Church officials engineered referral loopholes to shield molesters from police

Evidence

Another priest molested 20 altar boys. Cardinal Mahoney concurred with Monsignor Thomas Curry in not sending the list to the police: “We cannot give such a list for no [ sic] cause whatsoever” (Flaccus, 2014). Mahoney also signed off on the referral of an egregious molester to a psychiatrist who, because he was a lawyer as well, was not required to report the offender to law authorities (Medina, 2013). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 519

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete instance of moral disengagement through ‘displacement of responsibility’ plus deliberate institutional engineering — connecting to the ethics of mandatory reporting laws and loopholes.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to my piece on sacrifice: the grooming of altar boys and the referral of molesters to a lawyer-psychiatrist who wasn’t required to report reads like a form of sacraficing the vulnerable for institutional preservation.