at least one of whom he raped and then threatened to have deported if he said a word.

Mahony still has his defenders, first and foremost the Archdiocese's Minister of Propaganda, Tod Tamberg, who never misses an opportunity to blame the victim or shoot the messenger.

However, while the Holy Man's years of inaction had previously been spun as a good man's naivet , the written record proves the opposite. It places Mahony at the center of a very active conspiracy to subvert any criminal or civil investigation into the systemic sexual abuse of children by the priests he supervised.

There will be no justice for the victims until Curry, now a bishop in Santa Barbara, and Cardinal Mahony are made to answer for this outrage in a court of law.

If the law does not allow for prosecution, the law is unjust.