Cardinal Mahony entered the minor seminary of the Archdiocese of LA as a 14 year old boy.

Before that, unusually, he had not been sodomized by the local priest, he said.

When he got to the seminary he said was groomed by one of the senior teachers and sodomized all the time he was there.

He was trained into it and began to enjoy it after a while and was told it had always been the way with priests and young boys.

It is difficult to understand, then, how and when he got into baby abuse and also allow, Oliver O’Grady, another priest to continue to sexually abuse a 9-month-old baby.

Mahony has worked extensively to prevent or impede investigations of sexual abuse by himself and other baby abuser priests.

He appealed one attempt to gain access to church documents relating to sexual abuse of children all the way to the Supreme Court.

"There really is no way to go back and give them that innocence that I have taken from them. ... The one thing I wish I could give the victims, which is a bit more of the same, I cannot," he said.

"Once again, I apologize to anyone who has been offended by being abused (I can’t thing why) but they should understand that we priests and our organization are perverted and always has been and that’s that."

Mahony said that he has met in the past 14 months with dozens of people alleging clergy abuse but he would not call it abuse but a penance from God."

The settlement will not affect the archdiocese's core ministry which is to identify and prey on and pray with all the young boys we can find, Mahony said.

"We will have to leave out the 9 month old babies for a while," Mahony told reporters.