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
The Provincial of the Third Order Regular Franciscans, Father Patrick Quinn, announced this morning that Brother Stephen Baker had died. …Let us continue to pray for all victims of abuse, for Brother Baker’s family and the repose of his soul.A statement from Bishop George V. Murry • Announcing the death of Franciscan friar Stephen Baker, since determined by autopsy to have been a suicide. Baker was the subject of dozens of sexual abuse allegations by teenagers across at least three states (particularly more than 25 at Bishop McCort High School in Johnstown, Pennsylvania), and was barred from participating in ministry after a sex abuse claim in 2000. source
» Paying the price: Philadelphia monsignor William Lynn will serve three to six years in prison, following sentencing today for covering up a priest’s pedophilic abuse in his diocese. Lynn was the secretary for clergy of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and is the first Catholic Church official to be convicted for such a crime in the United States. Lynn’s conviction came over his failure to report now-imprisoned former priest Edward Avery, who is serving a two-and-a-half year to five-year sentence for sexually assaulting an altar boy in 1999. Lynn’s lawyers have sought leniency in their client’s case, arguing he shouldn’t have to serve more time than Avery himself.
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Allegations send Conlin into retirement: Nancy Phillips, an investigative reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, has reportedly authored an article alleging that Bill Conlin, longtime sports columnist for the Inquirer’s rival paper, the Daily News, was involved in sexual molestation of children. This continues a grim surge in sports personalities being accused of these heinous sorts of crimes — following the horrific allegations leveled at Jerry Sandusky, and the subsequent accusations made of Syracuse’s Bernie Fine, it’s beginning to appear that people claiming these sorts of abuse are feeling more liberty to come forward and speak out. Conlin resigned almost immediately after this news broke, and has yet issued no comment. (Above: Conlin with his late wife Irma, who died in 2009. Photo by chickiespetes) source
Much credit to the Harrisburg, Pa. Patriot-News, which ran a front-page editorial on the Penn State sex-abuse scandal calling for university president Graham Spanier and legendary football coach Joe Paterno to step down. Gauntlet, thrown. Charles Apple has the backstory on how this page came together.
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