And that was his greatest and proudest accomplishment? Whoever chose Mahoney to be a bishop, let alone an archbishop, made a HUGE mistake.
Posted on 12/01/2013 3:33:53 PM PST by jeannineinsd
From the start of his tenure as the leader of L.A.'s Catholics, Roger Mahony had ambitious plans for the archdiocese. But clergy molestation claims were vying for his attention.
A year after arriving in Los Angeles, the youngest archbishop in the U.S. Catholic Church had a schedule and an agenda befitting a presidential candidate.
Roger Mahony raced around the city in a chauffeured sedan, exhorting labor leaders to support immigrant rights and rallying hundreds against a proposed prison in Boyle Heights.
Where his predecessors had talked up praying the rosary, Mahony touted his positions on nuclear disarmament and Middle East peace, porn on cable TV and AIDS prevention.
(Excerpt) Read more at graphics.latimes.com ...
Pity protecting the next generation of Catholics wasn't #1 on his agenda, let alone being on it at all.
Ping for later
And that was his greatest and proudest accomplishment? Whoever chose Mahoney to be a bishop, let alone an archbishop, made a HUGE mistake.
I’ve been in there and was essentially impressed. The main chapel itself is very large and airy. ‘Kinda funny that I went with a Catholic geologist who claimed to be an atheist, and when we got in there, he was genuflecting and crossing himself up and down. When I asked him what was up he claimed he was hedging his bets.
The area below is largely tomb space that I’m not sure how well is selling. It is sufficiently eerie, but I somehow can’t see it there 500 years from now.
WHO designed that place? Frank Gehry?!
Mahoney wasn't interested in saving souls, he was interested in his own personal notoriety; being a political mover and shaker.
That's where the problem was, had he actually spent more time praying he might have made a better Archbishop.
Mahony seems to like Pedos and Illegal Aliens...
'Ten bucks says that's in Los Angel-eze'
About 4% of priests were accused of being molesters according to the John Jay Report.
4-10% of all priests or of investigated priests?
If two-thirds of priests transferred child molesters without alerting authorities that it amazing.
2/3rds is huge, it is institutional
No I sure hope I saw those 2 posts out of context
The Bishops clearly failed these children. The bishops' decisions should be understood in the context of the era when these crimes occurred. This problem was clearly not as well understood and often the bishops were following the advice of psychiatrists. I'm sure when they heard they could do what the experts said AND avoid a scandal they were overjoyed.
The Church was widely criticized when it was discovered that some bishops knew about some of the alleged crimes committed, but reassigned the accused instead of seeking to have them permanently removed from the priesthood. In defense of this practice, some have pointed out that public school administrators engaged in a similar manner when dealing with accused teachers, as did the Boy Scouts of America.Wikipedia "John Jay Report"In response to these allegations, defenders of the Church's actions have suggested that in re-assigning priests after treatment, bishops were acting on the best medical advice then available, a policy also followed by the U.S. public school system when dealing with accused teachers.
Some bishops and psychiatrists have asserted that the prevailing psychology of the times suggested that people could be cured of such behavior through counseling. Many of the abusive priests had received counseling before being reassigned. Critics have questioned whether bishops are necessarily able to form accurate judgments on a priest's recovery. The priests were allowed to resume their previous duties with children only when the bishop was advised by the treating psychologists or psychiatrists that it was safe for them to resume their duties.
It is still far too much. It shows that this was tolerated by authorities in the church.
Of course, isn’t that what leftists always wanted, tolerance for deviancy?
“Fewer than 10% of priests were molesters”
Try about 3%. And there is sexual abuse cases in all religions. Studies have shown a higher percentage in protestants faiths than Catholics, but Catholicism is where the money is, so follow the money.
4-5% of all American priests. 2/3 of all American bishops. I wish I could say they were out of context - but IMO they're not. I think we can all agree that some bishops tried to stop the crisis, while others perpetuated it. We know there were some bishops (Weakland in America and Vangheluwe in Belgium) who not only moved perpetrators around knowingly, but were perpetrators themselves. Despite that, the John Jay report assigns only five categories to sum up all of the bishops' responses - innovators, early adopters, early majority, later majority, and laggards. The John Jay study was commissioned and paid for by the US bishops, making it telling that no category was created for "bishop perpetrators".
[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.
-- from the thread Kneeling Before the World"The Dublin Archdiocese's preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid-1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets," said the report. "All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities. The archdiocese did not implement its own canon law rules and did its best to avoid any application of the law of the state"....
-- from the thread Pope calls Irish church leaders to Vatican to discuss abuse report
A rather telling admission, I would say.
A deeper problem is Dolan inability to defend the Church’s position about homosexuality. He is afraid of looking intolerant, and this prevents him from say, yes, homosexual sex is a grave sin, like other forms of human lust, and to organize politically to protect this sort of behave is something that the Church ought to oppose. Gay rights is like Leper rights: rights to infect others.
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