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People abused by priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese and their supporters held quilts with photos of victims outside the Cathedral of Our Queen of Angels.
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In an unprecedented move, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez has relieved his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, of all his duties due to Mahony’s “mishandling” of child sex-abuse allegations by members of the clergy. The announcement falls on the same day that the church published 122 pages of the secret personnel files about the abuse. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Curry, who allegedly covered up the abusers with Mahony, resigned. While Mahony canceled his confirmation schedule, an archdiocese spokesman insisted he remained a retired priest “in good standing.” But the pain of the scandal lives on: in a letter on the church’s website addressed to “my brothers and sisters in Christ,” Gomez called the posted files “brutal and painful reading”
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The church files are filled with outrage, pain and confusion. There are handwritten notes from distraught mothers, accounts of furious phone calls from brothers and perplexed inquiries from the police following up on allegations of priests sexually abusing children.
Over four decades, particularly under Cardinal Roger M. Mahony,[above] parishioners in the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese repeatedly tried to alert church authorities about abusive priests in their midst, trusting that the church would respond appropriately.
But the internal personnel files on 124 priests released by the archdiocese under court order on Thursday reveal a very different response: how church officials initially disbelieved them and grew increasingly alarmed over the years, only as multiple victims of the same priest came forward and reported similar experiences.
Even then, in some cases, priests were shuttled out of state or out of the country to avoid criminal investigations.
A sampling of the 12,000 pages suggests that Cardinal Mahony and other top church officials dealt with the accusations of abuse regularly and intimately throughout the last several decades. It often took years to even reach the realization that a priest could no longer simply be sent to a rehabilitation center and instead must be removed from ministry or even defrocked. The Los Angeles church files are not unlike other documents unearthed in the church’s long-running abuse scandal in the United States, but it appears to be the largest cache.
In one case, the Rev. José I. Ugarte was accused by a doctor of having drugged and raped a young boy in a hotel in Ensenada and of taking boys every weekend to a cabin in Big Bear. But rather than turn Father Ugarte over to the authorities, Cardinal Mahony decided to send him back to Spain, made him sign a document promising not to return to the United States without permission for seven years, not to celebrate Mass in public and to seek employment in “a secular occupation in order to become self-supporting.”
The documents also hint at the disillusionment on the part of church officials as they eventually realized that priests who had denied any accusations of abuse were eventually revealed as repeat violators.
Church experts agreed that it was the first time that a bishop had publicly condemned another bishop’s failures in the abuse scandal, which has occupied the American bishops for nearly three decades. They also said that Archbishop Gomez had gone as far as he could under the church’s canon laws to discipline Cardinal Mahony. He could not, they said, take away his authority to celebrate Mass,
Many victims said the release of the files felt like a vindication because they showed repeated abuse by the priests that church officials had often denied. “I wasn’t lying, I wasn’t embellishing, I wasn’t making it up,” said Esther Miller, 54, a mother of two who said she was abused by Michael Nocita, a priest, when she was in high school. “It shows the pattern of complicity. It shows the cover-up.”
Cardinal Mahony, who served from 1985 until 2011, when he reached mandatory retirement, has faced calls for his defrocking over his handling of the abuse cases for years. But the cardinal, a vocal champion of immigrant rights, remained hugely popular with Latinos here, who make up 40 percent of the four million parishioners in the archdiocese.
The church had fought for years to keep the documents secret, and until this week it argued that the names of top church officials should be kept private. But on Thursday, Judge Emilie Elias rejected the church’s requests to redact the names of officials before releasing the files. The diocese released the files, with the names of victims and many other church officials removed, less than an hour later.
The trove of documents suggests that church officials routinely sent priests accused of abuse out of state and in some cases out of the country to avoid the potential investigations from law enforcement.