(Adds material from files)
By Dan Whitcomb and Alex Dobuzinskis
LOS ANGELES, Jan 31 (Reuters) - The Catholic Archdiocese of
Los Angeles, after years of legal battles, released files on
Thursday of priests accused of molesting children and removed a
top clergyman who had been linked to efforts to conceal the
abuse.
Archbishop Jose Gomez said he had stripped his predecessor,
retired Cardinal Roger Mahony, of all public and administrative
duties. Mahony's former top aide, Thomas Curry, stepped down as
bishop of Santa Barbara.
"I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The
behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil,"
Gomez said in a statement released by the nation's largest
Catholic archdiocese.
"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," he said.
A spokesman for a victims' support group said that the
removal of Mahony and Curry was long overdue and a small step
after the church spent years fighting to protect them.
"Hand-slapping Mahony is a nearly meaningless gesture," said
David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of Those
Abused by Priests, or SNAP.
"When he had real power, and abused it horribly, he should
have been demoted or disciplined by the church hierarchy, in
Rome and in the U.S. But not a single Catholic cleric anywhere
had the courage to even denounce him. Shame on them," he said.
The 12,000 pages of files were made public more than a week
after church records relating to 14 priests were unsealed as
part of a separate civil suit, showing that church officials
plotted to conceal the molestation from law enforcement as late
as 1987.
Those documents showed that Mahony, 76, and Curry, 70, his
top adviser, both worked to send priests accused of abuse out of
state to shield known molesters in the clergy from law
enforcement scrutiny in the 1980s.
SENT AWAY
Mahony and Curry also tried to keep priests sent away to a
Church-run pedophile treatment center from later revealing their
misconduct to private therapists who would be obligated to
report the crimes to police, the documents showed.
Among the documents released on Thursday was the personnel
file of Father Jose Ugarte, which contains a 1993 letter to an
archdiocese official from a man whose name was redacted and who
wrote that Ugarte began sexually abusing him in 1983 when he was
17.
A document in the file says that in 1994, then-Archbishop
Mahony and Ugarte reached an agreement requiring the Spanish
priest to "leave the United States and take up permanent
residence in Spain" and not to return without the express
consent of the archbishop of Los Angeles for seven years. The
final outcome in that case was not immediately clear.
Patrick Wall, 47, a former priest who is a consultant for
plaintiffs and prosecutors in Catholic sex abuse cases, said the
documents suggested that Mahony had been trying to avoid a
public legal case against the priest.
"The important thing is those kinds of documents have never
been produced before," Wall said.
Los Angeles prosecutors have said they will review and
evaluate the documents, this batch of which includes 124
personnel files, 82 of which have information on allegations of
sexual abuse, according to the archdiocese.
The Los Angeles archdiocese, which serves 4 million
Catholics, reached a $660 million civil settlement in 2007 with
more than 500 victims of child molestation in the biggest such
agreement of its kind in the nation, and Mahony at the time
called the abuse "a terrible sin and crime."
Victims' advocates have accused Church leaders of continuing
to obfuscate their role in the scandal, and cite the newly
released confidential letters and memos as a "smoking gun"
proving complicity by Mahony and others.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb and Alex Dobuzinskis; Writing by Dan
Whitcomb; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Lisa Shumaker)
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