Catholic Church in LA comes clean on Abuse

NY TIMES:
Personnel files - some of which date from the 1930's - were produced as part of settlement talks with lawyers for 560 accusers in a civil suit in LA. The archdiocese has released them to the NY TIMES to make good on a promise to parishioners to come clean about the church's actions in the scandal, church officials said.

The confidential personnel files of 126 clergymen in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles accused of sexual misconduct with children provide a numbing chronicle of 75 years of the church's shame, revealing case after case in which the church was warned of abuse but failed to protect its parishioners.

The Los Angeles cases are in many ways typical of the sexual abuse claims that have stained the church around the country in recent years. The behavior of priests in Southern California was no worse than that seen elsewhere, and the response of senior church officials was generally no better.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles is the nation's largest Roman Catholic diocese, covering 8,700 square miles and serving nearly five million Catholics. The size of the priestly abuse problem here rivals that in Boston, where more than 500 members of the clergy were accused of abusing children over the past 60 years and where the church paid $85 million in 2003 to settle civil claims against it.

Since then, the stakes have risen. Late last year, the Diocese of Orange County in California paid $100 million to settle 85 cases.

Let's hope that the Catholic church in all states "cleans up" it's act and no longer covers up priestly abuses of young boys. If not it may be time to get some "millstones" out to hang them around the necks of those priests who committed such egregious crimes against children and also a few more for those in the heirarchy who covered them up.