Taj Mahony (Cardinal Roger Mahony threatened, hoodwinked and strong-armed to get a lavish new cathedral built in L.A. The result is a colossal monument to his ego.)
Posted on 04/05/2002 10:21:34 PM PST by Fitzcarraldo
While Mahoney has his sights on the Holy See, he has put his foot in Holy Sh-t. A few months back, Mahoney sold the archdiocese's cemeteries to a private company, Stewart Mortuary, which coincidentally donated an undisclosed amount of money towards the consruction of the new $180-million cathedral in Los Angeles. According to Mahoney, the only cemeteries the archdiocese would recognize were the ones sold to Stewart Mortuary. The kicker is that Mahoney forgot to tell his parishoners that the cemeteries had been sold to a private company. Now, these parishoners - mainly poor immigrants - will be charged an arm and a leg so they can give their relatives a Catholic burial.
Now, Mahoney is saying that the Church has no obligation to turn in pedophiles to the police; in other words, it's above the law. Incredibly, the church hierarchy is so desperate to retain priests that they'll obstruct justice and give refuge to kiddie molestors. Mahoney doesn't belong in the Vatican; he belongs on death row.
http://www.interment.com/articles/goliaths.html
"...Last September, the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles--the nation's largest, home to nearly 4 million Catholics--signed a deal with Stewart Enterprises, a Louisiana-based corporation. The church, worried about losing its market share of burials, agreed to allow Stewart to build mortuaries in its six biggest cemeteries--a valuable endorsement for a death-care provider. In return, the church will get an undisclosed percentage of the proceeds from each funeral Stewart performs at the cemeteries, money that will help Cardinal Roger Mahony realize his dream of building a $100 million cathedral downtown. "Sinful," [Father] Wasielewski calls the deal. "Most Stewart homes charge thousands more than many other mortuaries for the same funeral." A director of the archdiocese's cemeteries responds that Stewart has agreed "to honor the cardinal's request to keep prices reasonable."...
Cardinal Roger Mahony's secret deal with funeral giant Stewart Enterprises turned L.A.'s Roman Catholic cemeteries into a cash cow -- but it's the faithful who're getting milked.
BY RON RUSSELL
On the day in 1997 when Cardinal Roger Mahony blessed the ground upon which Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral would be built, he had special reason to be pleased. Although few outside the cardinal's inner circle knew it yet, three months earlier Mahony had struck a deal with the world's third-largest operator of mortuaries and cemeteries that would result in a bonanza of many millions of dollars for the Los Angeles archdiocese he governs. In an unprecedented arrangement that is even now shrouded in secrecy, the cardinal agreed to allow Stewart Enterprises Inc., based in New Orleans, to build commercial mortuaries at six of the 11 L.A.-area Catholic cemeteries. The deal would give the death-care giant a huge leg up in cornering a lucrative segment of the funeral market that the archdiocese, with its 4.5 million Roman Catholics, represents. In exchange, the archdiocese would be able to share the largess by leasing the ground beneath the mortuaries, five of which are now operating, to Stewart for 40 years.
Five years and -- by the time it is finished -- at least $193 million later, the lavish and lackluster cathedral complex rising among the sterile office towers and government monoliths of Bunker Hill is scheduled to finally open next Labor Day. Archdiocese officials insist that the timing of the Stewart deal is purely coincidental to the cathedral's construction. But such denials have been greeted with skepticism even among the cardinal's own clerics, some of whom have complained bitterly about his decision to use consecrated ground owned by the church for commercial purposes.
Indeed, Mahony has moved swiftly to silence those within the church who've had the temerity to question the Stewart compact. Eight parish priests, including Monsignor Juan Matas of Montebello, were forced to recant last year after initially siding with the project's opponents who boldly set back Mahony's plans by persuading Montebello officials to block construction of a sixth mortuary. The archdiocese has fueled suspicion about Stewart's link to the cathedral by providing almost no information about who some of the cathedral's donors are or how much they've contributed, including at least two corporate donors listed as "anonymous." It has similarly declined to reveal how much Western Sequoia Corporation, another firm with close business ties to the archdiocese's cemetery operations, has contributed.
Otherwise, Mahony and his subordinates have done their best to ignore the protests of those who say it is a travesty for an archdiocese with so many poor, mostly immigrant Catholics to spend such an enormous sum for a new cathedral. In 1996, members of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, a lay group that administers to the poor, occupied the former Saint Vibiana Cathedral at Second and Main streets to protest the cardinal's unsuccessful efforts to raze the historic 19th-century Spanish Baroque church when Mahony had wanted to build Our Lady of the Angels there. In 1998, several dozen members of the group disrupted the new cathedral's official ground breaking after scaling a fence and commandeering a piece of earthmoving equipment.
But even excluding speculation about the cathedral, the Stewart deal, cobbled together during secret talks in New Orleans and Los Angeles in the spring of 1997, was bound to be controversial. As one of the "big three" funeral chains that in recent years has shriveled competition by gobbling up independent mortuaries with the zeal of a Jurassic Park velociraptor, Stewart is widely viewed as a culprit of spiraling funeral prices. Indeed, Mahony's alliance with the company was no less shocking than if he had announced a deal with Big Oil to build service stations selling high-priced gas in parish parking lots and then tried to strong-arm Catholics to fill up there. "For the archdiocese to go into business with Stewart is sinful," says the Reverend Henry Wasielewski, 71, a Phoenix-area priest who heads the Interfaith Funeral Information Committee, a consumer group. "It's like inviting the wolf into the henhouse."
Mahony has scarcely spoken about the Stewart deal publicly. Tod Tamberg, the media relations director for the archdiocese, said that the cardinal would have nothing to say about the matter for this article. Neither did Monsignor Terrence Fleming, who oversees the archdiocese's cemetery department, respond to interview requests. But Randy Stricklin, president of Stewart's western division, confirms that the company's arrangement with the archdiocese, which he credited Mahony as having initiated, was a "triple-net" lease for a term of 40 years, after which the mortuaries that Stewart has thus far spent $22 million to build will belong to the archdiocese. While declining to offer details about the strength of the mortuaries' business so far, Stricklin says, "things are going well. Everything is on target with our projections."
He says Stewart pays property taxes on the mortuaries and ground beneath them, despite that the facilities are on archdiocese property. Knowledgeable observers say the fact that the arrangement involves a triple-net lease, as opposed to a basic land lease, suggests that the deal is structured to enable the archdiocese to share profits in accord with some undisclosed formula if Stewart prospers, as expected, from the alliance. And those profits are potentially enormous. A general rule in the funeral industry is that within five years mortuaries built at cemeteries usually end up providing services for half the burials that take place there. With the imprimatur of the church behind it, industry sources say, Stewart could easily exceed the norm. "To me the interesting question is how [the archdiocese] can get away with a deal like that and not jeopardize its tax-exempt status as a religious institution," says Richard Gutierrez, an attorney and L.A. mortuary owner who is also a past chairman of the defunct state Cemetery Board. "I'd love to get the chance to depose them on that issue."
Tamberg of the archdiocese portrays the Stewart arrangement as an extension of its pastoral mission, saying that it is a means to provide L.A.'s Roman Catholics with quality funeral services at reasonable prices and with the convenience of having mortuary, chapel and grave at a single location. He offers a similar view of the archdiocese's relationship with Western Sequoia, a commercial cemetery-sales company with headquarters in Inglewood. Since 1987, Western Sequoia has enjoyed an exclusive role in selling graves, crypts and niches at archdiocese cemeteries, a function that was handled in-house by archdiocese employees until after Mahony became archbishop in 1985. (Pope John Paul II elevated him to cardinal in 1991.)
Some of these church leaders have so little belief in their religion that I find it hard to accept that they are desparate to keep priests within the ranks. It was these very same leaders that spent decades instituting reasons that caused the depletion of the priesthood in the first place.
Godspeed, The Dilg
YOU'RE the one who outrages me. I didn't read any "cover-up" messages in that article. What I read was people sincerely trying to work with the police and get to the truth. I guarantee that if YOU were hit with a claim of sexual harrasment, you'd be on the phone to your attorney within 2 minutes to protect yourself against false claims.
What you seem to be suggesting is that the church hand over anyone who is accused without giving them due process.
As predicted, the claimants are coming out of the woodwork now.
I dislike Mahoney, but this is a false accusation, probably hysteria, but maybe for money. Doctors get accused all the time like this. And you know what? There is no way to defend yourself against a 20 year old charge, especially in the hysteria of the anti catholic feeding frenzy in this.
Are you basing this on some sort of special or intimate knowledge?
Some people like to throw out slanders.
This shouldn't be an afterthought.
And charity isn't slandering someone and then later saying I have no proof.
Your last two words are appropriate.
Aye, there's the rub. The "move on" crowd doesn't want to dwell on the sorry past of their rock star idol. Of course, in the sorry past they were telling people to move on as well. I know some of these cretins, and they are all women. I am ashamed of my gender. Not all women are like the "move on" crowd but they are in a minority.
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