Vatican Keeps Blurring the Issue

The Vatican has spoken, and once again we can only marvel.

If you’ve got “deep-rooted homosexual tendencies” or practice a “gay culture,” the church says, don’t bother knocking on the seminary door.

Unless, of course, your “transitory” homosexual tendencies have been driven into submission and “overcome” for at least three years.

I’m not sure how to translate any of this, but let me try.

If you have short-rooted gay tendencies rather than the deep-rooted variety, enjoy the theater but don’t get carried away, or if you’re capable of living in denial for periods of three years or longer, grab a robe and a pair of sandals and let’s talk.

Frankly, I can’t tell whether this is a sign of progress or further retreat into the Dark Ages. Church leaders might have been better off continuing to pretend there were no gays in the priesthood, or they could have stuck with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that’s made for hundreds of years’ worth of comfortable hypocrisy.

But then came the molestation scandal, which was one reason for the new policy, the other being a so-called fear of a growing gay subculture in church life.

To Eric Barragan of Santa Paula, the rewritten gay policy makes perfect sense.

“They’re trying to play the blame game,” he says.

You have an abuse scandal, you slam the door on people with “deep-rooted homosexual tendencies,” and it looks as if -- like good Christian soldiers -- you’ve zeroed in on the problem.

Yeah, it was the homosexuals.

“But it’s apples and oranges,” Barragan says. “Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you’re a pedophile.”

This is true, but spin is spin, and nobody does it better than the church.

Barragan and his brother, by the way, were molested between 1988 and 1993 by Father Carlos Rene Rodriguez, who was sentenced to eight years in prison last year. But instead of feeling as though justice has been done, Barragan, like many other victims, is still waiting for church leaders to come clean.

Instead, they get smokescreens like the new policy on gays.

In the church’s defense, I can understand the strategy. If you’d had its recent headlines, you’d be playing the misdirection game too.

At St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, a third of the graduates from the classes of 1966 and 1972 were later accused of molestation.

In Alaska, 85 people from 13 villages have sued for alleged abuse by priests and missionaries, and despite denials from the church, critics suspect that Alaska was a dumping ground for abusive Jesuits.

In the Los Angeles Archdiocese, accused molesters have served at nearly three-fourths of the 288 parishes since 1950. The archdiocese, now led by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, has been sued by more than 560 people for allegedly failing to protect children from abuse. Mahony refuses to turn over the files of accused priests despite demands from investigators.

This hasn’t been a particularly good year for His Eminence. Prosecutors reopened a child-abuse investigation of a priest who remained in the ministry after telling Mahony he had molested children.

The priest, Michael Stephen Baker, reported his crimes to the cardinal in 1986. Rather than call the police, Mahony sent Baker for treatment, and he was later assigned to nine different parishes. Four of his alleged 23 molestations occurred after his confession to Mahony.

The cardinal removed Baker from the ministry in 2000 but didn’t bother calling police until 2003.

The attorney for another former Los Angeles Archdiocese priest admitted last week that his client had molested 13 boys in the 1970s and ‘80s. The priest, Michael Edwin Wempe, is one of at least three priests accused of molesting children after Mahony sent them to therapy and then put them back in business.

Last month, the archdiocese released what critics referred to as watered-down versions of files on accused priests. Frustrated Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley lit into Mahony, yet again, for what he called “little more than a public relations ploy.”

“If ever there was a sin of omission, that was it,” Mary Grant says of the information released by Mahony.

Grant was abused in the 1970s, as a teenager, by a priest who was removed from service after my columns about him ran in 2002. She sees legal stunts, denials, stonewalling and new edicts on gays as part and parcel of the same thing -- a campaign designed to protect the real culprits.

“For decades we’ve seen victims blamed, salacious journalists blamed, greedy civil attorneys and prosecutors blamed,” Grant said. “The root cause of this is not whether a priest is gay or straight, or even a child molester. It’s because of the complicity of bishops who aided and abetted [molesters] and continue to aid and abet them.”

On this holiday weekend, we can thank the Lord someone is willing to tell it like it is.

And church leaders, including Cardinal Mahony, can be thankful they’ve still got their jobs.

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.