The sex abuse scandal is lapping awfully close to the feet of
Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony. The Los Angeles Times
reported
Monday that an accused molester of four boys lived in Mahony’s
residence at St. Vibiana’s cathedral and that Mahony recently
assigned the molester to serve at his new cathedral in downtown Los
Angeles as an associate pastor. For how long had Mahony known his
housemate and would-be associate pastor was a molester? For at
least a decade.
“It was one of those cases where I felt he had followed the
treatment successfully, honestly, and was rehabilitated to the
extent anyone can be rehabilitated,” said Mahony, who just days ago
was posturing about his “zero-tolerance” for “past, present and
future” abusers and boasting of his early awareness of the problem.
“I feel very good about what we’ve been doing over the years,” he
said.
That Mahony brought a molester into his residence and then
tapped him to be the associate pastor at his new cathedral reveals
his recent comments as an almost unbelievable sham. What a fitting
image of the American bishops’ complicity in the scandal: a
priest-molester who should have been behind bars was instead
sleeping comfortably behind the walls of the cardinal’s home.
Mahony is a fraud, says the lawyer for the victims’ family,
Jeffrey R. Anderson: “Cardinal Mahony talks about zero tolerance
for priests who abuse now. Well, where was zero tolerance when this
mother went to the Church? For years he did nothing.” Anderson on
Monday brought two suits against Mahony under federal racketeering
laws for the cardinal’s alleged “protection of pedophile
priests.”
Mahony told the Times that Fr. Carl Sutphin did not
pose a threat to anyone because he was living with him. “He was
probably in the safest supervised situation,” Mahony said. “In some
ways you couldn’t have a safer place.”
Sound familiar? Father Thomas Smolich, the head of the
California Province of Jesuits, also subscribes to the
have-the-molester-live-with-me school of oversight. Fr. Tony
Mariano, a registered sex offender, lives at Smolich’s “residence
near Santa Clara University,” the Los Angeles Times
reported last month. Mariano had been nabbed for a sex offense
after he “arranged to meet two teenagers by posing as a 25-year-old
woman on an Internet chat room. He wore lipstick and rouge when he
met the boys.”
And who can forget the rehabilitation regime Patrick Ziemann, a
former Los Angeles auxiliary bishop under Mahony, had in mind for
Fr. Jorge Hume, an accused embezzler and abuser? As bishop of Santa
Rosa, Ziemann told the police not to prosecute Hume because he had
him under close supervision. It turned out that Ziemann was having
an affair with Hume.
The explanation for Mahony’s refusal to name the
priest-molesters he hastily dumped in the wake of the Boston
scandal is coming into clearer focus. Mahony said he was
withholding information about cases involving accused molesters
retired or released so as not to embarrass or inconvenience their
victims. But the truth is that he didn’t want to embarrass or
inconvenience himself. He knew that reporters would see Sutphin’s
name on the list and say, “Didn’t he live at your residence? Didn’t
you assign him to be the associate pastor at your new
cathedral?”
But the lid has popped off. So now Mahony is speaking out of
both sides of his mouth about his “pain” for the victims and his
pain for the victimizers. “I felt badly for all of [the priests
forced to retire early], but particularly for him, because if this
had been a few months from now, he would have been gone anyway,”
Mahony said to the Times. Mahony praised Sutphin for being
“very good” with the homeless.
John Durham, a member of the Stockton jury that found Mahony
negligent in reassigning a molester, told the New Times,
an alternative L.A. weekly, that he “found Mahony to be utterly
unbelievable.”
But Mahony is certain that he can salvage his credibility
through spin, spin, spin. “Two weeks ago he went to a major public
relations firm, Weber Shandwick, to craft the message that would
serve him in the weeks ahead,” reported the Times.
The flacks at Weber Shandwick have their work cut out for them.
They may find it hard to protect the image of an apostolic
successor whose idea of “zero tolerance” toward molesters is to
bring them into his house.
