ANAHEIM, Calif. — For decades, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony was the convener and the star of the nation’s largest annual gathering of Roman Catholics, which opened here on Thursday. This year, though, Cardinal Mahony was nowhere to be seen at the gathering, the Religious Education Congress. His workshop on immigration was canceled. The cardinal was relieved of his public duties last month by his successor after the release of 12,000 pages of internal church files revealing how Cardinal Mahony protected priests accused of s*xually abusing minors.
In a rare breach of the deference American bishops usually grant one another, the current archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gomez, said he found the documents “brutal and painful” reading. Cardinal Mahony soon shot back, posting a bitter open letter to Archbishop Gomez on his blog. With Cardinal Mahony set to fly to Rome next week to elect a new pope, the prelates’ duel in the country’s largest archdiocese has set off shock waves in the church. Catholics in Los Angeles are re-evaluating the cardinal’s legacy, and newspapers in Italy are running articles asking whether the disgraced cardinal should attend the papal conclave.
Cardinal Mahony’s shadow looms large. Attendees at the congress, largely educators who teach teenagers and adults across the country, said they have been stung by recent events and are grappling with ways to make sense of what happened and how to move forward.
...Even here, among people who were once some of the cardinal’s staunchest supporters, there is a quiet debate over whether he should vote in the conclave. While those here stopped short of saying publicly that Cardinal Mahony should not participate in the conclave, there is a palpable sense of anger, betrayal and confusion over his role in protecting priests accused of s*xual abuse. ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/catho...
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Saturday, February 23rd 2013 at 12:45PM
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