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Rubino was allied with Kathy Freberg, Manly’s former law partner, on 156 cases and 37 perpetrators. “We said this is it, we know our future’s on the line, let’s do it,” Rubino remembered. “The only way to get a job done is to deal from a position of strength. The defense had an advantage in sheer manpower. We had to borrow $2 million each, and when I say we were in, I mean, we were deep in, like with houses, pets, trailers. A lot of lawyers are not willing to take those risks. I don’t begrudge them. The only thing the bishops respect is when you keep hitting them, all the time. You have to just stay in their faces.”

Manny Vega spent Holy Week of 2003 on a hunger strike outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels with a sleeping bag and picket sign that said “You Can’t Hide the Truth from God.” A lady entering church hissed, “You’re a shame and an embarrassment.” Father Silva had fled to Mexico. (When a TV reporter found him, Silva denied abusing any of the eight men.) Refusing to shave, shower, or eat, Vega occupied his slice of sidewalk. On Good Friday, he was asleep on the concrete when Mahony appeared. Light-headed from lack of food, Vega stood up and stumbled. The cardinal gave him a steadying hand. “You need to take some nutrients,” said Mahony helpfully.

“Would you have said that to César Chávez?” Vega shot back.

Mahony winced at the reference to the farm workers’ legendary hunger strikes, and withdrew.

Later, the cardinal came back, several times, to talk with Vega and a clutch of survivor-protesters. He apologized (though Silva’s abuses predated his time as archbishop); he gave them access to the cathedral restrooms. He offered rosary beads blessed by the pope, which Vega accepted, and later regretted, saying it made him feel bought off. Vega asked to meet one-on-one. Mahony said he could not, regretfully, for legal reasons.

In June 2003 the roof caved in on District Attorney Steve Cooley and the lead prosecutor, Bill Hodgman. The U.S. Supreme Court in Stogner v. California, on a 5–4 vote, reversed a California law that enabled prosecutors, in certain circumstances, to pursue people for sex crimes committed far back in time. “Stogner killed us,” said Hodgman. Among those set free, Michael Wempe had gone through the seminary with Mahony. Wempe’s indictment on forty-three counts of child molestation was thrown out. His backstory is instructive.

In May 1987 Wempe was accused of having sex with a youth. Mahony sent him to a clergy treatment center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, for six months. In 1988 he appointed Wempe a chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, confiding not a word on his background to hospital officials. Later that year, two young men complained to the archdiocese that Wempe had abused them as boys. He stayed on his job, undergoing therapy. From 1990 to 1995, he molested a boy in his hospital office. In 2002 Wempe was finally fired after his older transgressions made the news. Less than a year after Stogner, Wempe was charged in a new case. Without releasing Wempe’s treatment files, Mahony blamed the Paracletes’ facility in New Mexico, which was driven out of business by litigation in the midnineties.

Mahony gave me a telephone interview on February 12, 2005, for a National Catholic Reporter profile. Hundreds of civil cases were grinding slowly forward. The cardinal insisted that the Paracletes’ “prognosis” was that if Wempe “continued his spiritual direction and counseling he was getting, that he would not reoffend. And they recommended that he serve in a limited capacity such as a chaplain to a hospital or a prison facility. At the time, I believed their prognosis to be accurate … It wasn’t until after he was taken out of ministry that someone made a report that has been subject to criminal prosecution.”38

Here was John Paul’s rationalization from the 2002 cardinals’ meeting, cemented into an alibi: the therapists are at fault, they gave us bad advice. What happened to moral standards for a religious life? Why were pedophiles recycled