There's been a lot of talk lately about Roger Mahony's settlement with sexual abuse victims in the Los Angeles diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.
LA Times columnist Steve Lopez has been all over this story from the get-go, and his distaste for Mahony is legendary.
The celibacy-based Roman Catholic clergy and its indoctrinal seminaries provide a safe harbor for gays in general and sociopaths in the extreme. Without going into too much detail, I had a close relative who worked at a seminary in the 1970s and 80s; let's just say the place was rife with people of debateable sexual orientation. Not that there's anything wrong with that, per se, but if you have a predeliction for little boys (and in a few cases little girls), what better place to hide out than in an all-male institution that actually allows you -- no, encourages you -- to interact with all manner of potential victims.
Aside from the abuse itself, the real crime here is that Cardinal Mahony is going to skate. $660-million in hush money to keep him off the witness stand, where it would have become clear that he's been hiding these sickos in plain sight for years, moving them around to different parishes at the first (or second or third) sign of trouble.
I graduated from a Catholic high school in the LA diocese in 1980. The shit really hit the fan after I had graduated, but suffice to say we had several teachers of the cloth get busted for abusive behavior of a sexual nature, and none was ever punished in any meaningful way. They each just got transfered around, hidden away and ultimately given a new start. It was basically common knowledge, and it was unconscionable.
On a side note, there was a lay teacher at the school, a very popular, funny, talented young guy, who ended up going a bit too far with a female student (nothing overtly sexual IIRC, but inappropriate nonetheless), and they threw the book at him: Three years in jail, lost teaching license etc... Mahony and the diocese didn't lift a finger in his defense, but they hid those other slimeballs in other schools and parishes without a word about their transgressions.
Roger Mahoney ought to be in jail. Fortunately he's going to have a higher power to answer to. And I'm pretty sure they're not making snowballs where he's headed.
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