Archdiocese

The release of thousands of pages of church files showing how Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other top Los Angeles Archdiocese officials dealt with priest molestation cases has generated outrage and anguish at parishes across Southern California. But for victims of abuse, there is also the pain of learning details of how top church leaders tried to cover up the scandal. Matt Severson says that as a boy, he was abused by Father Michael Baker. Severson was a plaintiff in the record civil settlement over church abuse a few years ago. The release of the files has him reliving what happened decades ago. "It's deeply disheartening to read these files.

A former priest and suspected child molester left employment with the Los Angeles archdiocese to work for the L.A. Unified School District, officials confirmed Sunday. The former clergyman, Joseph Pina, did not work with children in his school district job, L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy said. He added that, as a result of the disclosures, Pina would no longer be employed by the nation's second-largest school system. Over the weekend, Deasy was unable to pull together Pina's full employment history, but said the district already was looking into the matter of Pina's hiring.

Responding to a public rebuke by his successor, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony insisted that he tried his best to deal with the priest molestation scandal but fell short because not enough was known about the problem early in his career. In an extraordinary open letter to Archbishop Jose Gomez, Mahony insisted Friday that he ultimately instituted state-of-the-art protections against child sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He seemed to suggest that Gomez had acted unfairly by publicly announcing that he was stripping the cardinal of any public role in the local church.

The archdiocese of Los Angeles learned in the late 1970s that one of its priests had sexually assaulted a 16-year-old boy so violently that he was left bleeding and "in a state of shock. " The priest said he was too drunk to remember what happened and officials took no further action. But two decades later, word reached Cardinal Roger M. Mahony that the same priest was molesting again and improperly performing the sacrament of confession on his victim. The archdiocese sprang to action: It dispatched investigators, interviewed a raft of witnesses and discussed the harshest of all church penalties - not for the abuse but for the violation of church law. "Given the seriousness of this abuse of the sacrament of penance … it is your responsibility to formally declare the existence of the excommunication and then refer the matter to Rome," one cleric told Mahony in a memo.

Earlier this month, a state judge ordered the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to include the names of church leaders who mishandled sex-abuse claims when it finally releases scores of confidential priest files as part of a 2007 settlement. Yet despite that court order, the archdiocese has continued to act as if the rules don't apply to it. This week, the church resubmitted a proposal that would have redacted the names of top church leaders from the documents and only provided the names of those officials in a generic cover sheet attached to the priest's file.

Here is the letter Archbishop Jose H. Gomez sent to the church community Thursday afternoon: My brothers and sisters in Christ, This week we are releasing the files of priests who sexually abused children while they were serving in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. These files document abuses that happened decades ago. But that does not make them less serious. I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil.

The long-awaited release of 30,000 pages of internal church records was thrown into turmoil when attorneys for the Los Angeles archdiocese proposed, and then disavowed, a plan to turn over the documents with the names of Cardinal Roger Mahony and other church leaders handling cases of child abuse blacked out. The church had agreed to make public the personnel files of 89 priests accused of sexually abusing children as part of a 2007 court settlement....

In January 2002, the Boston Globe published the first in a series of articles that exposed the sordid history of sexual abuse of youth in the Boston Roman Catholic archdiocese. Those stories revealed how church officials had kept knowledge of abuse from parishioners and kept abusing priests in parishes where they continued to blight the lives and faith of the innocent. Later in 2002, as more cases of sexual abuse in more dioceses tumbled out of the dark and the silence to which they had been consigned, the U.S. Conference of Bishops hurriedly promised transparency.

For years, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles fought to keep secret its confidential files concerning pedophile priests. Hundreds of sex abuse victims hoping for a full accounting of what church leaders knew about the growing scandal and what they did to stop it were rebuffed time and again. But the cover-up is finally coming to an end. On Monday, a series of memos and letters filed in a civil case confirmed that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other church leaders plotted to shield pedophile priests rather than turn them over to police and prosecutors.