The Cardinal’s ‘Biggest Mistake’--One of Many

There is talk of telling police as little as possible about priests who were known sex offenders.

There is the crafting of statements to avoid being caught in a lie down the road.

The truth is framed, needled and massaged in the name of protecting the church.

All this from those who hold themselves up as paragons of morality and virtue, with God as their guide.

On Thursday, having been told by a Los Angeles Archdiocese source about a possible abuse allegation against Cardinal Roger Mahony that dated back to his days in Fresno, I e-mailed the cardinal a question.

Had he ever been accused? I asked.

No interviews, he wrote back.

And then Friday, Fresno police acknowledged an investigation, but gave only the sketchiest of details.

At midafternoon Thursday, I sent Mahony another e-mail asking to discuss his internal memo titled “Our Biggest Mistake.”

“I don’t know what memo you could be referring to,” Mahony responded.

To help refresh the cardinal’s memory, I sent it to him. Of the several memos between him and his inner circle that had landed in my hands regarding sex-abuse cases, I thought “Our Biggest Mistake” was perhaps his best work in protecting the church’s image.

So I hit the “send” button and zipped Mahony his very own words about three priests whom the archdiocese had not yet reported to police. In the memo, Mahony expresses concerns about being dragged before a grand jury, and possible “charges of cover-up, concealing criminals, etc., etc.”

The “biggest mistake,” as Mahony described it, was to avoid notifying the police earlier. “By doing it back then, we would not appear to have been crumbling under public pressure.”

With all due respect, I can think of several other nominations for the church’s biggest mistake. At the top of the list would be the penchant for treating sex abuse like a threat to the church’s public image rather than the moral, ethical and criminal abomination that it is.

Everything is crisis management and damage control with this crew. In dozens of memos, archdiocesan officials come off like Nixonian and Clintonian operatives. They deliberate over the most effective ways to couch explanations and tinker with definitions.

In one memo, Mahony takes glee in reporting that he has not divulged the total number of priests dismissed for abuse. In another, one of Mahony’s attorneys has this advice for two church officials about to be interviewed by police:

“Listen to their questions and take your time answering. Do not volunteer information.”

A reasonable person might wonder if such advice approaches obstruction.

In another memo, a diocese attorney appears to be cautioning that a planned public statement might be too truthful.

“As written,” the attorney says in a memo to Mahony and others in the inner circle, “it gives the impression that for years we gave names over to law enforcement contemporaneously with the time we learned of the events. If an example of even one case comes out where we didn’t pass on the name then, but only more recently, it will blow up.”

Guess what, counselor. It has blown up.

Cardinal Mahony never did answer my e-mail Thursday about his “Our Biggest Mistake” memo. But it didn’t take long before I had one of his attorneys barking in my ear.

Before the day was done, the archdiocese had used its considerable influence to arrange an extraordinary hearing in court near midnight, trying desperately to put the kibosh on any publication or airing of the memos by The Times or radio station KFI-AM (640).

The archdiocese lost, but in the process, acknowledged that indeed those were Mahony’s words in the “Our Biggest Mistake” memo.

The rest of the memos haven’t been authenticated by the diocese, which was too busy calling the FBI to see how certain members of the media got their hands on them.

Too bad they weren’t that quick in notifying authorities about predators within the church.

If the archdiocese had been half as aggressive in making sure sex offenders were removed from the ministry as they were in rushing attorneys into court to hide unflattering secrets, it might not be in the middle of this mess.

Earlier this week, Mahony said of Boston’s scandal-rocked Cardinal Bernard Law:

“I don’t know how I could face people.”

It may be time to wonder the same thing about Mahony.

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.