Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [170]
In response to the budding criminal probe, Mahony formed a Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board with thirteen members, mostly laypeople, and three former FBI agents on call to investigate any charges that might arise. He instituted a Safeguard the Children Program for eighteen thousand church and school employees. But if his reforms and rhetoric suggested an outstretched healing hand to people hungry for justice, his other fist gripped a shield. Mahony and his lawyers knew that the decision of one judge in Boston had released clergy files to the Globe, and that as a result Cardinal Law’s reputation lay in wreckage.
Sizing up the media dynamics, Roger Mahony launched the most expensive legal battle in American church history to thwart subpoenas for files of accused priests. He would not sit still as prosecutor Bill Hodgman’s staff investigated his own complicity in shielding crimes. The assertion that clergy files were privileged under freedom of religion, which the Boston court rejected, became the ramrod issue in Los Angeles, stalling the criminal and civil cases in a legal saga that would run for many years.
A Los Angeles Times investigation in late summer 2002 mapped out a chronology of priests who had been reassigned after going to treatment facilities, while the church evaded or ignored police—a pattern of hierarchical behavior well documented in Louisiana, Minnesota, Illinois, New England, New York, Texas, and elsewhere. The priests’ photographs resembled mug shots. “I’m just horrified by this whole thing,” Mahony said. “You get the cross that comes your way, and this obviously for me is a very heavy cross.”
The Times identified 32 parish priests and one deacon who, since Mahony’s arrival in 1985, have been accused of molesting minors. Seven of the clerics were dismissed by the cardinal in February, six fled, three have been convicted of sex crimes and 17 are under criminal investigation by law enforcement. The Times examination also included more than 100 interviews with church officials, law enforcement authorities, alleged victims and their attorneys.32
The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels opened on September 2, 2002, to a choir singing “Ode to Joy” as Nigerian and Scottish drummers, a family carrying the relics of saints, a train of bishops wearing robes of watered silk, then priests, deacons, nuns—some seven hundred religious figures—moved in stately procession past the three-story bronze doors into a space of soaring beauty. “The fulcrum where the secular and sacred are joined for the glory of God and the good of the city,” wrote Larry B. Stammer in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Mahony called it “a symbol evocative of the deepest aspiration and hopes of the whole polis, the whole people of Los Angeles, the earthly city yearning for consummation, the completion yet to come in the new Jerusalem.”33
The legal front focused on a subterranean city, as suggested in the 1998 Stockton trial. Jeff Anderson and the gathering army of lawyers knew that clergy records would excavate another California, a Catholic terrain of memory, laden with a hidden history of sexual crimes perpetrated on hundreds of youngsters like Manny Vega. Ray Boucher, who had been an altar boy in New England, became the lead plaintiff attorney to negotiate with the archdiocesan counsel, Mike Hennigan, in Los Angeles. The culmination of the 2003 Boston cases—$85 million for 542 clients—averaged out at $156,000 per plaintiff. California dioceses were well financed, with solid real estate holdings and insurers’ deep pockets. As the lawyers signed up clients, the cathedral stood for the presence of Christ in time, a structure of breathtaking beauty