Clergy Abuse

Citing an alleged misrepresentation by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, a judge ruled Wednesday that four people can seek punitive damages against the Los Angeles Archdiocese for failing to protect them from a priest they accused of sexual abuse. The ruling, the first of its kind in the Los Angeles clergy sexual abuse scandal, could increase pressure on the archdiocese to reach a settlement with its accusers.

A judge Wednesday ordered Cardinal Roger M. Mahony to testify in a lawsuit alleging that he failed to protect parishioners from a pedophile teacher, but then granted the Los Angeles cleric's request for a trial delay. The lawsuit had been scheduled for trial Monday; Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Haley Fromholtz agreed to a two-month delay. Mary Grant, Western regional director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, called the delay "a shame on the church."

After more than four years of negotiation, pressure is mounting fast to settle some 500 claims that the Los Angeles Archdiocese failed to protect children from clergy abuse, before the first trial begins this month. "We know it's soon. We know it's inevitable. The day of reckoning is drawing near," said Jeffrey Anderson, a Minnesota lawyer who represents hundreds of alleged victims of clergy abuse in California and elsewhere.

Parishioners across the sprawling Los Angeles Archdiocese responded with relief, support and a measure of worry Sunday to news that the church will pay $660 million to victims of clergy sexual abuse, the largest payout to date in the nationwide Roman Catholic molestation crisis. But some also angrily blamed Cardinal Roger M. Mahony for failing to reach a settlement in the local cases years earlier.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese plans to pay its share of a record clergy sexual abuse settlement by liquidating investments, taking out bank loans and selling up to 50 non-parish properties, including its administrative headquarters, according to diocesan representatives. Many details of the complex financial arrangements were still being worked out, officials said, with the $660-million settlement having been formalized just Monday in a Los Angeles courtroom.

WHEN Times editors assigned me to the religion beat, I believed God had answered my prayers. As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a freak show. I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief shapes people's lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would grow deeper and sturdier. But during the eight years I covered religion, something very different happened.

A prosecutor said Wednesday that he planned to seek testimony from several officials in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles on how they handled sexual abuse allegations against a former priest charged this week with molesting a Pacoima boy. The former priest, George Miller, 69, appeared briefly in court Wednesday, but his arraignment was postponed so that he could get a lawyer.

Mexico's most prominent cardinal was deposed Wednesday in a U.S. lawsuit accusing him of complicity in the alleged rape of a child by a Mexican priest. Cardinal Norberto Rivera and his lawyers rushed past reporters and photographers waiting outside archdiocese offices in Mexico City without speaking. Later, archdiocese spokesman Rev. Hugo Valdemar Romero said Rivera gave his statement voluntarily.

An Anaheim pastor accused of molesting three congregants was charged Tuesday with sexually assaulting two additional victims at his home and his church office, prosecutors said. Raul Rosas Hernandez, 42, faces multiple felony counts in the latest case, including lewd acts on a child under 14, lewd acts on a child, unlawful sexual intercourse and distributing pornography to a minor.

SAN DIEGO -- A U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge ruled Friday that 42 lawsuits filed by people alleging sexual abuse by Catholic priests here can go to trial, which could goad the Catholic Diocese of San Diego into settling those and other suits. Andrea Leavitt, lawyer for a group of claimants, called the ruling by Judge Louise De Carl Adler a victory for victims of sexual abuse, many of whom have spent years seeking damage payments from the diocese. "The victims are very encouraged," Leavitt said.