Reflection: The Pope's Pastoral Visit (from Roger Cardinal Mahony)

Pope Benedict XVI came as our Pastor and as our Shepherd, and he spoke to us of our most human joys and sorrows, our hopes and our failures. He came in the name of Jesus Christ and he reminded us "to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus" [Hebrews 12:2].

Our Holy Father did not hesitate to lift up for us challenges and difficulties which our Church was facing here in the United States, but he never left us alone with our failures and problems. He stood with us, acknowledged the shame of sinful behavior, and urged us forward in the name of our Risen Lord.

He openly spoke of the scourge of sexual misconduct on the part of clergy over these past decades, he visited with victims of that abuse, he reminded us of our immigrant roots and urged us to be present to today's immigrant peoples and their plight, he spent quiet prayerful time at Ground Zero, he met with those young people suffering with physical disabilities, he spoke of the futility of violence and war, and he did not hesitate to alert us to the conflict between the Gospel of Jesus and our contemporary society.

But he never left us mired in our troubles and our difficulties. Rather, he pointed out time and again that God's presence and grace are far more powerful than the forces of evil in the world. Again and again he led us to focus not on the pain and sufferings of our human failures, but rather, on the redeeming grace of our Risen Lord.

Time and again he led us back to our friendship with Jesus Christ, and urged us to recognize the presence, love, and mercy of Jesus surrounding us. For me personally, the two most memorable moments of grace with our Holy Father were ones shrouded in quiet prayer, silence and few public words: his meeting with victims of sexual abuse in Washington, D.C., and his visit to Ground Zero in New York. Both of these events had the dignity of silence, the depth of sadness, and the promise of hope-filled prayer - and both captured deeply the most wounded parts of our Church and of our country.

Yes, the great outdoor Masses were inspiring, the meetings with ecumenical and interfaith leaders were moving, and the gathering with young people and seminarians was memorable. But the power of those times of quiet healing moved me more deeply than all the rest of the Holy Father's many public appearances.

At first, I didn't know why. After all, concelebrating Mass with the Pope and tens of thousands of people was surely uplifting and a source of joy for us all. Slowly the realization became real: those times of quiet healing grace were exactly what I needed at this time in my own journey of faith. My own mistakes and failures over the years had continued to burden me - a weight that I failed to realize was holding me down.

The gentle and quiet manner of Pope Benedict touched me in the most vulnerable depths of my soul. I felt uplifted by our Shepherd and my heavy burdens somehow seemed lighter. How did our Holy Father accomplish this? Through his consistent call to faithful discipleship in Jesus Christ, and his reassurance that we are truly saved by hope in our loving God! His recent Encyclical Letter, Spe Salvi [Saved by Hope], continues to point us forward and upward on our journeys. He does not allow us to remain mired in our sins and faults, but instead, kept repeating the call to "true freedom" in Jesus who has come as "the way, the truth, and the life" for each one of us.

I return to Los Angeles a different disciple of Jesus than when I left a week ago. Thank you, Lord, for sending us not only the Vicar of Christ and the Successor of Peter, but also a brother and friend who knows Jesus personally and gave us six extraordinary days of grace and hope!

Sexual abuse cases

[edit] Challenging aspects of investigations of sexual abuse
Mahony appealed an attempt to gain access to church documents relating to sexual abuse all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court refused to hear the appeal, and the decision required the archdiocese to comply with a subpoena from the Los Angeles County District Attorney for letters to the former priests and notes from counseling sessions conducted by the church.[11]

[edit] Oliver O’Grady
The 2006 documentary Deliver Us From Evil is based on accusations that Mahony knew that Oliver O’Grady, a priest who sexually abused children, including a nine-month-old baby, in a string of Central California towns for 20 years, was a child molester but failed to keep him away from children. In 1984, a Stockton police investigation into sexual abuse allegations against O’Grady was reportedly closed after diocesan officials promised to remove the priest from any contact with children. Instead, he was reassigned to a parish about 50 miles (80 km) east, in San Andreas, where he continued to molest children. Not long after, Mahony was promoted to archbishop of Los Angeles, the largest Catholic diocese in the country. In Deliver Us From Evil, O’Grady says Mahony was “very supportive and very compassionate and that another situation had been smoothly handled”. Mahony denies knowing that O’Grady was a child molester. [12]

[edit] Apology
On July 16, 2007, Mahony and the Roman Catholic Church in Los Angeles apologized for abuses by priests after 508 victims reached to a record-breaking settlement worth $660m (£324m), with an average of $1.3m for each plaintiff. Mahony described the abuse as a “terrible sin and crime”, after a series of trials into sex abuse claims since the 1940s were to begin. The agreement, if approved by a judge, will settle all 15 upcoming pedophilia trials against the Los Angeles archdiocese and avoids the threat of Mahony being forced to testify about how the Church dealt with abuses spanning the 1940s to 1990s. Since 2002 nearly 1,000 people filed sexual abuse claims in California. The $660m-deal dwarfs the $157m settlement paid by the Archdiocese of Boston.[13]

[edit] Mexico Case
On September 11, 2007, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) accused Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Rivera of having in bad faith transferred a priest he knew had committed sexual offenses upon children to the United States in order to cover up the crimes. Joaquín Aguilar Méndez stated that he was raped by priest Nicolás Aguilar in Mexico City in 1994 (at age 12). A damage suit accused Rivera and Mahony of negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy and sexual battery.[14]

Cardinal Sin
Mahony’s has a tendency to diss the law.

By George Neumayr

After Bill Clinton pardoned drug trafficker Carlos Vignali and controversy broke out, James Carville, appearing on Meet the Press in March 2001, sought cover by saying, “I don’t know all the facts, but I do know the cardinal of Los Angeles supported this.” Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony had written a note to Clinton asking him to consider clemency for the cocaine dealer. But it turned out in the scandalous aftermath that Mahony hadn’t even met the felon.

An embarrassed Mahony admitted, “I have never met Mr. Carlos Vignali.” Scrambling for an explanation, he said that he had written the note at the direction of “leaders of the community whom I greatly respect” and because he was “well aware of the outstanding contributions which the Vignali family have made to all of Southern California over the years” (though he hadn’t met Carlos Vignali Sr. either and said he “knew nothing about [the Vignali family’s] past nor their history).”

By “leaders of the community,” Mahony meant a gang of Hispanic pols in Los Angeles who wanted to spring the drug trafficker from jail. They leaned on Mahony to write the note, knowing that he was so tied into the Hispanic Democratic machine in Los Angeles that he would comply without bothering to ask any questions about the fitness of Vignali for clemency consideration.

The Vignali debacle is one of many examples of Mahony’s atrocious judgment and his sloppy if not contemptuous approach to legal matters.

That’s what he brings to the immigration debate. Contrary to his faux-pious rhetoric, he is speaking not for the Catholic Church but for himself, using, in a textbook example of clericalism, the prestige and trappings of his episcopal office to advance nothing more than his personal opinion in favor of open borders.

The Catholic Church has never taught that a nation can’t pass immigration laws or protect its border. If anything, Mahony’s encouragement of border lawbreaking is alien to the Church’s tradition of respecting the state’s legitimate concerns; it represents a modernist outgrowth of an individualistic morality that places extreme emphasis on “rights” and no emphasis at all on duties. To the liberal bishops, breaking a country’s immigration laws is not a sin but an entitlement — a position that would come as a surprise to their forebears, who considered Caesar worthy of respect.

Mahony’s de facto calls for civil disobedience on immigration would be more persuasive if it could be demonstrated that he understood the natural-law basis for the distinction between a just and an unjust law. Unfortunately, there’s little evidence of this; indeed, it is ironic that a famously modernist bishop like Mahony, who normally treats the concept of natural law as a pre-Vatican II relic, suddenly cites it when justifying illegal immigration.

And anybody who thinks Mahony is a sincere advocate for civil disobedience should talk to protesting pro-lifers: Squeamish about getting too close to them, Mahony won’t even let them collect signatures for ballot propositions on his parishes’ property. Notice, too, that he now speaks of compassion as more important than law — but when common sense and basic compassion dictated that he cooperate with the authorities in protecting children from pedophile priests, he didn’t, arguing that his understanding of the law didn’t technically require cooperation.

Michael Baker, an ex-priest caught molesting children, has testified about Mahony’s hypocritical brand of I’m-above-the-law clericalism, recounting that after he offered to turn himself in to the police, Mahony’s chancery lawyer said, “Should we call the police now?” And Mahony’s response was, according to Baker, “No, no, no.” Mahony then assigned Baker — over the subsequent 14 years — to several parishes near schools and children.

Jurors sitting on a case involving a pedophile priest in Stockton (a priest whose ministry partially overlapped with Mahony’s tenure as bishop of Stockton) concluded that Mahony didn’t even respect the rules of the courtroom. In their deliberations on the size of the settlement to the victims in the case, the jurors disregarded Mahony’s testimony, sizing him up as a witness who lacked credibility. One juror told the press that he “found Mahony to be utterly unbelievable.”

Standing against the law, in other words, comes easily to Mahony — not because he grasps a higher law, but because his self-indulgent liberalism is essentially lawless. His left-wing clericalism means that he can ignore justly enacted positive laws with the same casualness with which he ignores inconvenient parts of canon law.

I had to laugh when I heard last week that he in effect called on Los Angeles Catholics to “fast” and “pray” that amnesty be extended to illegal immigrants. This is a cardinal who normally considers such practices ultramontane burdens — a cardinal who waives Holy Days of Obligation when they fall too close to Sunday, because he doesn’t want the faithful to suffer the agony of going to church twice within three days. Yet to advance his chic liberalism he will harness the power of old-time piety and invoke weighty Catholic language he usually dismisses as too sectarian. The Church, he proudly harrumphs against a phantom threat, “is not in a position of negotiating the spiritual and the corporal works of mercy” — a phrase I’ve never heard him utter before.

He must have had to crack open the Baltimore Catechism for that one. But then again, maybe he dusted it off from his letter asking Clinton to consider releasing Carlos Vignali.

— George Neumayr is a writer living in the Washington, D.C. area.

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