De Owieoneknowie´s, Peeling back the thin, sacred veneer : Names in church sex abuse records should be public, judge rules!

The calendar year opens today with simultaneous court appearances by two of the largest Roman Catholic Archdioceses: Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

In Philly, jury selection begins in the criminal trials of priests accused of sodomy and child sexual abuse. These cases will continue to expose the “omissions” of Cardinals Anthony Bevilacqua and Justin Rigali.


`Philadelphia report I?
Gelovigen mogen dat niet lezen! `
 Some dirty little secrets


In Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press will argue for the release of unredacted secret personnel documents of priests and bishops accused of sodomy, rape and sexual abuse of minors.  These documents expose the “acts of commission” by Cardinals Manning, Mahony and Levada.

 This opportunity in L.A. for public accountability does not come twice in a lifetime.  The Cardinals’ fingerprints are on these documents.  If produced unsanitzed, they peel back the thin, sacred veneer covering the Cardinals’ business practices.

Not since Judge Sweeney ordered Boston’s Cardinal Law to turn over the documents in 2001 have we been at such a crossroads for child protection.

It is a tragic hour in some ways—that hour when the hierarchy is driven to reckon with themselves.  When every avenue of procedural distraction has been cut off and when documents are produced that these men penned that prove their acts of omission and commission and how they protected their own reputations over the safety of children.

...

More than 550 plaintiffs settled with the archdiocese in 2007 for a record-breaking $660 million, but the agreement also called for a process to vet personnel files for future release. The documents include letters and memos between top church officials and their attorneys, medical and psychological records, complaints from parents and, in some cases, correspondence with the Vatican about abusive priests.

More than 20 accused priests have held up the release in court for five years, arguing that making their files public would violate their privacy rights.

The priests have exhausted their legal appeals, however, and the documents are expected to come out within days or weeks.

Plaintiffs' attorney Ray Boucher also filed court papers last week outlining heavy redactions to three of the 72 files in question that he believes violate the scope of the previous judge's order.

The archdiocese said in court filings last week that any changes to the 2010 order on what can be blacked out will cause a significant delay in the release of the files. The church also argues that Judge Emilie Elias doesn't have the power to change the earlier decision.

...

Rest artikel

Los Angeles Times
January 7, 2013

A Superior Court judge has ruled  the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles must release the names of high-ranking church officials in 30,000 pages of confidential records about priests accused of abusing children.

In making the order Monday, Judge Emilie H. Elias reversed a key part of a 2011 ruling by a retired judge who said he feared including the names of the hierarchy could be used to embarrass the church further. Elias said the public’s right to know how the archdiocese, the largest in the nation, handled molestation allegations outweighed such concerns. She also reversed retired Judge Dickran Tevrizian’s ruling that priests who had faced only a single allegation of abuse would have their names blacked out.

“Don’t you think the public has a right to know … what was going on in their own church?” she asked a lawyer for the archdiocese, adding that parishioners “may want to talk to their adult children” about abuse alleged in their local church.

The judge and lawyers for alleged victims and the archdiocese were meeting Monday afternoon to discuss how and when the internal church records, which include psychiatric reports, reports of abuse and letters to the Vatican, will be released.

The Los Angeles Times and Associated Press filed court papers objecting to Tevrizian's ruling that all names of church employees, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other top archdiocese officials, should be blacked out in the documents before they were made public. Tevrizian said he did not believe the documents should be used to "embarrass or to ridicule the church."

The news organizations argued in court filings that the redactions would "deny the public information that is necessary to fully understand the church's knowledge about the serial molestation of children by priests over a period of decades."

Contending that the secrecy was motivated by "a desire to avoid further embarrassment" for the church rather than privacy concerns, the media attorneys wrote: "That kind of self-interest is not even remotely the kind of 'overriding interest' that is needed to overcome the public's presumptive right of access, nor does it establish 'good cause' for ongoing secrecy."

An archdiocese attorney said last month that the church had spent a "great deal of effort" in redacting the files to comply with Tevrizian's order, and said the media attorneys misunderstood the legal process that both parties in the settlement agreed would be binding.
"We agree with Judge Tevrizian that enough time has passed and enough reforms have been made that it's time to get off this and move onto another subject," attorney J. Michael Hennigan said at the time.