Mahony Won’t Name Abusers

At an extraordinary “Mass of reparations,” Cardinal Roger M. Mahony told about 300 Catholic priests Monday night that he would support victims of long-ago sexual abuse who want to break confidentiality agreements and talk, but would not release the names of their abusers.

“I couldn’t care less about confidentiality agreements,” Mahony told reporters after the Mass in Long Beach.

But he cautioned that identifying priests involved in older cases could traumatize their victims again.

“The last thing any of us want is to victimize all over again many years later,” he said. “If I felt that making those few names public would in any way protect children and youth or help victims, I would do it.”

Speaking in a Christian penitential season, Mahony said he accepts full responsibility as head of the nation’s largest archdiocese for the sins of the past.

“I offer my sincere apologies,” he said.

The cardinal’s remarks during the Mass and at a news conference afterward came at a time when the nation’s bishops have been under unrelenting pressure to face up to the widening sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. Some within the church have called it the gravest crisis to confront the Catholic faith in modern times.

Mahony also said that the subject of marriage in the priesthood should be open to discussion.

“I think all these questions are open; I never said they should not be raised,” he said. Mahony also made it clear that he saw no correlation between the church’s current mandate of celibacy and child abuse. Sexual abusers, he said, are often married men.

Nonetheless, the fact that an American cardinal would suggest an open discussion on married priesthood was likely to cheer liberals and offend conservatives. Pope John Paul II has been unbending in his opposition to a married priesthood and has said the subject was closed.

Mahony made it clear that new cases of sexual abuse would be thoroughly aired, and that the church would cooperate fully with law enforcement.

“A new standard of openness and frankness has been established,” he said. The archdiocese’s sexual abuse policy has been strengthened over the years since it took effect in 1988. As of July, the archdiocese has imposed a “zero tolerance” policy.

In recent months, church officials have examined thousands of priests’ personnel files, past and present, looking for reports of sexual abuse.

One new case of alleged abuse reported on the church’s hotline is under investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, he said. A priest also was dismissed last week from the presidency of an Encino Catholic school because of sexual abuse.

Historically, however, the number of sexual abuse cases involving the archdiocese has been small compared to those in some other areas, but Mahony would not be more specific.

Mahony’s remarks at Our Lady of Refuge Church in Long Beach came as the Catholic Church and Christianity around the world entered Holy Week, the most sacred time on the Christian calendar.

Speaking to the Los Angeles diocese’s white-robed priests and an equal number of nuns and members of the laity, Mahony said that in all his 40 years as a priest and 27 years as a bishop “I have never felt so devastated, so sad, and so besieged.”

Mahony, archbishop of the archdiocese that includes Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, said the sins of a few priests had pulled a “blanket of shame” over its 1,200 priests.

He pledged full disclosure and cooperation with law enforcement in any new cases, and repeated that the church is undergoing a time of what he called purification. He said the church’s truthfulness, honesty and credibility have been deeply wounded.

He pledged a new standard of openness and frankness to close what he called “a very wide gap between the church, its people and society.”

Monday’s Mass was an annual event at which the cardinal blesses the holy oil that priests will use throughout the next year for baptisms, confirmations and the ordination of new priests. It also was a time for priests to renew their ordination vows. The title of Monday’s Mass, however, suggested the uniqueness of events

“We pause to measure ourselves against Jesus Christ,” Mahony said. “In past years, we have always come up short. . . . But this year, the church and priests are undergoing an incredible purification because of the sinful [actions] of a small percentage of priests.”

He said he was outraged at the harm done to children and youths entrusted to the church’s care.

Given the enormity of the scandal in the church, Mahony told reporters, he was glad the archdiocese newspaper in Boston, the Boston Pilot, had recently raised the issue of a married priesthood. Although he didn’t offer his personal views on that subject, he contended that there is no connection between celibacy and sexual abuse.

Allowing priests to marry would reverse hundreds of years of church tradition and could only be made by the pope.

Still, Mahony’s comments were warmly received by many priests in his congregation Monday night.

One veteran priest who spoke on condition of anonymity said: “He’s a realist. We’re open to the future. The Lord works in various ways.”

Mahony’s remarks on sexual abuse were generally applauded by his priests.

“This is a very difficult period we are going through in the church,” the Rev. Carl Bell said. “Whatever the cardinal says, not everyone is going to be satisfied. Some are going to want more, some are going to want less.”

As for relations with young congregation members, he added, “We don’t want to push a child away, but we don’t want to seem to pull them too close. We are all treading on eggshells.”

There have been calls in Boston for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law. A bishop in Florida resigned after disclosures he had molested a seminary youth years earlier. Last week, Pope John Paul II said priests had succumbed to evil and brought a grave scandal to the church.

But the response from U.S. bishops, each of whom heads an autonomous diocese and is answerable only to the pope, has been uneven. Mahony, while consistently decrying sexual abuse and early on putting sexual abuse policies in place, has not been as forthcoming as some bishops in offering a public accounting of the number of priests accused of sexual abuse in his archdiocese.

Mahony was confronted by Catholics carrying placards after a Palm Sunday Mass in Camarillo Sunday. One man said his son had been sexually abused by a priest. Another man said he was molested when he was a boy. They and other demonstrators said Mahony had mishandled the crisis.

Although the scandal erupted in January with disclosures in Boston and elsewhere, Mahony remained publicly silent until last week. Sources within the church disclosed that in February, Mahony removed six to 12 priests from their ministries because of past sexual abuse. The Times published that report March 4.

But Mahony declined to confirm or deny the report until March 22 when he issued a partial confirmation in a message to Catholics he wrote for the archdiocesan newspaper. He conceded that a few local priests had been removed from their ministries.

But he did not say precisely how many clerics were involved. Nor did he say when the reported abuse occurred, where the priests had served, or when the archdiocese first learned of the allegations. He said only that virtually all of the cases cited in the media were old, having occurred as long as decades ago.

Since the offenses, the priests, some of whom served jail time, reportedly had undergone psychological therapy and counseling and apparently were leading acceptable lives, one source said. Mahony’s decision to terminate the six to 12 priests appeared to be the result of the civil suit settlement last year in which the Los Angeles Archdiocese and the Diocese of Orange agreed to rid themselves of anyone found guilty of sexual abuse in the past. In that case, $5.2 million was awarded to a man who said he had been sexually abused as a teenager.

Monday was the first time Mahony had addressed the archdiocese’s priests en mass on the subject. All or most of them recently completed a series of regional workshops on observing personal boundaries in their ministries.

In June, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has addressed the problem in years past, will take up the issue again when they meet in Dallas.

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Times staff writer Louis Sahagun contributed to this report.