Kelly McParland: Catholic Cardinal Hides Abuse Failure in Bureaucratic Busywork
By Kelly McParland
Cardinal Roger M. Mahony isn’t about to slip quietly into his enforced retirement from the archdiocese of Los Angeles, the biggest in the U.S. Within a day of the announcement that he had been censured by his successor, Mahony posted a letter on his personal blog, protesting his treatment. Mahony was relieved of all his public duties on Thursday by the man who replaced him, Archbishop Jose Gomez, over his handling of decades of complaints about sexual abuse among priests. The firing, according to the Los Angeles Times, was “unprecedented in the American Catholic Church.” Gomez, who’d been reading through thousands of pages of files on cases dating back 30 years, lamented the files as “brutal and painful reading. The behaviour described in these files is terribly sad and evil,” he said, adding: “I cannot undo the failings of the past that we find in these pages. Reading these files, reflecting on the wounds that were caused has been the saddest experience I’ve had since becoming your Archbishop in 2011.”That struck a nerve with Mahony, who pointed out that Gomez had had plenty of opportunity to pipe up over the years, but had held his tongue. Acknowledging he’d made mistakes, “especially in the mid-1980s,” Mahony insisted nevertheless that “when I retired as the active Archbishop, I handed over to you an Archdiocese that was second to none in protecting children and youth.” That may be true, though, given the predilection the Roman Catholic Church has for covering its tracks, it’s impossible to be certain. In any case, it’s not 2012 or 2013 that’s the issue, but the three decades from the 1980s when dozens on dozens of complaints were filed to Church leaders over assaults by priests, to little result. Not that there wasn’t a reaction. According to the personal files of 124 priests accused of abuse, released by the archdiocese on Thursday when a court finally put an end to church efforts to keep them from public view, the complaints produced lots of activity. Unfortunately little of it had to do with trying to protect the victims. Instead, efforts were mainly aimed at protecting the accused, preventing the police from catching wind of the complaints, and finding ways to spirit the priests to other states or countries so they wouldn’t have to face criminal responsibility for what they’d done. Even that level of cover-up took time to develop, though. At first, as reported by the New York Times, they simply refused to believe what they were being told. The culture at the top of the Church sounds a lot like that of any other self-regulating professional body, like doctors or police, where members, linked by loyalty and shared service, can’t bring themselves to accept that a colleague could be guilty of corruption or bribery or malpractice or, in the case of the priests, abusing 20 or 30 of the innocent youths entrusted to their care over the years. “Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem,” Mahony says in his letter, addressed to Archbishop Gomez. “In two years [1962—1964] spent in graduate school earning a Master’s Degree in Social Work, no textbook and no lecture ever referred to the sexual abuse of children. While there was some information dealing with child neglect, sexual abuse was never discussed.”When the first complains began rolling in, he says, he consulted fellow clerics, and everyone agreed residential treatment was the appropriate response. Years passed before they realized it didn’t work: “We were never told that, in fact, following these procedures was not effective, and that perpetrators were incapable of being treated in such a way that they could safely pursue priestly ministry.” So they set up an advisory board and formulated a charter, and followed that up with a Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board and zero-tolerance policy. From 2003-2012 they underwent several “compliance audits,” which confirmed that, yup, they were 100% in accord with their new charter. Then Gomez came along and denounced it all as not enough, which really irks Cardinal Mahony. Nowhere in his letter does he suggest that maybe somewhere along the line he’d have been done well to notify the police and let the law takes its course. The cases are horrendous: one priest, accuse of drugging a raping one boy and taking others every weekend to his remote cabin, was sent back to Spain after signing a document pledging to be good. Another, following intensive investigation of numerous accusations, was placed on “administrative leave.” A Mexican priest accused of molesting 20 boys was tipped off so he could flee to Mexico. When police investigators started looking into the case, Mahony stressed to a colleague that under no circumstances should they be given a list of altar boys to contact. The implication is that, 30 years into the Church’s abuse scandal, the people at the very top are still so clueless about the damage that’s been wrought that they continue to cling to their ecclesiastic procedures, their clerical bureaucracies and their faith in the cleansing powers of administrative delay. Despite his censure, Mahony will remain a “bishop in good standing … with full rights to celebrate the Holy Sacraments of the Church and to minister to the faithful without restriction,” and can vote for a pope until he turns 80 in two years. Meanwhile the abused children of the 1980s and 1990s have grown to adulthood now, still dealing with the residual effects of the trauma they underwent, trying to cope with the fact they were betrayed and abused by someone they’d been told was a man of God. But the archdiocese has its charter and its advisors and its oversight board. Mahony believes he handed over an “Archdiocese that was second to none in protecting children and youth.” Not hardly. Not even close. National Post
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