Jason Berry: "A cardinal's shameless struggle for survival" (Boston Globe)

[Hand]

A lot more on the recent Archdiocese of Los Angeles abuse settlement--and why Cardinal Mahoney is a fucking scumbag.

THE RECORD $660 million settlement that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay victims of clergy sex abuse marks the denouement of a strange legal drama. The litigation turned into a survival struggle for Cardinal Roger Mahony...

Mahony's personal judgment has long been suspect. Consider Father Carl Sutphin, who shared living quarters with Mahony in two cathedrals over seven years until a 2002 Los Angeles police investigation of charges that Sutphin molested two sets of brothers. Only then did the cardinal force his retirement. In 1991, Mahony had sidelined Sutphin, a classmate of his in seminary, when a Phoenix man informed the cardinal that the priest had abused him and his twin brother years earlier. Sutphin went to St. Luke Institute in Suitland, Md., for treatment after which he became chaplain in a retirement home. At the time of his suspension, Sutphin was a resident with Mahony at Our Lady of Angels Cathedral...

As Catholics, we have no power to remove a bishop who violates the trust. Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as archbishop of Boston after a sex abuse scandal only after a group of brave priests publicly called for his departure. Even then, the Vatican rewarded Law by appointing him pastor of a basilica in Rome...

If Pope Benedict XVI is serious about the church's so-called policy of prevention, he should remove Mahony immediately -- without a cushy post in Rome. Mahony's ouster is years overdue.

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[MichiganVote]

1. Mahoney tried to play clever...too bad, so sad