Cardinal Roger Mahony, who served as Archbishop of Los Angeles from 1985 until 2011, is embroiled in a furious scandal over his handling of reports of child sexual offenders amongst the ranks of his priesthood. The scandal broke open widely when a Los Angeles court ordered a trove of 12,000 pages of files, detailing the records of greater than 100 priest sexual predators, to be made public by the Archdiocese, following an exhaustive five-year legal struggle over the documents. The archdiocese complied, releasing the documents to their website, revealing shocking instances of Mahony prioritizing canonical infractions and violations above reports of abused children, both in tone and in practice. Of Father Jose Ugarte, for example, Mahony was pressured to take action not by reports that Ugarte was molesting children (as he’d been accused of, to no avail, twenty years earlier), but by the idea that he was improperly administering the sacrament of confession onto his victim. As a memo directed to Mahony from a cleric stated: “Given the seriousness of this abuse of the sacrament of penance… it is your responsibility to formally declare the existence of the excommunication and then refer the matter to Rome.” You can check out the files for yourself here. (Photo by maveric2003) source