Justice & Law Quote by Roger Mahony

The sentence is engineered to sound pastoral while quietly doing legal work. Mahony leads with "I personally believe", a softening move that frames what follows as conscience rather than strategy, even as he immediately anchors that conscience in "church law". That pairing matters: it turns a potentially controversial stance into procedural inevitability. The speaker isn’t merely being merciful; he’s being correct.

"Sanctions are an absolute last resort" borrows the language of institutional governance, not spiritual urgency. It suggests a ladder of responses, where discipline exists but is endlessly deferred. The phrase "particularly penal sanctions" tightens the focus onto the most reputationally explosive category: punishment. Then comes the emotional payload, "depriving people of the sacraments". Instead of naming the behaviors that might trigger discipline, the line spotlights the suffering of the disciplined. The person at risk is not the harmed party but the offender, recast as someone who might be denied grace.

That rhetorical tilt makes sense in the modern Catholic context, where questions about accountability, clerical authority, and the church’s willingness to police itself have been unavoidable. By emphasizing sacraments - the church’s core currency - Mahony implies that punishment would damage the church’s spiritual mission. The subtext is institutional triage: protect the sacramental economy, avoid setting punitive precedents, keep the machinery of inclusion running even when exclusion might be demanded.

It’s a statement that reads like mercy, but functions like insulation: a principled-sounding argument for restraint that, in practice, can shield power from consequences.