Mahony, in legal battle, insists church has right to secrecy

Since June 2002, when the scandal-plagued Catholic bishops met in Dallas to adopt a youth protection charter, Cardinal Roger Mahony has cast himself as a reformer, an image that is jarring to many people immersed in the legal saga here in which the archdiocese has waged a fierce battle to keep sensitive documents secret.

“If priests are indicted and some end up in prison or whatever, that’s going to be very sad for them, for the church,” Mahony told the Los Angeles Times in the weeks following that 2002 meeting. “But if that is required to move beyond, that’s what we’re going to have to go through.”

These men are criminals who happen to be priests. They are not part of a privileged class beyond the arm of the law. It's sad for everyone, most especially, the victims.

Two and a half years later, amid the slow grind of court proceedings, Mahony spoke of his own “terrible journey” in a Feb. 12 telephone interview with NCR. “It’s easy to look back through lenses of today to 15, 20, 30 years ago. You just wish you had known then what I know now” about the way sexual offenders behave.

Sheer stupidity! Everyone with half a brain has known for centuries that these perverted individuals must be confined...Then again, the real issue is being averted - the issue of homosexuality.

Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, a canon lawyer working at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office that processes cases of priests to be defrocked, told an Italian journal in 2002: “If a priest cannot confide in his bishop because he is afraid of being denounced, it would mean there is no more freedom of conscience.”

Bertone, who has since become the cardinal archbishop of Genoa, Italy, insisted: “Civil society must also respect the ‘professional secrecy’ of priests.”

Professional secrecy is the heart of Woods’ motion to quash the district attorney’s subpoenas of clergy files and plays a key role in the thinking of the Vatican.

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