A former high-ranking official with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has testified that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony ordered a subordinate to delay reporting claims of sexual abuse by clergy members to the police until the priest in question could be defrocked, according to court papers.The cardinal also decided not to tell parishioners about the accusations, according to the papers.
The claims were contained in a motion filed on Friday in Los Angeles County Superior Court by lawyers for the plaintiff in a civil case and were based on the recent deposition of the former vicar for clergy, Msgr. Richard Loomis. The testimony centers on Michael Baker, a former priest, and a lawsuit filed in 2000 by two Arizona men who say Mr. Baker molested them in the mid- to late-1990s.
The archdiocese eventually settled that case for $1.2 million. Mr. Baker, who was defrocked later in 2000, was convicted in 2007 of molesting based on the claims of the two men and one other victim and is serving a 10-year prison sentence.
Mr. Baker was called this year to testify before a federal grand jury investigating possible criminal wrongdoing by the archdiocese in its handling of abuse cases.
Calls to two archdiocese lawyers and the archdiocese spokesman were not immediately returned.
In the deposition transcript, however, a lawyer for the archdiocese, Don Woods, said that because the two men in the case were adults when they filed their claim, Cardinal Mahony was not obligated to report it to the police and did no wrong.
In his testimony, Monsignor Loomis said he told Cardinal Mahony in a memo that he was going to report the new accusations against Mr. Baker to police. Monsignor Loomis said Cardinal Mahony initially supported the idea but later told him through a secretary not to do so until the Vatican approved Mr. Baker’s defrocking.
John Manly, the plaintiff lawyer, said the archdiocese did not report abuse claims to the police until 2002, although Mr. Baker was defrocked in December 2000.
Monsignor Loomis later testified that he had wanted to report the new accusations to parishioners in parishes where Mr. Baker had worked but had been told by Cardinal Mahony not to do so. Monsignor Loomis said that the order upset him deeply and that he would have resigned if his term was not about to end.
“I wanted to follow our regular policy and inform the parishes where Father Baker had been assigned. And I was instructed that we were not going to do that because the lawsuit was still under the process of settlement,” Monsignor Loomis said, according to the transcript.
“I was very upset that we were not going to follow through with our ordinary way of doing it.”
Monsignor Loomis said when he was appointed vicar, his predecessor told him that Mr. Baker had been treated differently than other priests accused of sexual molesting because he had “self-disclosed.”
Mr. Baker first told Cardinal Mahony in 1986 at a priests’ retreat that he had molested two boys from 1978 to 1985, according to church documents. The cardinal did not notify the police but sent Mr. Baker to a residential facility that treated priests for sexual abuse problems.
In the years that followed, Mr. Baker was assigned to nine parishes but barred from having one-on-one contact with minors. He violated those restrictions three times, according to church personnel file summaries released by the archdiocese.
Cardinal Mahony removed Mr. Baker from the ministry in 2000 after the Arizona lawsuit.
Mr. Baker was charged two years later with 34 counts of molesting involving six victims, but those charges were dismissed in 2003 after the United States Supreme Court voided a California law that allowed the prosecution of cases involving acts that occurred before 1988.
The accusations by the Arizona men and one other victim allowed prosecutors to file new charges against Mr. Baker that fell within the statute of limitations.
In January 2006, the former priest was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport as he returned from a vacation in Thailand.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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