one hundred forty-fourth (tuesdays with big brother)

(Disclaimer: I'm not catholic.  In any way.  I have friends who are catholic.  Or, at least, I know some catholics who pretend to be my friends.  I try to take every opportunity I have to offend them in some small way.  This is not because I dislike catholics in general, but because I tend to offend most people at some point and wouldn't want them to feel left out.  To that end, I don't claim to have any expertise in catholic politics, catholic practices, or any sexual interest in young boys.)

Cardinal Mahony, the catholic cardinal currently installed at the Los Angeles archdiocese, is a fraud.  To be perfectly honest with you, I don't know much about the man.  However, the little that I do know is enough for me to feel confident in my impression of him as a slimeball.

When I first moved out here, to southern California, I heard his name mentioned in connection to some pedophile priest shuffling, but didn't know enough about the cases to really draw any conclusions.  I got my first direct media exposure to Mahony when the major illegal immigration movement kicked into gear early last year.  Mahony stepped up his media campaigning to come out and state his opposition to the Sensenbrenner bill that would punish agencies (and churches) who provided humanitarian aid to non-residents.  And Mahoney's stance on the issue, that the Catholic Church should not be in the business of enforcing immigration laws, was a viable one.  I actually agreed with the guy.  However, the manner in which he chose to frame the issue was obviously an attempt to pander to illegal alien Catholics:

"At this particular moment in our history, there seems to be these strident voices that are very much anti-immigrant," he said. (link)

The Cardinal came back to my mind a couple of months later when Deliver Us From Evil, a documentary about the sexual exploits of one Olive O' Grady, was released.  O'Grady is a defrocked priest who has a nasty record of molesting children.  He also happens to have been shuffled around by Mahony in the 80s:

"Court records show that in 1984, four years after Mahony became bishop of Stockton, O'Grady told his therapist he had fondled a 9-year-old boy. The therapist alerted child welfare officials, and police opened an investigation...

O'Grady testified that Mahony sent him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation, which the cardinal has acknowledged was the church's standard operating procedure at the time for handling pedophile priests. Almost immediately thereafter, O'Grady said, Mahony transferred him to a parish in San Andreas, about an hour outside Stockton. Mahony later promoted him to pastor...There was no school at his new assignment, but O'Grady testified that he supervised hundreds of students who came in on weekends and after school to study Catechism." (link)

"A Stockton jury in 1998 awarded one of O'Grady's victims $30 million, later reduced to $7 million. Jury members told The Times they thought Mahony was untruthful on the witness stand, that he had allowed O'Grady's pattern of abuse to continue...Mahony said he thought the jurors were wrong and that he took extraordinary steps to protect children." (link)

Sure sounds to me like Mahony had no idea what it was to 'protect children' in the first place.

"At least six months after Cardinal Roger M. Mahony told his superiors at the Vatican that a videotape provided proof of a priest's criminal misconduct with high school boys, the head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese told the public that the tape showed no sexual activity between Father Lynn Caffoe and the boys, according to court records." (link)

Up until this point, the possibility that Mahony has been lying to the public about his knowledge (and subsequent shuffling) of pedophile priests has been mostly conjecture on the part of his critics.  This, though, would be the first time that such a blatant contradiction in Mahony's public statements has come to light.

Secretly, I'm hoping that they roast the guy.  If anything, I think it's safe to say that he deserves to spend some time in jail for this.  And, while I'm not wishing it upon him directly, I can't say I'd be losing any sleep over the possibility of a prison guard looking the other way while Mahony got a healthy dose of what those molested children under his watch were forced to endure.