Immediately complying with a judge’s order, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has released the personnel files of 87 clergy accused of sexual abuse and has posted the files online.

Archbishop José Gomez, who has led the archdiocese since 2011, announced that he has relieved his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, of all administrative and public duties, and that Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry, at one time Cardinal Mahony’s vicar for clergy, has resigned from his duties as a regional auxiliary bishop.

Cardinal Mahony served as Archbishop of Los Angeles from 1985 until 2011. Until recently, Bishop Curry served as chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Catholic Education.

“I find these files to be brutal and painful reading,” Archbishop Gomez said in a statement. “The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed.”

“We need to acknowledge that terrible failure today,” Archbishop Gomez continued. “We need to pray for everyone who has ever been hurt by members of the Church. And we need to continue to support the long and painful process of healing their wounds and restoring the trust that was broken.”

• Source
• PDF of the letter

When I first saw this story last night I went through a series of reactions starting with “Finally and appropriate response.”

I already had little respect for the Cardinal and what was left was almost totally eliminated by the letter he wrote in reply to Archbishop Gomez.

“Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem.”

If only he had been trained to not cover up sexual abuse. His reply is exactly the type of thinking that led to the cover up of sexual abuse in that there is no responsibility and making decisions is hard. The problem is always because appropriate structures had not been setup. The problem and the horror of priestly sexual abuse is just something to deal with administratively, or at least this is what this attitude portrays..

What really outrages me about Cardinal Mahoney’s reply is that it displays zero sorrow for what he in fact did do. His attitude is that yeah I made mistakes and I apologized for them so just leave me alone about them now. There is really no public shame displayed in what he did and the fact is that even after this information started to come out it was business as usual for him.

Now as I said I was no fan of the Cardinal and it is easy to get caught up in what Archbishop Gomez has appropriately done. Still I find I have to look at my own reaction to this. I am experiencing too much schadenfreude and very little charity. It is quite easy to associate this story with the conservative/progressive divide when really it has nothing to do with it. Cardinal Law and Cardinal Mahoney fell on either side of this divide and yet acted roughly the same way. The types of attitudes that lead to covering up for priestly abuses transcend doctrinal orthodoxy for the most part.

One of the things that resonate about this story is the simple fact that there have been so few consequences for those who were involved in these cover ups. Once the facts of these cases came out the people involved usually going into bunker mode seeming to hope it will all pass by. Cardinal Law at least finally resigned. It reminds me of something Phil Lawler wrote on Bishop Finn wrote recently.

Having been found guilty in a court of law, and then having accepted the court’s verdict, Bishop Finn is now permanently handicapped as a teacher of the Catholic faith. The Los Angeles Times is not the first newspaper that has chosen to focus attention on his criminal conviction, nor will it be the last. Whenever he makes a public statement on a controversial issue, critics will be sure to remind us of the bishop’s troubles with the law, whether or not they are relevant to the issue at hand.

It may be unfair that Bishop Finn is now singled out as a convicted criminal, when so many other American bishops were guilty of the same offenses, and much worse, in the past. It may be unfair that the Los Angeles Times trains its editorial guns on the Bishop of Kansas City, when there is larger target at close range in Los Angeles. It may be unfair, but those are the facts. When an orthodox Catholic bishop makes a strong defense of the Catholic stand on contentious issues, the critics of Catholicism will fight back, and Bishop Finn is now vulnerable.

As much as I admire his stalwart leadership of the Kansas City diocese, I question whether Bishop Finn can act effectively as a teacher of the faith when his critics have such a handy means of impeaching his testimony. I question whether he can prosper as the leader of the Catholic community, in an increasingly hostile environment, while wearing a bulls-eye on his back.

Regardless of Bishop Finn’s past leadership I would agree with Mr. Lawler and it would be better for his diocese if he resigned.

Update:

Never mind, just more of the same. Archbishop José Gomez has issued the following clarification:

“Questions from the faithful and some members of the news media indicate that it would be helpful for me to clarify the status of Cardinal Roger Mahony and Bishop Thomas Curry.

“Cardinal Mahony, as Archbishop Emeritus, and Bishop Curry, as Auxiliary Bishop, remain bishops in good standing in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, with full rights to celebrate the Holy Sacraments of the Church and to minister to the faithful without restriction.”

Via Frank Weathers I saw that aleteia had been officially launched. Now you might justifiably ask “What the heck is aleteia?” It is an effort by the Foundation for Evangelization through the Media which was founded in 2010 to respond to Pope Benedict XVI urging members of the Catholic media to proclaim the Gospel on the “Digital Continent.”

This is suppose to be an open network and a evangelization effort. The front page is mostly a news portal made up of various sections and trending topics. It appears that the content linked to on the site is aggregated by people working with aleteia to find content from Catholic news sites and blogs. This in itself is rather a major effort and the fact that this is done in five different languages certainly increases the scope. There are also articles written specifically for this site.

If you do a search on the site you will get links to content they created along with sites they have specifically selected. Looking through various search results it looks like they have gathered together a solid set of sites that they will link to. A simple test of this showed that you can get results for the National Catholic Register, but not it’s evil twin The National Catholic Reporter. Father Z appears prominent in results and I wonder if they have weighted search results so that some of the more popular resources appear first? Apparently even my blog is on their whitelist of sites allowed in search results.

The design of the site is pleasant enough and uses a design ethic rather popular now. I like the color scheme, but I am biased since it is similar to my own. Like pretty much every site now there are social networking aspects. Commenting along with sharing information on multiple social network platforms.

Now is this site something that I would make a habit of going to? Well the answer is both yes and no. There are some flaws that I find annoying and hopefully will be fixed in the future.

For example the site has no RSS feed (at least none I could discover). I find this a major flaw as my daily travels on the web are almost totally via an app that uses my Google Reader account. I hardly ever bookmark a site since I usually don’t have to. RSS is a perfect way to keep up on news and is really mandatory for a site like aleteia. Oddly you can get an RSS feed for a comment thread on an article.

Now if I decided to visit and wanted to enter their name into the browser aleteia does not exactly roll off the tongue or the fingers for that matter. I know it is hard to find short meaningful domain names, but this is just clumsy. The fact that they don’t own the .com version of the name is doubly so.

For a site like this the thing I would be most interested in is their own content with the aggregation of Catholic sites being a secondary interest. Unfortunately they don’t make it easy to see what is their latest content. The “Most Read” section is prominent and does link to their content, but it should be easier to see fresh content. Currently the way to do this is to go to the bottom of the page and select “All Articles.”

As an evangelization effort I don’t see how this site would be appealing to people other than Catholics already interested in their faith. Matthew Warner previously had a critique when they were still in beta and some of his critique still stands. Especially this:

… my biggest concern is that the scope of this is too big. To sum it up, it’s target audience seems like it’s everyone. Which, from a marketing standpoint, means it’s for nobody in particular. Which is a difficult way to market, especially when you’re just trying to get a new, social site off the ground. Social sites are about the critical mass of the community. You go after a particular group of people and build a small community. Then expand your scope from there. Most every modern-day successful “social network” started with a relatively small, targeted niche in order to reach a critical mass before expanding. Facebook started with Harvard. Foursquare started with New York City, etc. And it’s not just big social media platforms, it’s anything that is community driven. Even your average blog is best started this way.

Then there are minor quibbles. For example the search field when the browser is at a width most people will see it says “Search within the Catholic” where “world” is cut off. Click on the search box and at times it now says the same thing in Spanish.

Hopefully they will fix some of these problems, but the problem with scope remains. I would certainly like to use it as a resource and hope it both improves and succeeds.