Victims Crushed in a Priestly Silence

Well, there goes another round of Sunday offerings. Your Easter tithes won’t pay for hymnbooks or boost the salaries of underpaid Catholic schoolteachers, but will go straight into the scandal management fund.

You read about these sex abuse cases each day and wonder if the national spectacle of hypocrisy and betrayal can get any more outrageous, and now we know the answer is yes. The latest case involves an Orange County priest who allegedly got a teenager pregnant roughly 20 years ago and then quietly paid for her abortion, breaking perhaps a half-dozen commandments in this one relationship alone.

But I can’t say I’m surprised. The priest happens to be an acquaintance of mine.

Father John Lenihan got the boot from his Dana Point parish last year after filling my ear with details of another, unrelated molestation, and “several” relationships with women, four of which he called serious. Shortly after I wrote about it, I got a message from Lori Haigh under the heading: “Father John molested me.”

Haigh went on to say:

“I went to the authorities. I was called a liar by priests in high places. I was crushed.”

In other words, it was like a lot of mail I get.

Haigh, whose old wounds were reopened when she read my columns about Father Lenihan, decided to do something about it. On Monday, the Orange and Los Angeles dioceses paid $1.2 million to settle her lawsuit, and then she filed a criminal complaint against Lenihan, who has finally been asked to leave the priesthood now that his sins are costing the church real money.

But no matter how unforgivable those sins, the Father Lenihans of the church constitute a minority of priests, and are not the biggest part of the problem. The greater obscenity is described in a single sentence of Lori Haigh’s e-mail to me.

“I was called a liar by priests in high places.”

On Monday, Haigh said two other priests ignored her pleas for help when she was being molested. Those two priests now happen to be high-ranking officials in the Orange Diocese, and one is in charge of molestation cases.

Is Haigh lying about her rebuffed pleas for help, as one of those two officials said Monday?

I can’t tell you the answer. But I can say that throughout the country, priests have climbed to the highest levels of church leadership by keeping their mouths shut about their own sins and those of others, protecting the church’s public image even at the cost of crushing victims and putting more people within reach of known predators.

That doesn’t mean there’s a greater percentage of pedophiles inside the church than outside, as readers keep telling me. In fact, based on six months of interviews with priests and parishioners, I can tell you that priests having sex with women, seminarians and other priests is far more rampant than the abuse of children.

But church practice has always been to keep quiet about uncomfortable realities. And so now we have Boston, and West Palm Beach, and questions about what church leaders knew in New York and Los Angeles and dozens of other places in this country and around the world.

The lesson of so much public shame is as obvious as the cross on top of every church: The silent priest is as dangerous as the abusive one. And yet we still can’t get simple answers from the likes of Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, who refuses to explain why recently dismissed priests had been kept on the job if they were known molesters.

Lori Haigh was not the first teenager Father Lenihan went after. The first was Mary Grant, whose father complained way back in 1978 to the then-cardinal. Rather than calling the police or at least defrocking him, church officials kept Lenihan’s career kicking along nicely. When I met with him, it was at a well-heeled church with an utterly spectacular ocean view. Tall and tanned, he spoke of his jogs on the beach.

Lenihan came to my attention last year as part of the $5.2-million sex abuse settlement involving Msgr. Michael Harris in Orange County. An ex-bishop was asked in deposition about priests like Lenihan being kept in jobs where they could do more damage, and the bishop all but vilified Lenihan’s first victim, Mary Grant, saying she might have been “very precocious or adult-looking.”

Yes, and so was Lori Haigh. Two teenagers, molested by a priest twice their age, were probably asking for it.

When I challenged the ex-bishop’s remarks about Lenihan, he said I had “no integrity” and added, “I wouldn’t talk to you if the pope told me to.”

Of course he wouldn’t.

For the first 2,000 years, at least, silence has served church leaders well.

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Steve Lopez writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.