The Dallas Morning News begins its series – to continue over the course of a year – investigating the global protection of abusing priests.

An overview.

And the first of the stories, centering on an Australian Salesian.

Cardinal Rodriguez of Costa Rica,who is a Salesian, is quoted in the story.

“For me it would be a tragedy to reduce the role of a pastor to that of a cop,” said Salesian Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez of Honduras, a prominent candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II. “I’d be prepared to go to jail rather than harm one of my priests.”

Salesian officials in Costa Rica and Chile are facing criminal complaints, accused of protecting priests who were shuffled across international borders. A judge in Chile is reviewing whether there is enough evidence to try a Salesian bishop on obstruction of justice charges, which would be the first such prosecution of a Catholic leader anywhere.

In the case of one priest from Peru, his superiors have ignored a church panel’s 1995 demand that he have no contact with children, as well as Chicago police’s subsequent request to question him. Salesians officials in Peru say they don’t know where he is, but The News found him working in Mexico — his fourth country he’s been in since he was first accused of misconduct more than a decade ago.

The Cardinal, in a 2002 interview with John Allen.

“I have my doubts about the motivation behind some of these scandals,” said Rodriguez, who has lived and studied in the United States. “Obviously, someone who has the sickness of pedophilia should not be in the priesthood. But why bring up these things now from 40 or 30 years ago? (The U.S.) is a society that has such compartmentalized information, such closed information. Often when you watch TV news, so many of the themes are local, there’s very little international coverage. Why in this moment of terrible conflict in the Middle East do these scandals surface, creating a polarization in the media that is almost obsessive?

“I have said in other places, and I’m not afraid to say it, that obsession is a mental illness that causes us to get blocked on one theme and to keep moving around it forever. Why is it that they bring these skeletons out of the closet? We know well that every time money mixes with justice it becomes unjust. When I was in the United States in the 1970s, there was a fashion when one slipped on a sidewalk to sue the owner of the house for millions. This became a kind of industry. I remember that people used to put on a neck brace and go find a lawyer. Eventually this was prevented by putting up signs saying, ‘Sidewalk is wet.’ So why now is there such interest in taking up these cases from the past? Because there is money in play.

“But we know that money doesn’t heal any wound. Only psychological and spiritual accompaniment can help. If it were up to me, I would give the money neither to the lawyers nor even to the victims, but to a fund to help accompany people in a spiritual and psychological way, to help to heal them. This would be a real healing. That’s the reality.

“Pedophilia is a sickness, and those with this sickness must leave the priesthood. But we must not move from this to remedies that are non-Christian. I think the world should reflect. We must ask, where is Jesus in all this? For me it would be a tragedy to reduce the role of a pastor to that of a cop. We are totally different, and I’d be prepared to go to jail rather than harm one of my priests. I say this with great clarity. …

Rodriguez added that he feels the church will exit from the crisis “more humble and more strong,” with “a new pastoral approach” that is “closer to the people, which always does us good.”

“We must not forget that we are pastors, not agents of the FBI or CIA,” he said. “Our attitude must be that people can change, that this can happen every day of our life, and that to the very end our goal is to save people. I don’t know the situation of 40 years ago, but we can imagine what was the basic level of sexual education in the seminaries when they could not talk about this because it was perceived as something wrong. Today there is a different type of education, and we can speak about it with much greater clarity. Many of the psychological implications were not known at that time. At times they even thought the seminary was a kind of tube where you enter on one side and exit ordained. This kind of thinking no longer exists.

“Some of these priests, and I say it with much respect, did not have the opportunity of psychological consultation, and therefore they can also be victims. As far as judging is concerned, that is very difficult. We can judge the exterior facts, but not the interior life of the person. We must always have a pastoral, Christian attitude.”