Clergy sex abuse scandals have rocked Catholic churches around the world, but few places have looked at the financial toll of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
With a record $880 million settlement with victims announced this week, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has now paid more than $1.5 billion.
The bill reflects its rank as the nation’s largest archdiocese, with more than 4 million members, and California law that gives plaintiffs more time to file their lawsuits.
But lawyers and others who have been involved in more than two decades of litigation say it is also indicative of church leaders’ failure to identify abusive priests and prevent them from committing other crimes.
Some of these priests, after undergoing treatment in residential centers, are shuffled to new parishes, often in immigrant neighborhoods where the abuse will continue.
With the latest settlement, the number of people alleging abuse is now nearly 2,500.
But the true number could be much higher, lawyers say.
One of the reasons for LA’s payment size is that the California Legislature in 2019 voted to give adults more time to file lawsuits about childhood sexual abuse, which has led to more survivors coming forward. This increases the amount of time available for the courts compared to other countries, which have also been plagued by abuse scandals.
“The LA archdiocese is not an anomaly,” said attorney Mike Reck. “It’s bigger and subject to more litigation and we’ve discovered more about how it operates. I’m not sure the archdiocese is any worse than other places. I think we just don’t know as much about other dioceses.
The abuses – and attempts to cover them up – date back decades.
It reaches the highest level of the church. Msgr. Benjamin Hawkes, the second in command of the two cardinals and the famous leader who was the inspiration for the character of Robert De Niro in the movie “True Confessions”, was accused after his death of abuse.
Troves of church documents that are a road map to cover the extreme scrutiny of Cardinal Roger Mahony, who has been roundly criticized for his handling of clerical abuse.
Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles for more than two decades, was a young and prominent leader who used his position at the top of the diocese in the 1980s and 1990s to champion social and economic justice, among causes large and small. But his legacy was thrown out after it was revealed that he oversaw the reassignment of many priests who confessed to or were accused of abusing minors.
With their behavior unchecked, the number of victims in the largest archdiocese in the United States is increasing.
“The real blame lies at the feet of Roger Mahony,” said lawyer John Manly, who has been a victim of sexual harassment for decades. “He could have come in 1986 and made changes. However, he chose to hide from the public, the media and, more importantly, law enforcement.
A culture of secrecy and the practice of swapping accused priests between parishes instead of alerting law enforcement — features of scandals playing out in dioceses across the country — are also persistent problems in Los Angeles. Delayed enforcement of priests accused of allowing them to move between locations and abuse other children, victims’ advocates say.
The list of abusers in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles includes more than 500 names, according to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
“There is a constant, uninterrupted flow of hundreds of perpetrators in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” said Patrick Wall, a sexual abuse survivor attorney and former Benedictine monk.
Mahony could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mahony wrote in a letter in 2013 that he had made “mistakes” when dealing with sexual abuse, but added that he followed the procedure followed in dioceses across the country: removing priests from active ministry if there is reasonable suspicion that abuse has taken place. occur and refer to a home care center.
He did not know at the time, he wrote, that “following these procedures was ineffective, and the perpetrators could not be treated in such a way as to enable them to safely exercise their priestly ministry.”
“Nothing in my background or education equipped me to deal with this serious issue,” he wrote.
Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez in 2013 relieved Mahony of all public duties over his mishandling of a sex abuse scandal, a move unprecedented in the American Catholic Church.
Mahony, now in his late 80s, lived for several years on the parish’s campus in the San Fernando Valley. After he retires, he vows to devote more time to immigration reform, a lifelong passion for him that stems from his experiences with migrant workers in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley during his years in the dioceses of Fresno and Stockton.
The church’s own records, protected by an army of lawyers for decades, reveal an organized conspiracy to prevent authorities from learning about criminal activity.
In memos written in 1986 and 1987, Msgr. Thomas Curry, then the archdiocese’s counsel on sex abuse cases, proposed a way to prevent police from investigating priests who confess to church officials that they abused children. Curry proposed to Mahony that the diocese prevent priests from seeing therapy that could alert authorities and task priests out of state to avoid criminal investigation.
Msgr. Peter Garcia admitted church officials for preying on undocumented children in the parish mainly Spanish-speaking. After he was discharged from the treatment center, Mahony told him to stay away from California to avoid legal consequences, according to internal church files.
“I believe that if Monsignor Garcia will reappear in the Archdiocese, we may have some type of legal action filed in the criminal and civil sectors,” the Archbishop wrote to the director of the treatment center in July 1986.
Garcia left the priesthood in 1989 and was never charged. He died in 2009.
Another priest, Father Michael Baker – one of the most prolific abusers of the church – has been accused of molesting at least 40 boys during his decade in the priesthood. In 2007, Baker pleaded guilty in a criminal court to abuse two boys. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was released in 2011 based on time he served in the county jail and good behavior.
Two brothers alleged that Baker began abusing people in the Catholic Church of St. Hilary in Pico Rivera in 1984 when they were 5 and 7, according to court records. The boy’s family moved to Mexico in 1986, but Baker, over the next 13 years, flew to Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Arizona, where the abuse continued until 1999, at least once at a priest’s rectory in Los Angeles County, court records show. .
Records show Mahony knew about Baker’s sexual abuse of boys decades before it became public.
In 1986, Baker first broached the subject in a memo to a cardinal after Mahony asked priests to report inappropriate behavior, according to internal church records.
“During the priest’s retreat … you gave us an invitation to talk to you about the reflections that some of us may have,” Baker wrote. “I’m going to take you up on the invitation.”
At a spiritual retreat in December 1986, Baker made a full confession and was moved to a treatment facility in New Mexico. Police were not notified, and no attempt was made to contact the children who had been abused, according to church records.
Baker returned to ministry in the Los Angeles Archdiocese in 1987, church records show. At that time, Mahony informed Baker that he was not allowed to leave alone with the child, but records show that Baker violated this directive on at least three occasions, all of which were observed by archdiocesan personnel.
Baker remained in ministry until 2000, when he was removed, church records show. In 2002, as the clergy abuse scandal came to light, The Times revealed that the Archdiocese had paid $1.3 million to two of Baker’s victims two years earlier.
