Fed-Up Faithful Seek Some Real Reform

A scandal-weary Catholic cleric tells me he thinks twice about going out in public wearing the black collar.

A disgusted Catholic university graduate calls to say he’s short-arming the donation basket on Sunday at his Northridge parish, “because I refuse to pay the cost of silence.”

A ticked-off Catholic school teacher e-mails me this query: “If the Los Angeles Archdiocese can afford payouts of MILLIONS of dollars to people who’ve been sexually abused by priests, why can’t they pay me a DECENT SALARY?!”

Good question. And here’s another: When are church leaders worldwide going to wake up and realize the cross is akimbo, the roof is on fire and the flock is headed for the exits?

Out of Rome, we get nothing. Out of L.A., we get “no comment” when the question is as simple as this: Did you call the police on priests who were dismissed for allegedly abusing children?

“It’s not going to get any better until a bishop hears the clang of a jail door closing behind him for concealing this stuff, and the Vatican addresses the problem definitively,” says attorney Jeff Anderson, who won a $30-million settlement in a Stockton sex abuse case. L.A. Cardinal Roger Mahony, formerly bishop of Stockton, was a key figure in the case.

Not a day goes by lately when I don’t get at least one reader relating a story about being sexually abused by a priest whose proclivities were known, or should have been known, to his superiors. Mary Grant, head of the Southern California chapter of the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests, says victims are coming out of the woodwork with horrific tales.

I could spend day and night on these cases and not come up for air before Christmas. But the people who caught my attention this week weren’t the abusers or the abused, but a different kind of victim.

The good cleric. The hard-working teacher. The mothers and fathers and sons and daughters who sit in the pews with their rosary beads, compromised trust and feelings of betrayal.

“I’m tired of the silence and denials,” says John Lynch, a lifelong faithful who went to Catholic schools all the way through college at New York’s Fordham University. “Enough with the tap dance.”

Lynch, a tax lawyer and former L.A. County assessor, said his eyes “rolled across the ceiling” Sunday when the pastor at his Northridge church read a statement from Cardinal Mahony assuring parishioners that the church is on top of the problem.

It was a neatly crafted statement saying, Don’t worry. But not a word about calling the cops or whether one of the unnamed pedophiles was in your parish, trolling for your children and grandchildren. It’s a lot of faith to ask.

“They’re not going to be able to keep infantilizing us by snapping their fingers, like they’re the gatekeepers to eternity,” Lynch said. “Catholics are fed up with cover-up, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

Lynch and I had a long chat by phone and then met to talk some more. Like the cleric and the teacher I mentioned at the top of the column, Lynch has chosen not to walk away from the church despite his misgivings, and I wanted to ask why.

This isn’t the best of times for organized religion, after all. We’ve got Islamic fanatics calling for the blood of infidels; Jewish scholars wrestling with new evidence that Abraham and Moses never existed; and the Catholic Church floating on a sea of scandal.

So why does John Lynch, pushing 70, put on the coat and tie and go to church on Sunday with his wife of 30-plus years?

“You have to have belief,” he said, and his belief is in something beyond priest and pulpit; something no scandal can steal. “You have to have some moral guardrails. If you don’t believe in an authority outside yourself, you’ve got problems.

“But they’ve got to stop carrying on like it’s the Middle Ages. You sit there and listen, and there’s no talking back. It’s like participatory fascism. They don’t understand this is not the church of our immigrant grandmothers and grandfathers. That’s what they don’t get.”

Lynch wants answers and he wants changes.

“They throw a few lower clergy to the wolves, and that’s it? You’ve got to figure it goes up higher than that, and this culture of silence, this atmosphere of whispers and rumors, it’s just no good anymore.”

As his frustration has grown, Lynch has been less generous when they pass the basket at Mass. “You don’t know what you’re paying for,” he said. Is it a sex-abuse settlement? Is it the cardinal’s new $200-million cathedral?

He’s hit on it now. The church won’t be reformed by police, bad press or a bout of conscience.

But just wait until that basket starts coming up short.

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Steve Lopez’s column will now appear Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.