There's not enough money in the world

It's not enough.

The $660 million the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and its insurers will be paying in a settlement with men and women raped, groped, sodomized -- or all of the above -- by perverts in Roman collars cannot restore shattered minds and tormented souls. Cardinal Roger Mahony, now free to issue a lame and self-serving "apology," cannot even come close to restoring victims' peace of mind . . . or their lost innocence.

No amount of money and no amount of groveling can fix the violence those wicked priests and their enabling prelate have done to those poor people -- have done to the whole Body of Christ.

“I’m not so sure that we can necessarily call it justice,” said plaintiff Carlos Perez-Carrillo. Perez-Carrillo's accusations against the Rev. John Anthony Salazar go back to the 1980s, when he says the priest molested him repeatedly at St. Bernard High School in Playa del Rey.

“Mostly what I’ve gone through is being shunned by Catholics and the Catholic Church,” Perez-Carrillo said in an interview with MSNBC. “I’ve always felt that I’ve been viewed as a pariah because I actually came forward and actually denounced what was happening.”

Perez-Carrillo and other victims said they regretted that archdiocese leaders, especially Cardinal Roger Mahony, would not appear in court to acknowledge under oath what had happened to them and others over the past 70 years. Many victims accuse Mahony of having swept the abuse problem under the rug by transferring accused priests from parish to parish.

Mahony offered an apology at a news conference Sunday, but Perez-Carrillo dismissed it as inadequate.

“When you’ve been dealing with this and going through the process and dealing with spin doctoring and covering up, you’re really quite skeptical about whether an apology is genuine,” he said.

“It’s just a little bit too little and a little bit too late,” added Perez-Carrillo, whose alleged abuser, Salazar, later moved to Texas and was convicted of sexually abusing an 18-year-old man. He is serving life in prison.

Esther Miller, who has accused Michael Nocita, who later left the priesthood to marry, of having abused her at St. Bridget’s of Sweden in Van Nuys during the 1970s, insisted that “in no way does it come close to apologizing.”

But Miller, who said the trauma of her abuse led her to develop an eating disorder, said many of her fellow victims were in dire straits and had nowhere else to turn.

“Many of us have secondary issues,” she said. “Obviously, my drug of choice was food, [but] some of the other survivors have opted for alcohol addiction, for cocaine addiction.

“So now what we can do with that settlement money is to apply it do self-care and try to make our lives a little bit better.”

Mahony reiterated his apology after the hearing Monday, but he declined to comment further because “this day in particular is a day for the victims to speak.”

WHAT RECOMPENSE can there possibly be when you have a virtual mafia of gay priests, pedophile priests, horndog priests and Those Who Cover for Them which has successfully equated Jesus Christ and the Church He founded with abject evil in the minds of victims and the general public? How many millions of dollars and crocodile tears can fix that blasphemy?

There is no adequate recompense. Not in this life.

Back to the MSNBC story:

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Haley Fromholz approved the landmark settlement Monday morning at a dramatic hearing marked by the sobs of victims and their attorneys.

The archdiocese itself is on the hook for a quarter-billion dollars, more than a third of the final settlement, raising questions about whether the archdiocese could meet its obligations without going into bankruptcy. The rest will be paid by insurance carriers, other church sources and litigation with religious orders that did not participate in the arrangement.

Mahony has promised that no funds directly relating to the church’s mission would be used. He said the archdiocese had been segregating funds to pay for the litigation for some time.

Still, archdiocese officials told NBC News, an undetermined percentage of parishioners’ offerings would be paid out to alleged victims, and they said they would likely have to sell some church property unrelated to direct ministry, such as underused hospitals.

Key to the settlement is the church’s agreement not to try to block the release of accused priests’ confidential personnel files, which it will turn over to a retired judge for review.

Some records, such as psychological examinations, cannot be released. But plaintiffs lawyers said they expected many details of alleged abuses by more than 200 accused priests would be brought to light in the months and years to come.

The father of one alleged victim, who he said was repeatedly abused as a youngster by a “dear friend,” said the release of the records was a big victory for the plaintiffs.

“We want to know that our house is clean,” said the man, who asked NBC News not to identify him to protect his child.

ONE CAN ONLY HOPE that -- with the rock lifted and the Church's clerical creepy crawlies exposed to cleansing sunlight -- some good will come of all this. One can hope that humiliation and scorn might help end some bishops', clergy's and functionaries' worship of mammon over the Messiah. Of the shadows over the Light of the World.

Maybe when the Church is poor, it will once again be holy. But will that be too late?