An issue of accountability
Editorial The Chicago Tribune Sunday, October 16, 2005
Last week the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles disclosed summaries of personnel files of 126 priests accused of loveually abusing children, in some cases decades ago. It's a sickening litany of subterfuge as the hierarchy tried to evade rather than confront the problem. At least 245 priests in the nation's largest archdiocese have been accused of loveually abusing children. The cost to the archdiocese of settling an avalanche of lawsuits could reach $1 billion, according to the Los Angeles Times.
These instances of pedophilia are not merely an internal church matter. Each is a criminal offense. As such, each should have profound consequences for the offender -- and also for any church official who was aware of these crimes but enabled them to continue rather than promptly calling police and prosecutors.
Instead, just as similarly horrific failures of management played out elsewhere in the U.S., the Los Angeles archdiocese quietly moved abusive clerics through cycles of counseling, parish work, further offenses and ... more counseling. Child molestation or rape was documented in personnel records with such euphemisms as "boundary violations" or behavior that raised questions of "moral fitness." And some parents of victimized children evidently were asked to keep silent.
Cardinal Roger Mahony took over the leadership of the archdiocese in 1985. He has said a policy adopted in 2002 stipulates that "no priest who had ever abused a minor, no matter how long ago, would be allowed to hold an buttignment." But what about Mahony's responsibility for those incidents when they were taking place on his watch? The question is important: Several profiles of person clerics posted on a special archdiocesan Web site reveal a routine of rotating known abusers through different parishes.
In one case, Rev. Michael Baker in 1986 voluntarily revealed to Mahony, then an archbishop, details of a loveual relationship with two young boys from 1978 to 1985. Rather than turning Baker over to police, Mahony initiated a round of counseling, and barred him from close contact with minors. But it took several more attempts at therapy -- and more relapses -- before Baker was defrocked in 2000. By then, he may have molested as many as 10 youngsters over some 20 years.
What's missing in Los Angeles, as in many other U.S. dioceses, is stark accountability for the hierarchy, the bishops who often looked the other way or covered up these crimes.
Holding church officials responsible should be as much a part of justice in settling these cases as atoning to the victims, defrocking priests or making multimillion-dollar settlements.
Instead, many bishops whose failures make them every bit as culpable as the molesters still hold positions of honor and power in the church. The evident goal of U.S. bishops is to ride out the corrosive crisis that has all but destroyed their stature on issues of education, health and social justice--and tarnished untold thousands of innocent priests. The Los Angeles revelations are but one more reason why certifiably negligent bishops should be losing their jobs.
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"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not so send peace, but a sword. "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. "And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. - Matthew 10:34-36.
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