Los Angeles churches cover up teens sex abuse

Los Angeles and other US cities.
In 2007, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles paid at least US$660 million to settle sex abuse charges, and then joined a torturous legal defense of a privilege to conceal its part in that history. Last week, in response to a court order, the archdiocese released internal records documenting the actions church officials took, or failed to take, when priests were accused of abuse.

Those documents revealed that in the 1980s, then-Archbishop Roger Mahony and his top aide, Thomas Curry, who is now a bishop, maneuvered to shield priests from prosecution, kept parishioners in the dark and failed to call police about sex crimes against minors.

A separate release of internal files showed that the cardinal and other archdiocesan officials protected 14 priests from prosecution, hiding at least one they knew had raped an 11-year-old boy and abused as many as 17 others. According to the documents provided to the court, in one instance, Mahony agreed to send a molester priest to his native Spain for a minimum of seven years, paying him US$400 a month and offering health insurance.

In return, the cardinal would agree to write the Vatican and ask them to cancel his excommunication, leaving the door open for him to return as a priest someday.

In another case, Mahony resisted turning over a list of altar boys to police who were investigating claims against a visiting Mexican priest who was later found to have molested 26 boys during a 10-month stint in Los Angeles.

“We cannot give such a list for no cause whatsoever,” he wrote in a January 1988 memo.
Worse still, it is not a problem alone in Los Angeles, it is nationwide, where church leaders moved problem priests between parishes and did not call police.

Studies commissioned by the US bishops found more than 4 000 US priests have faced sexual abuse allegations since the early 1950s, in cases involving more than 10 000 children, most of them boys.

It is reported that in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the former pastor of St Augustine Cathedral, Monsignor Kevin Wallin, (61), was arrested recently for possession with intent to distribute and distribution of methamphetamines.

Wallin resigned as pastor in the summer of 2011 and was relieved of his priestly duties by William Lori, then bishop of Bridgeport. — AFP.