The Archdiocese of Los Angeles published summaries yesterday of its confidential files on 126 clergymen accused of sexually abusing children, chronicling its failure for decades to act on complaints from parents, notify police or warn parishioners in the nation's largest Roman Catholic diocese.
"What we have here is a church that is embarrassed, that is contrite, that is ashamed of what happened in the past and is committed to reforming it to the extent that it is humanly possible to do so," said J. Michael Hennigan, lead attorney for the archdiocese.
The summaries read like matter-of-fact résumés, numbing lists of parishes served and promotions received.
But they are interspersed with brief, but chilling, notations. In 1977, a mother wrote to say that Father George Miller molested her son on a fishing trip. In 1986, Father Michael S. Baker took Cardinal Roger Mahony aside at a retreat and admitted to a "relationship" with two boys. In 2002, two women said Father Gerald Plesetz was the father of their children.
The archdiocese published the summaries on its Web site, http://www.la-archdiocese.org/ , at midnight Tuesday. They were compiled in connection with settlement negotiations over more than 560 sex abuse lawsuits, which could cost the archdiocese more than $500 million, according to lawyers on both sides.
The summaries do not contain anything close to the level of graphic detail that Catholic dioceses in Boston; Philadelphia; Manchester, N.H.; and several other cities have been forced to provide as a result of grand jury investigations into sex abuse.
Church officials and advocates for abuse victims gave widely divergent interpretations of the archdiocese's reasons for releasing the documents, and of the documents themselves.
Hennigan, representing Mahony, told reporters in a conference call that the archdiocese had been fighting for months for permission from the courts to release the records, despite objections from lawyers for some of the accused priests. The California Court of Appeal finally granted approval Sept. 22, he said.
"Cardinal Mahony has wanted to be as transparent -- his word -- as possible about what happened, when it happened, what we knew, when we knew it and what we did about it," Hennigan said.
The lesson to be learned from the documents, Hennigan said, is that church leaders from the 1950s to the present were "not terribly far behind, nor ahead" of society as a whole in understanding pedophilia.
"What you see in these files is a group of people dealing with the problem as best as they could, but that they did not understand well enough, and gradually understanding how to deal with it and ultimately coming to terms with it, we think, very effectively," he said. "Unfortunately, there are many, many victims of the process and its slowness. We regret that."
Hennigan contended that until recently, the parents of children who were molested "typically did not want" the church to report incidents to the police, for fear that the children's names would become known and they would "go through life with that tattoo."
