On January 31, 2013, in the wake of a court order requiring the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to release its unredacted files on clergy sexual abuse, Archbishop Gómez relieved Mahony of all of his remaining public and administrative duties. Critics called Gómez's action "purely symbolic punishment" and "hand-slapping...a nearly meaningless gesture", and noted that Mahony remains "a powerful man" in the church. According to the archdiocese, Mahony remains "a priest in good standing" and may still celebrate Mass, but he may no longer speak publicly or exercise any responsibilities ordinarily reserved for a bishop. . . . Under canon law, as Mahony is a cardinal, he enjoys the "privilege of forum", meaning that the only the pope is competent to judge and punish Mahony in matters subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Gómez only has the authority to control Mahony's administrative assignments within the archdiocese.Thus we had the situation mentioned in yesterday's post, in which Francis made Mahony his delegate to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Diocese of Scranton, from which Mahony withdrew after protests. Similar protests took place in Utah when Mahony was scheduled to keynote a fundraising event; he withdrew from that as well.
It seems as if Pope Francis had been trying to rehabilitate Mahony as he had McCarrick. This suggests Francis has been reversing a course he had apparently set in 2014, in which he publicly acted against a Paraguayan bishop accused of tolerating flagrant abuse -- I'll cover this tomorrow.
Throughout his time in California, Mahony has enjoyed remarkably good press. He rose in the Church via the same path that Bernard Law and Joseph Bernardin followed, allying himself closely with civil rights and anti-poverty causes, in his case Cesar Chavez and the first California governorship of Jerry Brown. This led to consistently favorable treatment from the Los Angeles Times and other California media. Although his indulgent treatment of sex offenders was comparable to Law's, he never attracted the same scrutiny in Los Angeles as Law did in Boston -- Law's association with the Bush family was probably his undoing, even though Law's practical positions on theology and liturgy were equivalent to Mahony's.
In fact, Mahony's impact on AmChurch probably exceeds that of both Bernardin and Law. Engel's The Rite Of Sodomy certainly has more to say about Mahony than Law, though I'm finding that its coverage of Mahony is poorly organized, and it often tells the story through Mahony's numerous protégés. But an example is the case of a 2003 civil suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of 17 victims of clerical abuse:
The December 2003 lawsuit exposes a portion of the clerical homosexual underworld operating out of Southern California with tentacles that reach into the American heartland. The lawsuit supports one of the major claims of this book—that clerical pederasts and homosexuals tend to gravitate toward and colonize certain administrative areas in a diocese, specifically the Chancery, diocesan major and minor seminaries, and departments connected to liturgy, religious education, canon law and finances.Engel describes a Mahony "Gang O'Four" that emerged from the Our Lady Queen of Angels seminary and the St John's major seminary in Camarillo, CA. These were Justin Rigali, Tod Brown, William Levada, and Mahony himself. These in turn sponsored or protected other gay or gay-friendly bishops, including Patrick Ziemann, the disastrous Bishop of Santa Rosa, CA; Bishop of Tucson Manuel Moreno; and John Steinbock, Ziemann's predecessor in the gay-friendly Santa Rosa diocese and later Bishop of Fresno, CA, where his record of handling abuse was at best mixed.According to attorneys Boucher and Drivon, unlike Cardinal Law of Boston, who was forced to resign in disgrace for his role in covering-up multiple clerical abuse cases, Cardinal Mahony has managed to survive the legal earthquakes that continue to shake the Archdiocese of Los Angeles because he enjoys the favor and protection of the ruling media and political elite.
. . . The lawsuit alleges:
In terms of shaping the make-up and philosophy ... of the archdiocese toward child molestation in the 1950s and into the 1960s, perhaps the most significant child molester faculty member of Our Lady Queen of Angels Junior Seminary was Fr. John Farris. Fr. Farris was among the most popular teachers and spiritual advisors at Our Lady Queen of Angels ...while rendering spiritual advisement, Farris sexually molested the young students at the junior seminary. During this time period, not uncoincidentally, the attrition rate of students dropping out from the junior seminary was extremely high. During this time many of the present archbishops and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in California were students at Our Lady Queen of Angels Junior Seminary, including Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop William Levada, Bishop John Steinbock, as well as former Bishop of Tucson Manuel Moreno. (p 807)
As far as I can see, this is just the tip of the iceberg, in large part because California media hasn't covered abuse cases as fully as media in other regions, and because the political establishment is aligned with liberal and gay-friendly prelates.
