Suffer Little Children

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Editorial / Periscope - Niall O'Dowd

Suffer Little Children

July 19, 2007

By NiallO’Dowd

THE $660 million settlement by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to the victims in the priest child abuse cases is an extraordinary admission of a criminal enterprise. One cannot imagine any other profession where such an awful admission would not result in the wholesale arrest of those who covered up the crimes, including the Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony.

That Mahony knew about the abusers among his priestly ranks is absolutely clear. In the case of the Irish priest, Father Oliver O’Grady, who raped a nine month-old-girl among other victims, he was shipped from parish to parish by Mahony despite full knowledge of what he was up to. His victims, young boys and girls, ran into the hundreds.

Imagine for one second that this was a school system, and a principal knew that a teacher was abusing children all over the school, yet persisted in sending him to other schools so he could abuse again.

The cries for firing the principal, as well as sending him to jail for a very long time, would be loud and persistent. Yet Mahony remains a prince of the church and a person who has great standing in the American hierarchy. Why?

The double standard reaches all the way up to the very highest levels. Pope Benedict XVI, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, was the cleric in charge of investigating the flood of pedophile investigations that began with the crisis in the American church and the machinations of Bernard Cardinal Law to cover up abuse in Boston.

Ratzinger’s philosophy was to deny, delay and obfuscate, and his minions did just that all over the world. In this respect, the videotaped testimony of Mahony, defending his criminally neglectful treatment of O’Grady, is an awful indictment of his humanity.

Here was a man who at the time saw himself ascending to the heights of the American church, and who was not going to let a pedophile scandal or the abuse of young children get in the way. He shipped O’Grady to whatever obscure parish he could, even promoting him at one point, to keep him quiet and out of sight.

When O’Grady, who now roams free in Ireland, was eventually caught and jailed he refused to name names as to who aided and abetted his behavior.

In return, he received a pension from the church, which essentially bought his silence with a jailhouse visit the night before he was due to testify.

Law, we must remember, was brought to Rome after being forced to resign and given a place of honor, including a new role by the Pope, who had him celebrate one of his first Masses after he was named pontiff.

Any wonder then that the church is in deep crisis all over the world with men like this at the helm? The sad part is that there are so many decent priests who do great work, who unfortunately find themselves tarred with the same brush.

If defies logic that Mahony is still a free man. The fact that he actually promoted O’Grady at one point, rather than confront him and have him defrocked and jailed as eventually had to be done, surely shows he was a willing accessory in the abuse of hundreds of innocent children.

The settlement by the Los Angeles Archdiocese last weekend is just one small acknowledgement of the harm done. Doubtless, there will be many other settlements in the years to come.

It comes too late for many of the their victims, but it surely shines a light on an institution that has behaved abominably towards its most vulnerable.

There is something rotten in the Catholic Church’s affairs that reaches all the way up to this Pope himself. The issue of enforced celibacy, which is nowhere endorsed in the Bible, has set a group of men at the center of Catholic society who are in many cases warped and deviant such as O’Grady. The idea of them continuing to have such power over people is truly frightening.

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