LA Archdiocese files may speed cases

''I think what we have here is a church that is embarrassed, that is contrite, that is ashamed of what happened in the past and is committed to reforming it to the extent that it is humanly possible to do so," he said.

But critics called the release of the summaries a public relations ploy designed to move 560 sex abuse cases closer to a settlement before damaging testimony in the upcoming sex abuse trial of former priest Michael Wempe and the possible release of personnel files to the Los Angeles County district attorney, who is investigating clergy abuse in the nation's largest archdiocese.

The California Appeals Court recently rejected the archdiocese's attempt to keep those files from prosecutors. The archdiocese has appealed to the state Supreme Court and expects to learn within weeks if the high court will hear its case.

''The question for the archdiocese is not money because the archdiocese has enough," said Richard Sipe, an expert witness in some clergy abuse cases and a former Benedictine monk and author. ''The question is the documents, and the truth that's in the documents that may very well send some archdiocesan officials to face indictment."

District Attorney Steve Cooley did not address the latest document release in the civil cases, but said in a statement issued yesterday that his office was ''looking for . . . evidence and investigative leads, not institutional mea culpas" from Cardinal Roger Mahony, head of the archdiocese.

The clergy abuse litigation in Los Angeles is the largest such litigation that remains unsettled nationwide -- and that, too, increases pressure on Mahony and the archdiocese, said Marci Hamilton, a professor at Cardozo Law School at New York City's Yeshiva University who consults with plaintiffs on constitutional law.