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Mahony was an avatar of the building bishops of yesteryear, raising the $190 million for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, immersing himself in the aesthetic and construction details. Los Angeles was growing into its past as a vast Mexican city outside Mexico, now encompassing a mosaic of Asians, Filipinos, and Latinos from Central America. The city was also a case study of national problems that seemed insoluble: a choked infrastructure, dysfunctional public schools, the yawning maw between wealth and poverty, gang killings in drug-infested barrios, and the recurrent plague of national disasters—fires, droughts, mud slides, earthquakes—so severe they at times seemed biblical.

But like the city it served, the church under Cardinal Mahony was a study in resilience. When he gave his shocking 1998 testimony in Stockton, the archdiocese had 287 parish programs for 4 million Catholics. The previous eight years had seen parishes generate a $299 million surplus to fund renovation or new buildings.28 Each parish paid for its schools. The cardinal was immersed in the final stages of the new cathedral when the Boston scandal broke in January 2002.

MAHONY IN CRISIS

As the media coverage intensified, Jeff Anderson got a call from a southern California police officer named Manny Vega. A decorated marine veteran, Vega said that he and guys he had grown up with in his hometown, Oxnard, were abused as kids by Father Fidencio Silva. Oxnard lies about halfway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. On Easter Sunday in 2002, Anderson and Drivon made the 345-mile trek from Stockton to meet with the survivors’ group—eight Latinos, including a probation officer, a social worker, cops, and a lawyer. Anderson explained the statute of limitations hurdle; he wanted to help them seek redress. On the long drive home, Anderson fumed, “We need a window in the law.”

“Hell yes!” said Larry Drivon, who had political contacts. “Let’s go do it.”

Manny Vega’s family had come from Yucatán; his father was a bracero, a field-worker who had come legally to postwar California and eventually gained citizenship. Father Silva began abusing the boy sexually in sixth grade, and took nude photos of him. As Manny heard kids play outside, he felt dirty inside Our Lady of Guadalupe rectory. To keep the boy from telling anyone of his ordeal, Silva drummed into him the story of Judas, betrayer of Jesus. For years Manny Vega kept silent, shame growing like a tumor.29 Sorrow lanced his memories of praying with his parents as a boy. As a man he couldn’t take his own two kids to church, he couldn’t step inside a church. At the state capitol in Sacramento, Manny Vega, an Oxnard police officer of the year, sat down with State Senator Martha Escutia, the head of the powerful Latino caucus. She was appalled to learn what the priest had done, that Vega had no legal recourse. Escutia arranged for a group of survivors to give committee testimony. Drivon knew they needed more help to move a bill of this scope through the legislature; he introduced Anderson to Ray Boucher, one of the state’s leading trial attorneys. Boucher had good political contacts and superb experience as a class action litigator. Boucher’s law firm in Beverly Hills was in a two-story building with about forty employees. All three men knew that if the bill passed, their small firms faced a daunting commitment of time and money. The legislation sailed through, giving victims—regardless of when they had been abused—one year starting on January 1, 2003, to sue the responsible party.

In response to the bishops’ youth protection charter of June 2002, Mahony cast himself as a reformer. “If priests are indicted and some end up in prison or whatever, that’s going to be very sad for them, for the church,” Mahony asserted. “But if that is required to move beyond, that’s what we’re going to have go through.”30 The cardinal hired J. Michael Hennigan, one of L.A.’s priciest white-collar criminal defense attorneys, to blunt the criminal subpoenas seeking personnel files