Film on Pedophile Priest Revives Focus on Cardinal
Pastor Dale Morgan
October 8, 2006
*Film on Pedophile Priest Revives Focus on Cardinal*
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 8 — A documentary film featuring an extraordinarily
candid interview with a former priest convicted of molesting children
has heightened interest among law enforcement officials here in
considering a criminal case against Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, says a
prosecutor who has been investigating sexual abuse cases involving priests.
In the documentary, “Deliver Us From Evil,” the former priest, Oliver
O’Grady, describes how he abused young boys and girls across central
California over 20 years, including a period in the 1980’s when Cardinal
Mahony was his superior as the bishop in Stockton.
The former priest, who lives in Ireland, said he was able to continue
abusing children in part because of actions by Cardinal Mahony, who now
heads the country’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, here in Los
Angeles, and is among the church’s most influential American leaders.
Mr. O’Grady says in the film that as bishop in Stockton, the cardinal
moved him from parish to parish in the face of abuse accusations.
“The film does certainly charge the atmosphere here in Los Angeles,”
said William Hodgman, the top deputy of the target crimes division of
the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, who coordinated prosecutions
of priests in Los Angeles.
The film also “will fuel ongoing consideration as to whether Cardinal
Mahony and others engaged in criminal activity,” Mr. Hodgman added.
Joe Scott, a spokesman for the district attorney, Steve Cooley,
confirmed that characterization.
The lawyer for the Los Angeles archdiocese, Michael Hennigan, said
Friday, “If Mr. Hodgman is suggesting in any way that the cardinal is
the subject of a criminal investigation, he is being irresponsible and
in our judgment is committing prosecutorial misconduct.”
Mr. O’Grady, who confessed to abusing boys and girls as young as 9
months old and also adult women, said in the documentary that “I should
have been removed” from the priesthood by Cardinal Mahony. In 1993, he
was convicted on four counts of “lewd and lascivious” acts with two
preteen brothers and served seven years in prison.
Cardinal Mahony, who was the bishop in Stockton from 1980 to 1985, when
he was appointed archbishop of Los Angeles, has disputed Mr. O’Grady’s
account of events. His spokesman, Tod Tamberg, said Mr. O’Grady’s
comments in the documentary were not believable.
“The film rests on the credibility of a convicted child molester who
lied to his bishop, to his therapists, to the families of the young
people he abused and to law enforcement,” Mr. Tamberg said. “He is the
classic pedophile. He lies to conceal his activity from public view.”
But Mr. Hodgman said officials in the district attorney’s office
believed that Mr. O’Grady’s revelations in the documentary, along with
documents obtained from the archdiocese through subpoena, had given new
evidentiary muscle in determining whether criminal acts were committed
in handling pedophilic priests.
Mr. Hodgman, who appears in the documentary, declined to comment about
the content of the documents, which he said his office had spent several
years trying to obtain.
In a telephone interview on Thursday from Ireland, Mr. O’Grady
maintained that he informed Cardinal Mahony of his “situation” while
working as a priest in Stockton. “I told him I would go to counseling
and he said fine,” Mr. O’Grady said. “We thought I had resolved it.”
The film was written and directed by Amy Berg, a former television
producer. It features a taped deposition from 1997 stemming from a civil
trial in Stockton in which the brothers in the criminal case against Mr.
O’Grady brought suit against the local diocese, alleging that its
bishops — including Cardinal Mahony — failed to prevent Mr. O’Grady from
having contact with children in the face of evidence of his history of
abuse.
In that deposition, Cardinal Mahony denied having known that Mr. O’Grady
was a pedophile. The brothers’ lawyers presented a police report about
Mr. O’Grady’s being accused of molestation along with a 1976 letter to
one victim, an 11-year-old girl, in which Mr. O’Grady admitted molesting
her.
In a 2004 deposition related to civil trials in Los Angeles, Cardinal
Mahony stated that expressing sexual urges toward a 9-year-old would not
be automatic cause for removing a priest from duty. He also said he
barely knew Mr. O’Grady, though lawyers in the cases presented warm
letters exchanged between the two.
In the Stockton civil case, a jury awarded $30 million in damages to the
brothers in 1998, an award reduced to $7 million in negotiations.
According to news media accounts at the time, jurors said they did not
find Cardinal Mahony’s testimony, that he was unaware of Mr. O’Grady’s
proclivities, credible.
“I was in Stockton for that trial,” said David Clohessy, the national
director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “The jurors
were crystal clear that they didn’t buy what he was saying.”
The Los Angeles district attorney’s office is currently prosecuting or
investigating several criminal cases of sexual abuse by priests in Los
Angeles County, where there are also more than 500 civil suits, some
naming Cardinal Mahony.
In September, a man from Mexico City filed suit against the Diocese of
Tehuacán, Mexico, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Cardinal Mahony and
his counterpart in Tehuacán, alleging that the two of them transferred a
priest to the United States in 1987 despite knowing he had molested
minors in Mexico.
The district attorney has had protracted battles with the archdiocese
over obtaining church records, and has long examined Cardinal Mahony’s
criminal culpability in the unresolved cases, Mr. Hodgman said.
Criminal cases against church leaders are rare and extraordinarily
difficult to pursue. Legal experts said prosecutors might hope Mr.
O’Grady’s statements would help them establish a pattern of Cardinal
Mahony responding inadequately to reports of abuse.
“What the movie does is confirm that this was a longstanding practice of
covering up,” said Prof. Marci A. Hamilton of the Benjamin N. Cardozo
Law School in New York, who is an expert on church-state cases. “It
corroborates evidence. But whether the movie by itself could be aired in
the courtroom is another issue”
No senior Roman Catholic Church official in the United States has been
prosecuted in a sex-crimes case, Professor Hamilton said. Because most
victims do not come forward until years or even decades after they are
abused, the statute of limitations has been a preventive bar.
“The statute of limitations has been a huge impregnable wall,” Professor
Hamilton said. “To the extent that a movie like this stirs up the
passions of rank-and-file Catholics and citizens it makes it harder for
Mahony to say he is being singled out. He has such a history and the
numbers are so large, it has been frustrating for prosecutors to get
nowhere.”
Mr. Tamberg, the Los Angeles Archdiocese spokesman, dismissed the notion
that the film would harm the cardinal. “It is such a biased piece of
filmmaking,” he said, “that it has no credibility and will almost
certainly have no credibility in the eyes of authorities.”
The documentary, which won first place in the documentary category at
the Los Angeles film festival in June, will be publicly released in New
York, Los Angeles and Boston next week.
From the 1970’s to the 1990’s, Mr. O’Grady concedes in the film, he
sexually abused children. He also describes conversations with Cardinal
Mahony about his sexual feelings toward children, and his troubles with
law enforcement officials and angry families in towns where he committed
his abuse.
(The Stockton police are portrayed in the documentary as filing a report
on Mr. O’Grady, and having dropped their investigation after church
officials assured them that he would be removed from the parish. A
spokeswoman for the department, Roseann Clark, said the department had
no record of an investigation into him.)
After the incident in Stockton, but long before his conviction, Mr.
O’Grady was moved to another parish — his fourth.
The film also features interviews with several of his victims and their
parents, whose festering anguish and heartache seem to have healed
little over the years.
Ann Jyono, one of Mr. O’Grady’s victims and a central character in the
film, said in a telephone interview Thursday that she was a practicing
Catholic, and that while she longed to see Cardinal Mahony prosecuted,
she would settle for a conversation with him about her years of abuse at
Mr. O’Grady’s hands.
“I hope people appreciate that it is not easy to be naked in front of
everybody with your shame,” Ms. Jyono said. “In this film, you find out
that Mahony had a hand in everything that happened to me.”