Monday, December 2, 2013

The Taj Mahony

I have never visited Ex-Archbishop Roger Mahony's fancy new cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, and I never will.

It opened in 2002 while Mahony was still covering up the names and specific criminal acts of priests accused of sexual abuse of children.

Not until January of 2013 did a court order force the archdiocese to make public "thousands of pages of priest personnel files" that had forced Mahony to settle litigation in 2008 with a payoff of $720 million to 500 persons who had been abused as children.

http://graphics.latimes.com/mahony/

That cathedral reeks with Mahony's pride and echoes with the whispers of church officials trying to silence adults pursuing justice for their stolen childhoods.

Thank you to Harriet Ryan, Ashley Powers, and Victoria Kim for putting together a powerful retrospective on the ambition and cover-up of Mahony as archbishop.

One anecdote stood out to me, when Mahony was meeting with wealthy parishioners from La Canada/Flintridge to raise money for the $720 million settlement.

One woman challenged him to resign for being in essence a CEO who had mismanaged his business causing a loss of three-quarters of a billion dollars.

It's about accountability, another woman said.
Mahony slammed his hand on the table, scattering his charts.  You self-righteous... he began.  Keep your money, he told them.

That's what journalism is about--research and interviews that report the truth about and behind current events.

In 2013 Mahony enjoyed traveling to Rome for the conclave to choose a new pope, despite calls for him to stay home instead as penance for his role in covering up child sexual abuse.  

During the nearly nine years I taught at a Catholic college in Los Angeles, Mahony was the leader of the church in Los Angeles.  He spoke up for immigrant rights but clamped down against any suggestion that women should be allowed to become priests.  

In 2000 he and other California bishops joined with the Mormon Church to raise financial support and votes for Proposition 8, the effort to enshrine marriage as "only between a man and a woman."

That hypocrisy--defining marriage and priesthood while protecting child abuse by priests--was part of my decision to leave my job as a tenured professor at Mount St. Mary's College.  

Another part was American bishops' plan to enforce Ex corde ecclesiae, "The Apostolic Constitution of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on Catholic Universities."  The goal was to preserve the heart of the Roman Catholic Church by firing professors and college presidents who did not toe the Church's line on social issues.

I was not going to continue taking a paycheck while professors in theology and religious studies had to ask Archbishop Mahony for a mandatum--permission to continue teaching, perhaps granted only to those who did not speak out on contraception, abortion, married priests, women priests, and other issues.

I sent Mahony a letter explaining my reasons for resignation.  

He never answered, too busy with his new cathedral and with fending off police investigations of priests who had abused children.

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