Fatherhood Quote by Roger Mahony

Mahony’s language is built to sound like moral clarity while quietly managing institutional risk. “We’re not at a point in time” frames child abuse less as an evergreen atrocity than as a crisis of the moment, a reputational weather system the Church must now navigate carefully. The phrase “taking chances” is telling: it treats safeguarding as a wager, as if the central problem were uncertainty and exposure rather than harm already done and enabled.

The pivot to authority is the quote’s spine. “The Holy Father himself said...” is a rhetorical shield, relocating moral agency upward. Mahony isn’t staking out a hard line so much as borrowing one, aligning himself with Rome to inoculate against accusations of softness or complicity. It’s also a subtle attempt to reset the narrative from local failure to universal policy: whatever happened in Los Angeles becomes, in this framing, a matter the Church has already settled at the highest level.

“No room in the priesthood or religious life” sounds absolute, but it’s also bureaucratically neat. It confines the issue to membership and employment - who gets to wear the collar - rather than the grittier demands of accountability: reporting to civil authorities, cooperating fully, compensating victims, dismantling the culture of secrecy. “I think he’s right” lands like a personal endorsement, but it’s deliberately modest, a posture of agreement rather than confession or responsibility.

In context, Mahony speaks as a figure whose credibility has been scarred by the abuse scandal and allegations of mishandling cases. The quote reads as a late-stage adaptation: the institution’s vocabulary of protection, delivered with the instincts of damage control.