How do you negotiate horror? How do you say, "I'm sorry, here's a check" to people whose lives you've ruined?The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles was never more like Paris Hilton than when it agreed to pay $660 million to 508 people whom its priests sexually abused -- like the money was a big deal.
When Hilton was sent to jail for a minor term in a drunken driving case, you would have thought she'd gotten the death penalty. But the L.A. archdiocese describing in detail how it had to pull funds from insurance and some religious orders it had to convince to help, like it was a hardship, was an insult to God.
And what kind of insurance covers sexual abuse?
Not all priests violated the law like those whose secrets are being revealed. But how can the church believe there will be no repercussions? How can parents teach their children to trust without taking a second thought?
The abuse settlement came a week after Pope Benedict redeclared the Roman Catholic Church as the true church and other religions as defective. The timing was interesting, coming just before another reminder of how tarnished the Catholic Church has been by the scandal.
The timing couldn't have been worse, because no better word describes the cover-up than "defective."
The settlement, announced Monday after years of complaints and a four-year legal battle, is to be distributed based on the duration and nature of abuse each victim suffered.
Imagining victims having to relive the most tragic time of their lives to get paid made my stomach hurt.
And the settlement doesn't include those injured most, the ones who couldn't live with what happened and killed themselves or succumbed to drugs.
I'm no Catholic, but what is missing in this travesty is a total confession of sins. I'm no prosecutor, but the other thing missing is justice. Every priest who abused a child or a woman should have been brought up on charges, not allowed to move to new parishes to abuse again.
Every defective priest who still lives should still be brought up on charges.
The Los Angeles settlement was being praised for being six times higher than those in any other abuse cases. But how dare we measure justice in dollars when it isn't being measured in years in prison?
Cardinal Roger Mahoney, archbishop of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, apologized to anyone who had been offended. Comedian Jon Stewart responded best on "The Daily Show" Tuesday night: "Offended? You're going to go with offended?"
What the cardinal and his fellow archbishops nationwide should understand is that, as a child of God, mother of one and a human being, I am offended. The victims who suffered terror at the hands of men they were taught to trust, men they believed were their guides to God, were terrorized.
So while $660 million is a tidy sum and may help some victims pull themselves from practical despair, the question remains: When are all the criminal priests going to stand trial so they can get some measure of justice?
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