Cardinal Tells of Assault Over Sexual-Abuse Cases

By REBECCA CATHCART

Published: December 5, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 4 — Cardinal Roger Mahony, the leader of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, told fellow priests that he was assaulted last summer by a man who yelled angry statements about the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests.

Cardinal Mahony first spoke about the attack at an annual gathering of local priests in October, according to priests who attended the meeting. The cardinal described being approached last July by an unidentified man outside Our Lady of Angels Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, said the Rev. Michael Gutierrez, who was at the meeting.

“He went down there to drop something off at the mailbox when this guy approached him, saying some stuff,” said Father Gutierrez, pastor of St. Anne Catholic Church in Santa Monica. “Then, boom, the guy was on him.”

The attack, according to Father Gutierrez and others, occurred days after a Los Angeles Superior Court judge approved a $660 million settlement between the archdiocese and more than 500 local victims of abuse by the clergy. The settlement is the largest of its kind in the country.

No report about the assault was filed with the Los Angeles Police Department, a police spokesman said. “We don’t know if the assault did or did not happen,” said the spokesman, Sgt. Lee Sands, who said Tuesday that he was trying to get in touch with Cardinal Mahony.

The cardinal could not be reached for comment. A spokeswoman for the archdiocese, Carolina Guevara, said, “The annual pastoral meeting with the priests of the archdiocese is a private meeting, and whatever conversation that might have taken place was between the priests and their bishop and was not meant to be public.”

Priests at the meeting reported that Cardinal Mahoney said it had taken him a month to heal from the assault. “The cardinal is fine,” Ms. Guevara said when asked about his condition.

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said that “violence against anyone is abhorrent,” but that “there are citizens who feel anger about the way Cardinal Mahony has handled this case for years and years.”

“If he was assaulted,” Mr. Clohessy said. “I feel for him.”

Follow-up:  The Times obtained today a copy of the police report filed by Cardinal Mahony after he was assaulted last summer.  In that statement, Mahoney described a confrontation with a young teenager whose pants were torn off by Mahony in the initial stages of their scuffle.  “Then,” insisted Mahony, “I felt him viciously ramming his buttocks into my penis, which had escaped from my fly after I accidentally pulled down my zipper while I was trying to beat off the attacker, and then he continued to assault me in this fashion until I suffered an unholy discharge.  Then he ran away screaming.”