Bad Apples

One bad apple don’t spoil the whole darn bunch.

     -The Osmonds

            First of all I must admit that I thought Michael Jackson sang the above referenced song, but I guess it makes more sense for Mormons to sing about food storage techniques.  This song popped into my head recently as I was thinking about particularly bad apples in my former church.

            In Los Angeles - a city you’ll remember is actually named after the Catholic Church’s favorite mother, Mary - Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has been in the news lately because of the release of thousands of formerly secret church files that speak of 122 priests who molested children.  Mahony’s name is associated with these priests and these files because those same files lay out how he and an auxiliary bishop plotted to prevent law enforcement from learning that children had been molested.  Church law may be sketchy on how criminal these obstructions were, I wouldn’t even know where to look it up, but the California Penal Code is not.  According to that document it’s a crime:

            California Penal Code, Section 182, a-5, "If two or more persons conspire to...prevert of obstruct justice, or the due administration of the law."

            Mahony wasn’t protecting these priests so much as protecting the church.  He certainly wasn’t protecting the children.  Perhaps his thought was, as the Osmonds suggests, that a few “bad apples” don’t spoil the whole darn priesthood.  He’s probably right, but by stymieing the police and prosecutors he is leaving the bad apples in the barrel with the potentially good ones.  And perhaps he, as an apple, has become brown and rotten because he left those bad ones in.

            Roger Mahony started in Fresno, at the church my family attended.  He confirmed my sister and probably at least a couple of my brothers.  When he became Cardinal of Los Angeles, even though I don’t attend Mass any more, I took some pride that he had risen to such an important position and was from Fresno.  Maybe he took some pride in that too, and you know what goeth before a fall. 

            Monsignor Kevin Kostelnik at the Los Angeles Cathedral said he has grown weary of the intense media attention since the files were released.  In his own way as he is complaining that those outside the church want to know who broke the law, both while molesting children and covering it up, he is leaving those bad apples in there too.  He doesn’t seem to get it, but neither do his bosses; last year the Vatican issues a statement that said essentially that ordaining women is equal to child molestation.  Protecting these “criminal” priests is illegal in California, across the United States, and I would hope within the Catholic Canon.  To Mr. Kostelnik I would offer this advice about media attention, “Tough Titty.”  

           

            Sure, if you throw it out, one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch.  But how may do?  Five, ten, one hundred and twenty-two?