Los Angeles Archdiocese to Dismiss Priest Over Admission of Molesting Girl
By JENNIFER MEDINA
LOS ANGELES — A priest accused of having a long-term sexual relationship with a teenage girl, writing her decades later to ask for forgiveness and declare that he was a sex addict, is being removed from ministry in a parish, and the diocese’s vicar of clergy has also resigned, officials of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles said Friday.
The priest, the Rev. Martin P. O’Loghlen, was once a leader in his religious order and was appointed to an archdiocesan sexual abuse advisory board, although officials at both the order and the archdiocese knew at the time about his admission of sexual abuse and addiction. He served on the board, which was meant to review accusations of abuse by priests, for at least two years in the late 1990s, according to church and legal documents.
Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said church officials planned to announce the removal of Father O’Loghlen from his current parish in San Dimas on Sunday. Church officials decided to act after being contacted by a reporter about the priest’s history of sexual abuse.
Mr. Tamberg said in a statement that officials of the priest’s religious order assured the archdiocese in 2009 that Father O’Loghlen was fit for the ministry. He said that the archdiocese’s vicar for clergy, Msgr. Michael Meyers, resigned on Friday. Monsignor Meyers had been in the position since July 2009 and it was his job to grant clergymen what are known as faculties to serve as priests.
The Los Angeles Archdiocese, led by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, has been rocked by sexual abuse accusations for years. In 2007, it agreed to a $660 million settlement with 508 people who said that priests had sexually abused them as children.
“The failure to fully check records before granting priestly faculties is a violation of archdiocesan policy,” Cardinal Mahony said in a statement. “We owe it to victims and to all our faithful to make absolutely certain that all of our child protection policies and procedures are scrupulously followed.”
Father O’Loghlen had sex on several occasions with Julie Malcolm in the 1960s while she was a student at Bishop Amat High School in nearby La Puente, Ms. Malcolm said. Nearly three decades after the abuse ended, Father O’Loghlen tried to reach Ms. Malcolm, who was then living in Phoenix.
After receiving several phone messages from Father O’Loghlen, Ms. Malcolm filed a complaint with the Diocese of Phoenix and later filed a lawsuit against the priest and his religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. In 1999, she settled the lawsuit for $100,000, Ms. Malcolm said.
“I am deeply sorry for our becoming involved and readily accept the fact that I was the responsible one in our relationship,” Father O’Loghlen said in a five-page handwritten letter dated June 23, 1996. “Clearly, I was the one in power position. If I had not made a move nothing would have happened between us. I sincerely hope that there were some moments of joy for you in our relationship, but ultimately it caused you much significant pain.”
Father O’Loghlen goes on to say that since Ms. Malcolm filed her complaint, he has undergone psychological evaluations, which determined that he is “not a pedophile” or a “sexual predator.” But, he adds, “I do have a sexual addiction.”
Copies of the letter and other documents were provided to The New York Times by Joelle Casteix, the southwest director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who had received them from Ms. Malcolm.
Father O’Loghlen, 74, was ordained in Ireland in 1961. He began teaching at Bishop Amat later that year and remained there for six years. In 1967, around the same time of his involvement with Ms. Malcolm, he moved to Damien High School, a boys’ school nearby, where he was vice principal and principal for more than 10 years.
In 1995, Father O’Loghlen became the provincial leader in the western region for the religious order of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. After he contacted Ms. Malcolm in 1996, leaders in the Los Angeles Archdiocese and officials with the religious order based in Rome exchanged several letters.
According to copies of those letters, Father O’Loghlen admitted to molesting Ms. Malcolm and told his superiors that he was undergoing counseling. Msgr. Richard Loomis, then the vicar for clergy in Los Angeles, told officials in Rome that he would not remove Father O’Loghlen from the archdiocese but that his service should be limited.
Several months later, Monsignor Loomis removed all restrictions on Father O’Loghlen and, in a letter, thanked him for agreeing to serve on the sexual abuse advisory board. He writes that both he and Cardinal Mahony “feel that you will bring valuable insights to the work of the board.”
In a deposition in 1999, Father O’Loghlen said he had attended some of the review board’s meetings. Mr. Tamberg said it was not clear why Father O’Loghlen was appointed to the board. Father O’Loghlen remained the provincial for the religious order until 2001, according to the church records. Then, for five years beginning in 2003, he was a pastor in the Philippines.
Mr. Tamberg said the provincial, the Rev. Donal McCarthy, who now oversees the religious order in California, wrote to the archdiocese in March 2009, asking that Father O’Loghlen serve as a priest in Los Angeles. The letter included assurances that Father O’Loghlen “manifested no behavioral problems in the past that would indicate that he might deal with minors in an inappropriate manner” and had “never been involved in an incident or exhibited behavior which called into question his fitness or suitability for priestly ministry due to alcohol, substance abuse, sexual misconduct, financial irregularities, or other causes.”
He was appointed as an associate pastor in the San Dimas church four months later. Father O’Loghlen also worked at the parish’s elementary school.
The archdiocese’s Vicar for Clergy’s Office “did not fully consult” other records of the priest’s “previous assignments in the archdiocese, which would have indicated that he admitted to having had a sexual relationship with a female minor,” Mr. Tamberg said.
American bishops adopted a “zero tolerance” policy in 2002 that bars from the ministry any priest who has abused minors. Mr. Tamberg said that the archdiocese had not received any complaints about Father O’Loghlen in his time at the San Dimas church. He said officials would review records to verify that there had been no other errors.
Father McCarthy said he could not comment. “I can’t say anything about the placement of a priest, that’s our policy,” he said.
John C. Manly, a lawyer for victims in dozens of sexual abuse cases, said Father O’Loghlen’s case was egregious because of his time on the sexual review board. “He was personally selected for a board that is meant to protect people from priests like him,” Mr. Manly said.
Ms. Malcolm, now 61, said in an interview that Father O’Loghlen had been her debate coach at Bishop Amat High School and that he was particularly encouraging. Sometime around the time she was 16 years old, she said, Father O’Loghlen, who was around 29 at the time, met her at a home where she was baby-sitting. After a few minutes of sitting on the couch talking, Ms. Malcolm said, Father O’Loghlen kissed her. They began having sex more than a year later, Ms. Malcolm said.
“I was so naïve, I thought this was some kind of special treatment,” Ms. Malcolm said. “We would meet somewhere like it was this clandestine romance. We would periodically break up, but he would call and apologize and ask to see me again and I always agreed.”
She said she never considered filing a complaint until Father O’Loghlen tried to contact her.
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Father-of-two U.S. Catholic bishop quits
ReplyDeleteAGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE JANUARY 4, 2012
VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of the Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles in the United States, Gabino Zavala, on Wednesday, after he confessed to having fathered two children.
"The Holy Father has accepted the resignation from the post of Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles Gabino Zavala," the Vatican said in a statement, without spelling out why he quit.
The pontiff has demanded action be taken in the case of priests who are homosexual or married, calling on those concerned to hand in their resignations if they cannot abide by their vow of chastity.
"Bishop Zavala informed me in early December that he is the father of two teenage children who live with their mother in another state," L.A. Bishop Jose Gomez said in a separate statement announcing the "sad and difficult" news.
"Zavala also informed me that he submitted his resignation to the Holy Father in Rome, which was accepted," he said.
The Mexican-born Zavala, ordained in 1977, is an influential figure within the Church renowned for his fight to abolish the death penalty in the United States, as well as improve rights for homosexuals and Mexican immigrants.
"The Archdiocese has reached out to the mother and children to provide spiritual care as well as funding to assist the children with college costs," said Gomez, adding that the family's identity was being withheld.
The American Catholic Church has been rocked by a clerical child abuse scandal which has cost a number of bishops and priests their jobs since 2002.
http://www.canada.com/news/Father+Catholic+bishop+quits/5944637/story.html
LA Archdiocese Sued For Alleged Abuse Cover-Up
ReplyDeleteApril 18, 2012
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — A group comprised of child sexual abuse victims and their supporters alleged on Wednesday that officials with the Los Angeles Archdiocese tried to cover up allegations that a former staffer had abused and videotaped a Catholic high school student.
KNX 1070′s Vytas Safronikas reports John Malburg was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2009 after pleading guilty to sexually molesting a male student and videotaping another one for commercial purposes.
Malburg, 43, was dean of students at now-closed Daniel Murphy Catholic High, which was closed by the Archdiocese in 2007 in an effort to help pay for its share of a $660 million settlement with families of abuse victims.
But now a complaint filed on behalf of former Daniel Murphy Catholic High School student John Doe TD against the archdiocese and John Malburg alleges sexual battery, negligence and fraudulent conveyance and claims church officials tried to cover up the allegations as early as 2005.
“Cardinal Mahony needs to be held accountable for this,” said Joelle Casteix of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests(SNAP) . “They found out that he was surreptitiously filming his students and making child pornography, and instead of calling the police, they did nothing.”
Archdiocese spokesman Tod M. Tamberg disputed that allegation and said Malburg was removed by church officials once police notified them of the charges.
“The archdiocese first became aware of the investigation from the police and fully cooperated with the investigation,” he said. “Malburg was immediately removed from his position and archdiocesan officials met with parents at the school.”
The plaintiff, now an adult, alleges he was coerced into appearing in a series of pornographic videos being produced by Malburg. At the time, Malburg was a teacher as well as the vice principal and dean of students at the school, which closed in 2009.
In addition to the allegations against Malburg and the archdiocese, the complaint alleges that Malburg’s parents, Dominica and former Vernon Mayor Leonis Malburg, were involved in a fraudulent scheme to transfer property assets in order for their son to avoid civil judgment claims.
The younger Malburg pleaded no contest to continuous sexual abuse of a minor and using a minor for commercial sex acts and was sentenced to eight years in state prison in a plea deal in which 12 other counts were dismissed.
One of the named victims in the criminal complaint was the plaintiff, according to his attorneys.
Malburg pleaded no contest in a separate case to conspiracy to commit voter registration fraud, voter registration fraud and perjury by declaration, and was sentenced in that case to three years and four months in state prison.
His father was convicted of charges including fraudulent voting and conspiracy for falsely claiming to live in the tiny municipality of Vernon, while his mother was convicted of conspiracy and fraudulent voting.
Leonis Malburg was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to pay $579,000 in fines and restitution, while Dominica Malburg was sentenced to three years probation and ordered to pay $36,000 in fines and penalty assessments.
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/04/18/la-archdiocese-sued-for-alleged-abuse-cover-up
Files of L.A. priests accused of sexual abuse to be released
ReplyDeleteThe California Supreme Court denies an attempt by individual priests to keep the records private.
By Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times October 10, 2012
Personnel files of Los Angeles Archdiocese Roman Catholic priests accused of sexual molestation will be released to the public within the next few months, an archdiocese lawyer said Wednesday.
The release follows a decision by the California Supreme Court on Wednesday to deny an attempt by individual priests to keep the records private.
J. Michael Hennigan, an attorney for the archdiocese, said the church agreed as part of a 2006 settlement to release the personnel files of several dozen accused priests. The archdiocese paid $660 million to settle more than 500 lawsuits filed by people who said they had been sexually abused by priests.
"We have already selected the documents that are going to be released, gone through a process of redacting innocent names and we need a court order" signing off on the release of the documents, Hennigan said.
Anthony DeMarco, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that the court order already has been signed and that he hopes to have the records within days. He insisted that the archdiocese has tried to prevent the records' release.
"They will show time and time again that complaints were raised to church leadership — to bishops and archbishops and everyone else in leadership — that given priests were sexually molesting kids, and time and time again the priests were shuffled elsewhere and the victims disregarded," DeMarco said.
He said the records will show that persons still in power at the archdiocese or in other dioceses did not protect the victims and made it possible for the priests to molest again.
Although Wednesday's court decision involved about 25 priests, the settlement calls for the release of records involving about 200 priests, DeMarco said. He said he expects all the records to be made public soon.
Elsewhere in the country, the release of personnel files of accused priests has produced damaging revelations.
In Orange County, where the files of 15 accused abusers were released five months after cases were settled in late 2004, records revealed that church officials dumped one serial molester in Tijuana, welcomed a convicted child abuser from another state and offered a repeat abuser up to $19,000 to leave the priesthood quietly.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-priest-files-20121011,0,1785530.story
Names in church sex abuse records should be public, judge rules
ReplyDeleteby Harriet Ryan and Victoria Kim Los Angeles Times January 7, 2013
A Superior Court judge has ruled the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles must release the names of high-ranking church officials in 30,000 pages of confidential records about priests accused of abusing children.
In making the order Monday, Judge Emilie H. Elias reversed a key part of a 2011 ruling by a retired judge who said he feared including the names of the hierarchy could be used to embarrass the church further. Elias said the public’s right to know how the archdiocese, the largest in the nation, handled molestation allegations outweighed such concerns. She also reversed retired Judge Dickran Tevrizian’s ruling that priests who had faced only a single allegation of abuse would have their names blacked out.
“Don’t you think the public has a right to know … what was going on in their own church?” she asked a lawyer for the archdiocese, adding that parishioners “may want to talk to their adult children” about abuse alleged in their local church.
The judge and lawyers for alleged victims and the archdiocese were meeting Monday afternoon to discuss how and when the internal church records, which include psychiatric reports, reports of abuse and letters to the Vatican, will be released.
The Los Angeles Times and Associated Press filed court papers objecting to Tevrizian's ruling that all names of church employees, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other top archdiocese officials, should be blacked out in the documents before they were made public. Tevrizian said he did not believe the documents should be used to "embarrass or to ridicule the church."
The news organizations argued in court filings that the redactions would "deny the public information that is necessary to fully understand the church's knowledge about the serial molestation of children by priests over a period of decades."
Contending that the secrecy was motivated by "a desire to avoid further embarrassment" for the church rather than privacy concerns, the media attorneys wrote: "That kind of self-interest is not even remotely the kind of 'overriding interest' that is needed to overcome the public's presumptive right of access, nor does it establish 'good cause' for ongoing secrecy."
An archdiocese attorney said last month that the church had spent a "great deal of effort" in redacting the files to comply with Tevrizian's order, and said the media attorneys misunderstood the legal process that both parties in the settlement agreed would be binding.
"We agree with Judge Tevrizian that enough time has passed and enough reforms have been made that it's time to get off this and move onto another subject," attorney J. Michael Hennigan said at the time.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/01/names-catholic-church-sex-abuse-records-public-judge-ruling.html
L.A. church leaders sought to hide sex abuse cases from authorities
ReplyDeleteDocuments from the late 1980s show that Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and another archdiocese official discussed strategies to keep police from discovering that children were being sexually abused by priests.
By Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers and Harriet Ryan, Los Angeles Times January 21, 2013
Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.
The archdiocese's failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese's chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation's largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders' own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being abused.
In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.
One such case that has previously received little attention is that of Msgr. Peter Garcia, who admitted preying for decades on undocumented children in Spanish-speaking parishes. After Garcia's discharge from a New Mexico treatment center for pedophile clergy, Mahony ordered him to stay away from California "for the foreseeable future" in order to avoid legal accountability, the files show. "I believe that if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors," the archbishop wrote to the treatment center's director in July 1986.
The following year, in a letter to Mahony about bringing Garcia back to work in the archdiocese, Curry said he was worried that victims in Los Angeles might see the priest and call police.
"[T]here are numerous — maybe twenty — adolescents or young adults that Peter was involved with in a first degree felony manner. The possibility of one of these seeing him is simply too great," Curry wrote in May 1987.
Garcia returned to the Los Angeles area later that year, but the archdiocese did not allow him to work in any church because he refused to take medication to suppress his sexual urges. He left the priesthood in 1989, according to the church.
Garcia was never prosecuted and died in 2009. The files show he admitted to a therapist that he had sexually abused boys "on and off" since his 1966 ordination. He assured church officials his victims were unlikely to come forward because of their immigration status. In at least one case, according to a church memo, he threatened to have a boy he had raped deported if he went to police.
The memos are from personnel files for 14 priests submitted to a judge on behalf of a man who claims he was abused by one of the priests, Father Nicholas Aguilar Rivera. The man's attorney, Anthony De Marco, wrote in court papers the files show "a practice of thwarting law enforcement investigations" by the archdiocese. It's not always clear from the records whether the church followed through on all its discussions about eluding police, but it did in some cases.
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Mahony, who retired in 2011, has apologized repeatedly for errors in handling abuse allegations. In a statement Monday, he apologized once again and recounted meetings he's had with "some 90" victims of abuse.
ReplyDelete"I have a 3 x 5 card for every victim I met with on the altar of my small chapel. I pray for them every single day," he wrote. "As I thumb through those cards I often pause as I am reminded of each personal story and the anguish that accompanies that life story."
"It remains my daily and fervent prayer that God's grace will flood the heart and soul of each victim, and that their life-journey continues forward with ever greater healing," he added. "I am sorry."
Curry did not return calls seeking comment. He currently serves as the archdiocese's auxiliary bishop for Santa Barbara.
The confidential files of at least 75 more accused abusers are slated to become public in coming weeks under the terms of a 2007 civil settlement with more than 500 victims. A private mediator had ordered the names of the church hierarchy redacted from those documents, but after objections from The Times and the Associated Press, a Superior Court judge ruled that the names of Mahony, Curry and others in supervisory roles should not be blacked out.
Garcia's was one of three cases in 1987 in which top church officials discussed ways they could stymie law enforcement. In a letter about Father Michael Wempe, who had acknowledged using a 12-year-old parishioner as what a church official called his "sex partner," Curry recounted extensive conversations with the priest about potential criminal prosecution.
"He is afraid ... records will be sought by the courts at some time and that they could convict him," Curry wrote to Mahony. "He is very aware that what he did comes within the scope of criminal law."
Curry proposed Wempe could go to an out-of-state diocese "if need be." He called it "surprising" that a church-paid counselor hadn't reported Wempe to police and wrote that he and Wempe "agreed it would be better if Mike did not return to him."
Perhaps, Curry added, the priest could be sent to "a lawyer who is also a psychiatrist" thereby putting "the reports under the protection of privilege."
Curry expressed similar concerns to Mahony about Father Michael Baker, who had admitted his abuse of young boys during a private 1986 meeting with the archbishop.
In a memo about Baker's return to ministry, Curry wrote, "I see a difficulty here, in that if he were to mention his problem with child abuse it would put the therapist in the position of having to report him … he cannot mention his past problem."
Mahony's response to the memo was handwritten across the bottom of the page: "Sounds good —please proceed!!" Two decades would pass before authorities gathered enough information to convict Baker and Wempe of abusing boys.
Federal and state prosecutors have investigated possible conspiracy cases against the archdiocese hierarchy. Former Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said in 2007 that his probe into the conduct of high-ranking church officials was on hold until his prosecutors could access the personnel files of all the abusers. The U.S. attorney's office convened a grand jury in 2009, but no charges resulted.
During those investigations, the church was forced by judges to turn over some but not all of the records to prosecutors. The district attorney's office has said its prosecutors plan to review priest personnel files as they are released.
Mahony was appointed archbishop in 1985 after five years leading the Stockton diocese. While there, he had dealt with three allegations of clergy abuse, including one case in which he personally reported the priest to police.
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In Los Angeles, he tapped Curry, an Irish-born priest, as vicar of clergy. The records show that sex abuse allegations were handled almost exclusively by the archbishop and his vicar. Memos that crossed their desks included graphic details, such as one letter from another priest accusing Garcia of tying up and raping a young boy in Lancaster.
ReplyDeleteMahony personally phoned the priests' therapists about their progress, wrote the priests encouraging letters and dispatched Curry to visit them at a New Mexico facility, Servants of the Paraclete, that treated pedophile priests.
"Each of you there at Jemez Springs is very much in my prayers and I call you to mind each day during my celebration of the Eucharist," Mahony wrote to Wempe.
The month after he was named archbishop, Mahony met with Garcia to discuss his molestation of boys, according to a letter the priest wrote while in therapy. Mahony instructed him to be "very low key" and assured him "no one was looking at him for any criminal action," Garcia recalled in a letter to an official at Servants of the Paraclete.
In a statement Monday on behalf of the archdiocese, a lawyer for the church said its policy in the late 1980s was to let victims and their families decide whether to go to the police.
"Not surprisingly, the families of victims frequently did not wish to report to police and have their child become the center of a public prosecution," lawyer J. Michael Hennigan wrote.
He acknowledged memos written in those years "sometimes focused more on the needs of the perpetrator than on the serious harm that had been done to the victims."
"That is part of the past," Hennigan wrote. "We are embarrassed and at times ashamed by parts of the past. But we are proud of our progress, which is continuing."
Hennigan said that the years in which Mahony dealt with Garcia were "a period of deepening understanding of the nature of the problem of sex abuse both here and in our society in general" and that the archdiocese subsequently changed completely its approach to reports of abuse.
"We now have retired FBI agents who thoroughly investigate every allegation, even anonymous calls. We aggressively assist in the criminal prosecution of offenders," Hennigan wrote.
Mahony and Curry have been questioned under oath in depositions numerous times about their handling of molestation cases. The men, however, have never been questioned about attempts to stymie law enforcement, because the personnel files documenting those discussions were only provided to civil attorneys in recent months.
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In a 2010 deposition, Mahony acknowledged the archdiocese had never called police to report sexual abuse by a priest before 2000. He said church officials were unable to do so because they didn't know the names of the children harmed.
ReplyDelete"In my experience, you can only call the police when you've got victims you can talk to," Mahony said.
When an attorney for an alleged victim suggested "the right thing to do" would have been to summon police immediately, Mahony replied, "Well, today it would. But back then that isn't the way those matters were approached."
Since clergy weren't legally required to report suspected child abuse until 1997, Mahony said, the people who should have alerted police about pedophiles like Baker and Wempe were victims' therapists or other "mandatory reporters" of child abuse.
"Psychologists, counselors … they were also the first ones to learn [of abuse] so they were normally the ones who made the reports," he said.
In Garcia's 451-page personnel file, one voice decried the church's failures to protect the victims and condemned the priest as someone who deserved to be behind bars. Father Arturo Gomez, an associate pastor at a Spanish-speaking church near Olvera Street, wrote to a regional bishop in 1989, saying he was "angry" and "disappointed" at the church's failure to help Garcia's victims. He expressed shock that the bishop, Juan A. Arzube, had told the family of two of the boys that Garcia had thought of taking his own life.
"You seemed to be at that moment more concern[ed] for the criminal rather than the victum! (sic)" Gomez wrote to Arzube in 1989.
Gomez urged church leaders to identify others who may have been harmed by Garcia and to get them help, but was told they didn't know how.
"If I was the father … Peter Garcia would be in prison now; and I would probably have begun a lawsuit against the archdiocese," the priest wrote in the letter. "The parents … of the two boys are more forgiving and compassionate than I would be."
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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-files-20130122,0,3114631.story
Church sex abuse files unlikely to lead to charges, experts say
ReplyDeleteStatute of limitations is the main stumbling block to prosecuting Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and aides in the sex abuse files from the 1980s released this week, experts say.
By Harriet Ryan, Ashley Powers and Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times January 22, 2013
Over the last decade, there have been numerous calls to prosecute Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and his top aides for their mishandling of clergy sex abuse. At least three grand juries, two district attorneys and a U.S. attorney have subpoenaed documents and summoned witnesses. None of those cases resulted in charges against the archdiocese's hierarchy.
The release this week of a trove of internal church records showing a concerted effort to hide abuse from police triggered new demands from victims and church critics that Mahony and his advisors be held criminally accountable.
The Los Angeles County district attorney pledged to review all the files and evaluate them for criminal conduct, but legal experts consulted Tuesday said the reams of new documents were unlikely to lead to charges, let alone convictions.
A nearly insurmountable barrier is the statute of limitations, the experts said. A quarter-century has passed since Mahony and his chief aide for sex abuse cases, Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, wrote memos outlining strategies to prevent police investigations of three priests who had admitted abusing boys. The 1986 and 1987 letters fall decades beyond the three-year statute of limitations for felonies such as child endangerment, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to commit those offenses.
"I can't imagine them figuring a theory out that goes back that far," said veteran defense attorney Harland Braun.
While there are a number of different federal and state laws that deal with concealment of crimes, none have statutes of limitations long enough to cover acts in the 1980s, said Rebecca Lonergan, a USC law professor and a former prosecutor.
"It's tough, very tough," Lonergan said. The only possible way to prosecute would be if the cover-up continued through 2010, an almost inconceivable scenario given reforms made by the archdiocese, she said.
After the scandal broke in 2002, the L.A. Archdiocese removed accused abusers from ministry, issued a lengthy public report naming abusers and adopted wide-ranging measures to protect children, including fingerprinting of employees.
Perhaps the only possible charge for which the statute of limitations hasn't run out is perjury, said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson.
"If Mahony lied under oath in a lawsuit or grand jury or lied to a federal investigator, and the documents show something to the contrary, they might be able to bring charges on perjury or false statement," Levenson said. She added, however, that those types of cases are generally very difficult to prove in court.
"I think people desperately want Mahony to have more accountability for what happened, but it would be very difficult in the criminal justice system," she said.
Mahony and Curry have been deposed numerous times about their handling of abuse cases, but they were never asked about the attempts to avoid law enforcement detailed in the newly released files, attorneys said.
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In addition to the passage of time is the issue of whether what Mahony and Curry did constituted a crime in the 1980s. The memos the men wrote made clear that they were aware children had been raped and otherwise assaulted and were attempting to keep authorities in the dark. They discussed giving the abusive priests out-of-state assignments and keeping them from seeing therapists who might have alerted law enforcement.
ReplyDeleteAfter the files were released, Mahony issued a statement in which he apologized and recounted humbling meetings with about 90 victims of abuse.
"I am sorry," he wrote.
Former Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who oversaw a fruitless investigation of the church hierarchy in the mid-2000s, said "it would be great to prosecute" Mahony and Curry but noted that clergy were not required to report suspected child abuse to authorities until 1997.
"Whatever they did back then is horrendous, unethical and immoral to the point of biblical proportions, but it may not be criminal," said Cooley, who retired last year.
The five-year investigation Cooley supervised led to convictions of a handful of priests but no charges against supervisors in the archdiocese. In 2007, he announced he was placing that part of the probe on hold until authorities could gain access to more internal church records. A spokeswoman for current Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey declined to say whether the prosecutors already had seen the files made public in a civil court case Monday. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, which convened its own grand jury in 2009 to look into the hierarchy, declined to comment.
Files related to 75 more priests are expected to be made public in coming weeks.
An attorney for the archdiocese said Tuesday that he did not believe the information in the files could be the basis for prosecution.
"Criminal misconduct is something vastly different than simply not reporting to police," attorney J. Michael Hennigan said, adding, "That's not to say that a creative prosecutor might not take a different view."
He said the church's policy in the 1980s was to let victims and their parents decide whether to go to authorities.
If prosecutors were to try to proceed under a theory of conspiracy to commit crimes such as child endangerment, they would face the challenging task of proving that church officials' intent was to harm children and not just protect the archdiocese from scandal.
"It's hard to sway jurors that players in the church intended for children to be abused," said Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University in New York and a consultant to a 2005 grand jury report about abuse in the Philadelphia archdiocese.
The first time a member of the Catholic hierarchy has been held criminally liable in the U.S. for covering up sex abuse occurred in Philadelphia. Msgr. William Lynn, who handled job assignments as secretary of clergy, had returned an abusive priest to ministry in the mid-1990s. The priest went on to sexually assault a 10-year-old altar boy in 1999, prosecutors said. Lynn was sentenced last summer to three to six years in prison for child endangerment.
His prosecution was enabled by recent changes to state law that extended the statute of limitations for some victims and expanded child endangerment laws to include supervisors whose employees abused children, Hamilton said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-files-20130123,0,3180168.story
Cardinal Mahony relieved of duties over handling of abuse
ReplyDeleteL.A. Archbishop Jose Gomez takes action against his predecessor for his role in the priest sex scandal; another top church official resigns from his post
By Harriet Ryan and Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times February 1, 2013
In a move unprecedented in the American Catholic Church, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez announced Thursday that he had relieved his predecessor, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, of all public duties over his mishandling of clergy sex abuse of children decades ago.
Gomez also said that Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Curry, who worked with Mahony to conceal abusers from police in the 1980s, had resigned his post as a regional bishop in Santa Barbara.
The announcement came as the church posted on its website tens of thousands of pages of previously secret personnel files for 122 priests accused of molesting children.
"I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil," Gomez wrote in a letter addressed to "My brothers and sisters in Christ."
The release of the records and the rebuke of the two central figures in L.A.'s molestation scandal signaled a clear desire by Gomez to define the sexual abuse crisis as a problem of a different era — and a different archbishop.
"I cannot undo the failings of the past that we find in these pages. Reading these files, reflecting on the wounds that were caused has been the saddest experience I've had since becoming your Archbishop in 2011," Gomez wrote.
The public censure of Mahony, whose quarter-century at the helm of America's largest archdiocese made him one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church, was unparalleled, experts said.
"This is very unusual and shows really how seriously they're taking this. To tell a cardinal he can't do confirmations, can't do things in public, that's extraordinary," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and Georgetown University fellow.
An archdiocese spokesman, Tod Tamberg, said that beyond canceling his confirmation schedule, Mahony's day-to-day life as a retired priest would be largely unchanged. He resides at a North Hollywood parish, and Tamberg said he would remain a "priest in good standing." He can continue to celebrate Mass and will be eligible to vote for pope until he turns 80 two years from now, Tamberg said.
The move further stained the legacy of Mahony, a tireless advocate for Latinos and undocumented immigrants whose reputation has been marred over the last decade by revelations about his treatment of sex abuse allegations.
Before Gomez's announcement, Mahony had weathered three grand jury investigations and numerous calls for his resignation. He stayed in office until the Vatican's mandatory retirement age of 75. No criminal charges have been filed against Mahony or anyone in the church hierarchy.
Terrence McKiernan, president of bishopaccountability.org, said that in a religious institution that values saving face and protecting its own, Gomez's decision to publicly criticize an elder statesman of the church and his top aide was striking.
"Even when Cardinal [Bernard] Law was removed in Boston, which was arguably for the same offenses, this kind of gesture was not made," he said.
Law left office in 2002 amid mounting outrage over his transfer of pedophile priests from parish to parish, but the church presented his departure as of his own accord and he was later given a highly coveted Vatican job in Rome.
Bishop Thomas J. O'Brien of Phoenix relinquished some of his authority in a deal with prosecutors to avoid criminal charges for his handling of abuse cases, but he kept his title and many of his duties. A Kansas City bishop convicted last year of failing to report child abuse retained his position.
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The Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer and Dominican priest who has testified across the nation as an expert witness in clergy sex abuse cases, said the Vatican would have "absolutely" been consulted on a decision of this magnitude.
ReplyDelete"This is momentous, there is no question," he said. "For something like this to happen to a cardinal.... The way they treat cardinals is as if they're one step below God."
Gomez's decision capped a two-week period in which the publication of 25-year-old files fueled a new round of condemnation of the L.A. archdiocese. The files of 14 clerics accused of abuse became public in a court case last Monday. They laid out in Mahony and Curry's own words how the church hierarchy had plotted to keep law enforcement from learning that children had been molested at the hands of priests.
To stave off investigations, Mahony and Curry gave priests they knew had abused children out-of-state assignments and kept them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities.
Mahony and Curry both issued apologies, with the cardinal saying he had not realized the extent of harm done to children until he met with victims during civil litigation. "I am sorry," he said.
Victims called for new criminal investigations and the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said it was reviewing the newly released files.
At the same time, a five-year battle over the release of confidential church records on abuser priests was drawing to a close. Under the church's 2007 settlement with more than 500 victims, the archdiocese was required to hand over the personnel files of every cleric accused of abuse.
The church waged unsuccessful battles to keep much of the material secret and later to ensure that the names of Mahony, Curry and other church employees were blacked out.
On Wednesday, church lawyers abruptly announced they planned to provide victims' lawyers with unredacted files that included the names of everyone in supervisory roles. On Thursday afternoon, a judge signed a final order requiring the archdiocese to hand over the files within three weeks.
An hour later, a spokesman for the church released Gomez's statement and the files were posted on the archdiocese website.
McKiernan of bishopaccountability.org noted that Mahony will keep the title of "archbishop emeritus" and suggested his removal from public life was primarily an effort to blunt the wave of criticism likely to follow the file release.
"They are trying to gain control of what is truly a devastating time for them," he said.
The files released Thursday contained additional evidence of attempts by Curry and Mahony to stymie police investigations.
In a 1988 memo about Father Nicolas Aguilar-Rivera, a Mexican priest accused of molesting more than 20 boys during a nine-month stay in Los Angeles, Curry expressed a desire to keep a list of parish altar boys from investigators.
"The whole issue of our records is a very sensitive one, and I am reluctant to give any list to the police," Curry wrote.
At the bottom of the memo, Mahony replied: "We cannot give such a list for no cause whatsoever."
The police charged Aguilar-Rivera, but after receiving a warning from Curry, he went to Mexico. He remains a fugitive.
In some memos, archdiocesan officials appeared concerned only with the church's reputation and displayed little sympathy for the victims of abuse. In a 1990 note about Father George Neville Rucker, who authorities believe molested 30 children, an unidentified church official wrote that three women had contacted the archdiocese alleging that the priest molested them decades earlier when they were children.
"One of these days, they may happen to meet and all hell will break loose," the official wrote.
Times staff writers Ashley Powers, Hector Becerra, Jack Leonard, Robert Faturechi and Abby Sewell contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0201-mahony-curry-20130201,0,3889565.story
Cardinal Mahony says he was not equipped to handle priest abuse
ReplyDeleteLos Angeles Times February 1, 2013
Cardinal Roger M. Mahony responded Friday to Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez's decision to relieve him of all public duties over his mishandling of clergy sex abuse of children, saying he did all he could to protect children.
...
Mahony posted the letter, addressed to Gomez, on his blog Friday afternoon. In the letter, he outlined the steps his administration had taken to address the priest abuse scandal and to create policies to prevent further such abuse.
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In his letter Friday, Mahony said he did the best he could to handle the abuse cases.
"Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem," he wrote. "In two years [1962—1964] spent in graduate school earning a master’s degree in social work, no textbook and no lecture ever referred to the sexual abuse of children. While there was some information dealing with child neglect, sexual abuse was never discussed."
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Gomez issued another statement Friday afternoon: It read: "Questions from the faithful and some members of the news media indicate that it would be helpful for me to clarify the status of Cardinal Roger Mahony and Bishop Thomas Curry.
Cardinal Mahony, as Archbishop Emeritus, and Bishop Curry, as Auxiliary Bishop, remain bishops in good standing in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, with full rights to celebrate the Holy Sacraments of the Church and to minister to the faithful without restriction."]
... read the full article at:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/02/cardinal-mahony-priest-abuse.html
Priests ecclesiastical missteps treated more sternly than abuse
ReplyDeleteFiles detail cases in which L.A. Archdiocese officials displayed outrage over a priest's violation of canon law while doing little for victims of his sexual abuse.
By Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers and Harriet Ryan, Los Angeles Times February 1, 2013
The archdiocese of Los Angeles learned in the late 1970s that one of its priests had sexually assaulted a 16-year-old boy so violently that he was left bleeding and "in a state of shock." The priest said he was too drunk to remember what happened and officials took no further action.
But two decades later, word reached Cardinal Roger M. Mahony that the same priest was molesting again and improperly performing the sacrament of confession on his victim. The archdiocese sprang to action: It dispatched investigators, interviewed a raft of witnesses and discussed the harshest of all church penalties—not for the abuse but for the violation of church law.
"Given the seriousness of this abuse of the sacrament of penance … it is your responsibility to formally declare the existence of the excommunication and then refer the matter to Rome," one cleric told Mahony in a memo.
The case of Father Jose Ugarte is one of several instances detailed in newly released records in which archdiocese officials displayed outrage over a priest's ecclesiastical missteps while doing little for the victims of his sexual abuse.
The revelations emerged from 12,000 pages of the once-confidential personnel files of more than 100 priests accused of abuse. The archdiocese posted the documents on its website Thursday night, an hour after a Los Angeles judge ended five and a half years of legal wrangling over the release of the files with an order compelling the church to make the documents public within three weeks.
Victims, their lawyers, reporters and members of the public spent hours Friday poring through records that stretched back to the 1940s and provided details about the scope of abuse in church ranks never before seen.
The files also suggested that the attempts to protect abusers from law enforcement extended beyond the L.A. archdiocese to a Catholic order tasked with rehabilitating abusers.
"Once more, we ask you to PLEASE DESTROY THESE PAGES AND ANY OTHER MATERIAL YOU HAVE RECEIVED FROM US," the acting director of the order's treatment program wrote to Mahony in 1988 in a letter detailing therapists' reports about a prolific molester. "This is stated for your own and our legal protection."
The order, the Servants of the Paraclete, closed the New Mexico facility where many Los Angeles priests were sent amid a flood of lawsuits in the mid-1990s. A lawyer for the order declined to comment, but indicated in a 2011 civil court filing that all treatment records were destroyed.
Mahony disregarded the order's advice, and therapy memos are among the most detailed records in the files.
One evaluation recounts how Father Joseph Pina, an East L.A. parish priest, said he was attracted to a victim, an eighth-grade girl, when he saw her in a costume.
"She dressed as Snow White … I had a crush on Snow White, so I started to open myself up to her," he told the psychologist. In a report sent to a top Mahony aide, the psychologist expressed concern the abuse was never reported to authorities.
"All so very sad," Mahony wrote years later after Pina was placed on leave. He was defrocked in 2006.
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The limitations of the treatment at the Servants' center are evident in the file. After months of therapy in 1994, Father John Dawson was allowed to leave the facility for a weekend. Among the first things Dawson, who had been accused of plying altar boy victims with pot and beer, did was apply for a job at the Arizona Boys School in Phoenix. Treatment center staff found out only after the school phoned Dawson to arrange an interview. "Had they not called the Villa, it is doubtful that Fr. Dawson would have informed us of that job application and interview," according to a 1994 letter to Mahony's vicar for clergy, Msgr. Timothy Dyer.
ReplyDeleteIn some cases, the behavior that drew the greatest ire of the hierarchy involved breaking church rather than criminal laws. After first learning of Michael Baker's abuse of boys in 1986, church leaders sent the priest to therapy, then returned him to ministry believing his word that he would stay away from children.
Yet in 2000, information that Baker was performing baptisms without permission set off a new level of alarm among the church's top officials. They discussed launching a canonical investigation, and for the first time in Baker's checkered years with the church, officials raised the prospect of contacting police.
They mulled getting a restraining order to keep him away from churches.
"Please proceed — this is very bad!" Mahony scrawled across the bottom of a memo on starting a church investigation into the baptisms. Ultimately, church officials did not seek a restraining order.
Archdiocese officials finally contacted police about Baker's abuse of children when the scandal erupted in 2002.
Full coverage: Priest Abuse Scandal
Father Lynn Caffoe was sent to a Maryland treatment center in 1991. In a letter to the center, Dyer said that "apart from Father Caffoe's behavior with minors" the church was also concerned about his failure "to record any of the 60 additional baptisms … and … there have been nearly 100 marriages he has not documented."
"In the matter of failure to record sacramental events — this is not just unprofessional, but a terribly serious matter in parish life," Dyer said, adding that Caffoe had told a supervisor the records were "in a box somewhere" but never produced them.
In Ugarte's case, it was a second complaint from a victim that led to the full-scale canonical investigation of his administration of the sacraments. In the early 1990s, the teenage boy mentioned to church officials that Ugarte had ended each episode of molestation by absolving him of sin.
"What really confused me was the fact that after taking advantage of me, he would place his hand on my forehead and give me a prayer of absolution. While I felt forgiven by God, I still felt dirty," the victim wrote. He told church officials he had been abused by Ugarte about 15 times. Mahony ultimately dropped the attempt to excommunicate the priest and instead placed him on inactive leave.
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The focus on religious rather than sexual transgression appeared to reflect church leaders' unease with sexual topics and comfort with the clearly spelled-out world of canon law. In a posting on his blog Friday,
ReplyDeleteMahony blamed ignorance for his mishandling of abusers.
"Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem," he said. When he got his social work degree, he wrote, "No textbook and no lecture ever referred to the sexual abuse of children."
Richard Sipe, a former priest and a consultant to victims' attorneys in clergy sex abuse cases, said most priests learned about sexual deviance in the confessional and were perhaps more apt to consider child sex abuse as a sin to be absolved rather than adjudicated in a court.
"They think, 'We are the arbiters of sin,'" he said. "That's why you hear them saying, 'We had to keep this confidential, we can't say anything about sins.'"
He also said that the hierarchy may have been reacting to what they perceived as a direct challenge to church authorities.
"This is a problem of power and control," Sipe said.
Nicholas Cafardi, a professor at Duquesne University and a canon law expert who served as general counsel for the Pittsburgh diocese, said sexual abuse of children had been an ecclesiastical crime since the seventh century but had not been properly treated within the Catholic Church before the mid-1990s.
"When it came to treating sexual abuse of children as an ecclesiastical crime, the church legal system failed," he said. He added that church officials may have decided to more aggressively crack down on other violations of canon law because of a five-year statute of limitations when it came to sex abuse cases.
Full coverage: Priest Abuse Scandal
The church fought all the way to the state Supreme Court to keep many of the records secret. The archdiocese abandoned a plan make the documents public with the names of the hierarchy blacked out only after media organizations, including The Times, sued in court. The judge sided with the media, but in many of the documents posted online, Mahony's name and that of his top aide on abuse in the 1980s, Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Curry, are still redacted.
Asked about the redactions, a lawyer for the archdiocese, J. Michael Hennigan, pledged to "fix it."
"It was our intention to always release the Cardinal and Bishop Curry's names when they appeared," he wrote in an email.
Times staff writers Scott Glover, Abby Sewell, Jack Leonard, Jack Dolan, Jason Felch, Dan Weikel, Laura Nelson, Andrew Khouri, Garrett Therolf, Nita Lelyveld, Hailey Branson-Potts, Kim Christensen and Richard Winton contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-priest-files-20130202,0,2178748.story
Child abuse cases covered up by papal elector are settled in $10m deal
ReplyDeleteRoger Mahony, who is at Rome conclave choosing next pope, protected Los Angeles priest who admitted molesting children
The Guardian UK March 13, 2013
Two child abuse cases involving a cover-up by one of the cardinals electing the next pope have been settled as part of a $10m (£6.6m) out-of-court deal in Los Angeles.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles will make the payouts to victims of a now-defrocked priest who told Cardinal Roger Mahony nearly 30 years ago that he had molested children.
The cases involving ex-priest Michael Baker span 26 years, from 1974 to 2000. Two were set for trial next month. The cases were settled this week.
Two of the claims alleged Mahony didn't do enough to stop Baker from abusing children, said the plaintiffs' attorney John Manly.
Mahony retired as Los Angeles archbishop in 2011 and was rebuked by his successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez, in February after confidential church files showed the cardinal worked behind the scenes to shield molesting priests and protect the church from scandal.
Mahony, one of the cardinals in Rome helping select the next pope, was aware of the settlement, said J Michael Hennigan, an archdiocese attorney. "We have for a long, long time said that we made serious mistakes with Michael Baker and we had always taken the position in these cases that whatever Baker did we were responsible for," he said.
Baker could not be reached for comment. Mahony has apologised repeatedly for his handling of clergy abuse cases. The cardinal was sequestered for the papal conclave and could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
Manly said: "The person who could have stopped this in its tracks and prevented three out of four of these children from being sexually assaulted is now sitting in Rome voting for the next vicar of Christ," said Manly. "I find that terribly troubling."
Two of the plaintiffs, a pair of brothers, will get $4m each and the two others will get nearly $1m each, Manly said.
Confidential files show that Baker met with Mahony in 1986 and confessed to molesting two boys over a nearly seven-year period. Mahony removed Baker from ministry and sent him for psychological treatment but the priest returned to ministry the following year with a doctor's recommendation that he be defrocked immediately if he spent any time with minors.
Despite several documented instances of being alone with boys the priest wasn't removed from ministry until 2000 after serving in nine parishes.
Baker was convicted of child molestation in 2007 and paroled in 2011. Baker was charged in 2002 with 34 counts of molestation involving six victims but those charges were dismissed because they fell outside the criminal statute of limitations.
Authorities believe Baker may have abused more than 20 children in his 26-year career.
The archdiocese settled more than 500 clergy abuse lawsuits in 2007 for a record-breaking $660m.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/13/sex-cases-conclave-cardinal-settled
Sex-abuse investigations rip open Catholic Church's secret files
ReplyDeleteFor centuries, the church has maintained a second set of books containing sensitive documents such as notes on priests' alcohol abuse, disputes over parish funds and, later, molestation allegations.
By Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times May 27, 2013
Preparing for his return to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles after six months' treatment at a center for pedophile priests, Father Michael Wempe sat down to type out a list of concerns. Arrangements for his dog. Counseling and support groups for himself.
Above everything, he wrote at the top of the list in the 1987 memo: "Confidentiality — Reports from here destroyed, even this paper."
Wempe had good reason for the request. The reports from the center laid out how he had confessedto molesting young boys. Wempe's therapists also urged church officials to immediately destroy everything. If the papers fell in the hands of law enforcement, the priest, the archdiocese and the treatment center could be in serious trouble.
But Cardinal Roger Mahony and other church leaders ignored the warnings. Rather than shred or burn the reports, they preserved them in carefully organized file cabinets where they remained until this year.
The release of those records — and thousands of pages of other damaging abuse documents in January — begged a question: Why did the church hold on to decades-old evidence of its priests' sins?
The explanation lies in centuries of Catholic Church history and is a tale involving secret betrothals, scandal, even a murder or two. Since the time of the Enlightenment, the Catholic Church has maintained two sets of records: one for the mundane and a second "secret archive" for matters of a sensitive nature. The cache — known as sub secreto files, Canon 489 files, confidential files or C-files — was to be kept under lock and key, only for the eyes of the bishop and his trusted few.
After the files became known to prosecutors and plaintiff's lawyers, the American justice system has pried open the doors to an archive long kept sealed. Thousands of additional pages are set to become public in coming months, as more than a dozen Catholic orders — Salesians, Claretians, Vincentians and others — prepare to bare their own secrets pursuant to agreements with victims. L.A. County Superior Court Judge Emilie Elias could set the date for their release at a hearing Tuesday.
For some, the revelations were damning. For others, they offered validation for dark, private memories.
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The files were never meant to go beyond church walls.
The earliest mention of the secret archives in church history dates to the 1700s, in an edict on marriage issued by Pope Benedict XIV. The archives were to bear witness to "marriages of conscience" — unions that may be banned under civil law or otherwise scandalous, but celebrated by a priest in secrecy.
In the 20th century, when church law regulating the archives were written, Canon 489 prescribed that there was to be "a safe or cabinet, completely closed and locked, which cannot be removed" to which only the bishop would hold the key.
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Safeguarding the files was not taken lightly. One scholar suggested in 1954 that files could be kept in "modern safes" that could "withstand concentrated burglarious attacks by drills, sledge hammers, wedges and mechanical tools."
ReplyDeleteOver time, the files came to hold information about priests' alcohol problems, squabbles over parish funds, clerics who had impregnated parishioners. By the 1970s and '80s, church leaders found themselves increasingly documenting in the files whispers of a more disturbing sort: sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests.
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Few outside the innermost circles of the church knew of the trove's existence until the late 1980s, when Minneapolis attorney Jeff Anderson received a tip from a priest that evidence of molestation was probably sitting somewhere within the local diocese. Anderson and other victims' lawyers subpoenaed the secret files. Church lawyers resisted, arguing that forcing the church to disclose the files was an infringement of its right to religious freedom.
It doesn't matter "whether the church gives a file a particular name," judges ruled in one 1988 Pennsylvania case, ordering the disclosure of the file of a priest who allegedly molested a "mildly retarded" boy for nearly a decade.
Such decisions set off alarm bells. One Cleveland bishop suggested at a canon law society meeting that precautions could be taken ahead of time.
"If there's something there you really don't want people to see you might send it off to the Apostolic Delegate," A. James Quinn said in 1990, referring to the Vatican's embassy. "They have immunity to protect something that is potentially dangerous."
Anderson said that when he finally laid hands on the files, he felt shivers.
"It makes you both excited and sick at the same time," he said.
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Prosecutors in Toledo, Ohio, stumbled upon archives there while investigating a cold-case murder of a nun.
They had their suspicions trained on Father Gerald Robinson, believing that new forensic technology linked him to the 1980 death of the nun, who was covered with an altar cloth and stabbed 31 times. In 2004, they subpoenaed the local diocese for Robinson's file but were incredulous at how little the church offered.
"I said, 'Three pages! He's been working there for 20 years!' " said Thomas Matuszak, then a Lucas County prosecutor.
Matuszak spent two weeks poring over canon law and applied for a search warrant for the secret files, using church law as probable cause. Detectives went to the diocesan headquarters with the warrant and came away with a 148-page file, including another priest's letter laying out his suspicions of Robinson. The priest was convicted in 2006.
In Pennsylvania, it was an accused septuagenarian murderer who sought the secret files. The man, David Stewart, had shot and killed a priest whom he suspected of having an affair with his wife. He demanded the Rev. Leo Heineman's records to prove he had fired the gun in self-defense.
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After a seven-year battle that went to the state Supreme Court, the church was ordered in 1997 to turn over the file. In it was a letter regarding the priest's alcohol treatment and an anonymous letter about his erratic behavior, according to local reports. Stewart was convicted the following year of manslaughter but cleared of premeditated murder.
ReplyDelete::
When claims of molestation by priests flooded into the L.A. Archdiocese after the sex-abuse scandal erupted in 2002, church leaders' reaction was to reach for each priest's C-file. Some already had a thick volume chronicling a troubled history. Others had none, and a new file was created.
New accusers wrote to the archdiocese about Wempe, by then serving as a chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
"I should have written this letter many years ago," one man wrote in a letter that was added to Wempe's lengthy file. "It would happen during weekend trips to the mountains … a cabin, and in a vacation trailer."
Within months, the district attorney obtained grand jury subpoenas demanding the archdiocese hand over the confidential files. The church fought prosecutors to the U.S. Supreme Court but ultimately lost. Wempe was convicted in 2006 of molestation and sentenced to three years in prison.
It would take a six-year legal fight for the church to publicly release 375 pages from Wempe's file dating back to 1978.
In the pages were not only Wempe's abuses, but the blunt words of church leaders who clearly thought no one outside the church would ever read the secret file. There were mentions of the criminal implications of Wempe's acts and how to keep the police from finding out.
"Discussed aiding victims and the problem that might cause," an unnamed church official wrote in 1987 summarizing a conversation with Wempe.
Terry McKiernan, founder of BishopAccountability.org which collects clergy sex-abuse related documents from across the U.S., said Mahony was clearly a far more meticulous keeper of records than his predecessors and that may have hurt him when the archive was made public.
"I don't know of any other diocesan archive where scheming to manipulate reporting laws and access of law enforcement to these cases is as explicit as in these L.A. documents," he said.
Nicholas Cafardi, a canon law professor and former general counsel with the Diocese of Pittsburgh, said that although "secret archives" may sound nefarious, they were like any other church records dating back to the Gospels.
"The church expects to be here forever," he said. "They never know when they're going to need it."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-secret-files-20130528,0,1511948.story
L.A. church leaders sought to hide sex abuse cases from authorities
ReplyDeleteDocuments from the late 1980s show that Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and another archdiocese official discussed strategies to keep police from discovering that children were being sexually abused by priests.
By Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers and Harriet Ryan, Los Angeles Times January 21, 2013
Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor plotted to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement, including keeping them out of California to avoid prosecution, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.
The archdiocese's failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese's chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation's largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders' own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.
In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.
One such case that has previously received little attention is that of Msgr. Peter Garcia, who admitted preying for decades on undocumented children in predominantly Spanish-speaking parishes. After Garcia's discharge from a New Mexico treatment center for pedophile clergy, Mahony ordered him to stay away from California "for the foreseeable future" in order to avoid legal accountability, the files show. "I believe that if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors," the archbishop wrote to the treatment center's director in July 1986.
The following year, in a letter to Mahony about bringing Garcia back to work in the archdiocese, Curry said he was worried that victims in Los Angeles might see the priest and call police.
"[T]here are numerous — maybe twenty — adolescents or young adults that Peter was involved with in a first degree felony manner. The possibility of one of these seeing him is simply too great," Curry wrote in May 1987.
Garcia returned to the Los Angeles area later that year; the archdiocese did not give him a ministerial assignment because he refused to take medication to suppress his sexual urges. He left the priesthood in 1989, according to the church.
Garcia was never prosecuted and died in 2009. The files show he admitted to a therapist that he had sexually abused boys "on and off" since his 1966 ordination. He assured church officials his victims were unlikely to come forward because of their immigration status. In at least one case, according to a church memo, he threatened to have a boy he had raped deported if he went to police.
The memos are from personnel files for 14 priests submitted to a judge on behalf of a man who claims he was abused by one of the priests, Father Nicholas Aguilar Rivera. The man's attorney, Anthony De Marco, wrote in court papers the files show "a practice of thwarting law enforcement investigations" by the archdiocese. It's not always clear from the records whether the church followed through on all its discussions about eluding police, but in some cases, such as Garcia’s, it did.
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Mahony, who retired in 2011, has apologized repeatedly for errors in handling abuse allegations. In a statement Monday, he apologized once again and recounted meetings he's had with about 90 victims of abuse.
ReplyDelete"I have a 3 x 5 card for every victim I met with on the altar of my small chapel. I pray for them every single day," he wrote. "As I thumb through those cards I often pause as I am reminded of each personal story and the anguish that accompanies that life story."
"It remains my daily and fervent prayer that God's grace will flood the heart and soul of each victim, and that their life-journey continues forward with ever greater healing," he added. "I am sorry."
Curry did not return calls seeking comment. He currently serves as the archdiocese's auxiliary bishop for Santa Barbara.
The confidential files of at least 75 more accused abusers are slated to become public in coming weeks under the terms of a 2007 civil settlement with more than 500 victims. A private mediator had ordered the names of the church hierarchy redacted from those documents, but after objections from The Times and the Associated Press, a Superior Court judge ruled that the names of Mahony, Curry and others in supervisory roles should not be blacked out.
Garcia's was one of three cases in 1987 in which top church officials discussed ways they could stymie law enforcement. In a letter about Father Michael Wempe, who had acknowledged using a 12-year-old parishioner as what a church official called his "sex partner," Curry recounted extensive conversations with the priest about potential criminal prosecution.
"He is afraid ... records will be sought by the courts at some time and that they could convict him," Curry wrote to Mahony. "He is very aware that what he did comes within the scope of criminal law."
Curry proposed Wempe could go to an out-of-state diocese "if need be." He called it "surprising" that a church-paid counselor hadn't reported Wempe to police and wrote that he and Wempe "agreed it would be better if Mike did not return to him."
Perhaps, Curry added, the priest could be sent to "a lawyer who is also a psychiatrist" thereby putting "the reports under the protection of privilege."
Curry expressed similar concerns to Mahony about Father Michael Baker, who had admitted his abuse of young boys during a private 1986 meeting with the archbishop.
In a memo about Baker's return to ministry, Curry wrote, "I see a difficulty here, in that if he were to mention his problem with child abuse it would put the therapist in the position of having to report him … he cannot mention his past problem."
Mahony's response to the memo was handwritten across the bottom of the page: "Sounds good —please proceed!!" Two decades would pass before authorities gathered enough information to convict Baker and Wempe of abusing boys.
Federal and state prosecutors have investigated possible conspiracy cases against the archdiocese hierarchy. Former Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said in 2007 that his probe into the conduct of high-ranking church officials was on hold until his prosecutors could access the personnel files of all the abusers. The U.S. attorney's office convened a grand jury in 2009, but no charges resulted.
During those investigations, the church was forced by judges to turn over some but not all of the records to prosecutors. The district attorney's office has said its prosecutors plan to review priest personnel files as they are released.
Mahony was appointed archbishop in 1985 after five years leading the Stockton diocese. While there, he had dealt with three allegations of clergy abuse, including one case in which he personally reported the priest to police.
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In Los Angeles, he tapped Curry, an Irish-born priest, as vicar of clergy. The records show that sex abuse allegations were handled almost exclusively by the archbishop and his vicar. Memos that crossed their desks included graphic details, such as one letter from another priest accusing Garcia of tying up and raping a young boy in Lancaster.
ReplyDeleteMahony personally phoned the priests' therapists about their progress, wrote the priests encouraging letters and dispatched Curry to visit them at a New Mexico facility, Servants of the Paraclete, that treated pedophile priests.
"Each of you there at Jemez Springs is very much in my prayers and I call you to mind each day during my celebration of the Eucharist," Mahony wrote to Wempe.
The month after he was named archbishop, Mahony met with Garcia to discuss his molestation of boys, according to a letter the priest wrote while in therapy. Mahony instructed him to be "very low key" and assured him "no one was looking at him for any criminal action," Garcia recalled in a letter to an official at Servants of the Paraclete.
In a statement Monday on behalf of the archdiocese, a lawyer for the church said its policy in the late 1980s was to let victims and their families decide whether to go to the police.
"Not surprisingly, the families of victims frequently did not wish to report to police and have their child become the center of a public prosecution," lawyer J. Michael Hennigan wrote.
He acknowledged memos written in those years "sometimes focused more on the needs of the perpetrator than on the serious harm that had been done to the victims."
"That is part of the past," Hennigan wrote. "We are embarrassed and at times ashamed by parts of the past. But we are proud of our progress, which is continuing."
Hennigan said that the years in which Mahony dealt with Garcia were "a period of deepening understanding of the nature of the problem of sex abuse both here and in our society in general" and that the archdiocese subsequently changed completely its approach to reports of abuse.
"We now have retired FBI agents who thoroughly investigate every allegation, even anonymous calls. We aggressively assist in the criminal prosecution of offenders," Hennigan wrote.
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Mahony and Curry have been questioned under oath in depositions numerous times about their handling of molestation cases. The men, however, have never been asked about attempts to stymie law enforcement, because the personnel files documenting those discussions were only provided to civil attorneys in recent months. De Marco, the lawyer who filed the records in civil court this month, asked a judge last week to order Curry and Mahony to submit to new depositions “regarding their actions, knowledge and intent as referenced in these files.” A hearing on that request is set for February.
ReplyDeleteIn a 2010 deposition, Mahony acknowledged the archdiocese had never called police to report sexual abuse by a priest before 2000. He said church officials were unable to do so because they didn't know the names of the children harmed.
"In my experience, you can only call the police when you've got victims you can talk to," Mahony said.
When an attorney for an alleged victim suggested "the right thing to do" would have been to summon police immediately, Mahony replied, "Well, today it would. But back then that isn't the way those matters were approached."
Since clergy weren't legally required to report suspected child abuse until 1997, Mahony said, the people who should have alerted police about pedophiles like Baker and Wempe were victims' therapists or other "mandatory reporters" of child abuse.
"Psychologists, counselors … they were also the first ones to learn [of abuse] so they were normally the ones who made the reports," he said.
In Garcia's 451-page personnel file, one voice decried the church's failures to protect the victims and condemned the priest as someone who deserved to be behind bars. Father Arturo Gomez, an associate pastor at a predominantly Spanish-speaking church near Olvera Street, wrote to a regional bishop in 1989, saying he was "angry" and "disappointed" at the church's failure to help Garcia's victims. He expressed shock that the bishop, Juan A. Arzube, had told the family of two of the boys that Garcia had thought of taking his own life.
"You seemed to be at that moment more concern[ed] for the criminal rather than the victum! (sic)" Gomez wrote to Arzube in 1989.
Gomez urged church leaders to identify others who may have been harmed by Garcia and to get them help, but was told they didn't know how.
"If I was the father … Peter Garcia would be in prison now; and I would probably have begun a lawsuit against the archdiocese," the priest wrote in the letter. "The parents … of the two boys are more forgiving and compassionate than I would be."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-files-20130122,0,3114631.story
Clergy abuse case filled with silent bystanders
ReplyDeleteLong before Father Donald Patrick Roemer was charged with molesting a young boy, his behavior had been observed by churchgoers, fellow priests, school officials and police authorities. Yet none of them did anything.
BY ASHLEY POWERS, Los Angeles Times June 26, 2013
They stared at each other, the detective and the priest. Kelli McIlvain found interrogating him somewhat surreal. She had been raised Catholic and taught that a man in a black clerical shirt and white collar was nothing less than an emissary of God.
Father Donald Patrick Roemer was 5 feet 5, maybe 150 pounds. Hazel eyes. Blondish hair. A Ventura County Sheriff's Office report described him that night as "cooperative, seems stable," though McIlvain remembered how he repeatedly buried his head on the desk and wept.
To her surprise, his confession came easily. Yes, he said, he molested the 7-year-old boy.
McIlvain lit a cigarette. She hushed her voice, slowed her cadence to match his. Were there others, she asked. Yes, he said, according to court papers, and offered name after name.
"Where do I go from here?" he asked as midnight neared.
"Well," she said, "I'm going to have to arrest you."
What McIlvain uncovered in the weeks that followed seared the case into her memory, so much that she can recall its details more than three decades later, long after she retired: A number of people inside and outside the Catholic Church had been alerted to Roemer's misdeeds, or had strong suspicions of them, she learned.
They did nothing.
Experts call it the "bystander effect" — when people fail to help in potentially dire situations. Often they are more wary of falsely accusing someone than of their fears being confirmed. They question whether it's their responsibility to help, whether stepping in would do any good. If no one else is upset, they assume it's OK to walk away.
"We think our way out of situations we don't want to believe," said Pete Ditto, a UC Irvine professor who studies moral decision-making.
According to the 12,000 pages of church records that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles made public this year, the phenomenon appears to have played a key role in allowing clergy sex abuse to fester in case after case.
Although Catholic leaders shoulder much of the blame for the abuse scandal, the culture of silence extended to teachers, secretaries and others in the church's bottom rungs. In certain cases, it took years for someone to tip off the archdiocese's top officials to suspected molesters, let alone authorities.
In the Los Angeles Archdiocese, school staffers sat on accusations against Father John Salazar for two years. A pair of youth group directors stayed silent for decades after Father Michael Terra confessed to what he described as a relationship with a 16-year-old girl. A priest who lived in the same rectory as Father Lynn Caffoe watched him take boys into his bedroom "hundreds of times." A housekeeper who tidied Father Michael Wempe's room noticed that more than once, a 10-year-old boy had slept over and soiled the bed.
In Roemer's case, the list of people who suspected something was awry was particularly lengthy: churchgoers, fellow priests, school officials — even McIlvain's former boss.
Known in Ventura County as Father Pat, Roemer was well-aware of his demons. He had been sexually attracted to boys since he was young, he admitted to McIlvain, and had sought counseling for years from a fellow priest. That cleric, Roemer said, failed to provide him with much help.
"It's kind of like trying and trying and trying not to get involved in that, failing over and over again and not knowing what to do," he told McIlvain, according to a transcript of their interview. Roemer, now 69 and living in an Orange County apartment complex, according to public records, did not respond to requests for comment.
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Since his ordination in 1970, Roemer hid behind a Mister Rogers veneer, parishioners said, doling out miniature Snickers and joking that his clerical collar repelled fleas. Any odd behavior was viewed through a certain prism, McIlvain learned, one that essentially inoculated him.
ReplyDeleteIn the words of one parishioner who wrote to Roemer after his arrest: "We always see you as Jesus standing in the mists [sic] of our children."
An early opportunity to stop him came about 1976, when he was working in Santa Barbara. A few churchgoers said they marched into the archdiocese's religious education office to complain about how he and other priests behaved around children, court papers said.
Either no one passed those concerns up the hierarchy or no record was made of them. A top church official wrote years later that he had combed Roemer's file and could find "no indication of even a suspicion of wrongdoing" before his arrest.
Roemer moved to Thousand Oaks in 1978, when the city had about 77,000 residents and a reputation as one of California's safest. He oversaw youth services at St. Paschal Baylon, a parish of several thousand families.
Talk of child sex abuse was rare and the idea of a priest as a sexual predator unheard of. Instead of balking when Roemer ruffled their sons' hair, mothers thanked him for teaching the boys how to show affection. "He was the Pied Piper of the church," said Bill Sugars, whose two children attended St. Paschal.
If parents thought it was strange that Roemer showed up at sporting events — even ones at public schools — they didn't speak up, McIlvain learned. He paced the sidelines with the coaches and sometimes crept up behind players and embraced them.
"I still remember one boy and the look he had on his face — the terror," said Shari Vener, who noticed Roemer at her son Ryan's flag football games. "I asked another mom, 'What's with him?' and she said, 'He just likes kids so much he can't keep his hands off them.' "
Later, Vener's own son had an encounter with Roemer at a sports camp that reduced him to tears.
No one really questioned why Roemer had few companions his age, McIlvain learned. His peers praised him as a sort of child whisperer; other parishes sent struggling children his way.
He took boys hiking at his family ranch. He treated them to movies. Over the years, they made him shirts to say thanks. One said, "Father Knows Best." Another, "Good Guys Wear Black."
In 1980, Roemer won a Parent Teacher Assn. award for his work with students.
"What a farce now," he told McIlvain.
On Jan. 26, 1981, Roemer stopped a 7-year-old boy who was on his way to religion class. "Do you want to see some pictures?" the priest asked, and the boy followed him to a teachers' lounge, court papers said. The boy didn't yet have the vocabulary to describe what happened next: The priest stroked the boy's "doofer" and then started shaking, the boy said.
Over dinner that night, the boy told his parents. "I felt like a tattletale," he said later. They called the sheriff's office and then-Deputy Bruce McDowell responded. "That little kid had not been coached," he recalled thinking, "and we needed to do something right away."
He notified McIlvain, who was working the night shift. As a mother, she understood the gravity of the accusations. She called the church, asked for Roemer and got her first hint that his crimes were no secret when one of his fellow priests replied: "Is this concerning a young boy?"
Later that night, Roemer confessed.
When news of his arrest broke, the vitriol it provoked was telling. In letters to the local News Chronicle, boys sneered at the charges. "Is it that wrong to show a little affection toward a child?" one asked. "Come on!"
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Adults were more vicious. "What gives you the right to smear the name of a man of God and not the name of a 7-year-old, and don't give me that song and dance because the child is a minor and it is for his own protection," one woman huffed.
ReplyDeleteAt the sheriff's station, deputies defended Roemer's character. Over and over, McIlvain reminded them: "He confessed to it."
Vener, the mother who cringed at Roemer hugging football players, saw the headlines too. She turned to Ryan, then 12, and said, "I think we need to go to the police." Ryan balked. His mother insisted: "You need to go for those other kids, to validate them."
The boy met with McIlvain and told her that during the sports camp about seven months before Roemer's arrest, the priest had stalked him. At one point, Ryan said, Roemer told him, "You have such nice strong legs. Come up to my room after camp and I'll show you my yearbook." At another, Ryan said, the priest wrapped his arms around the boy and warned, "You can't get away from me."
In the ensuing months, said Ryan, now a married father of two, "I kept thinking he was going to come get me." He refused to go upstairs in his home. He felt uneasy around male teachers and coaches, and when his own father patted his back, Ryan sometimes shuddered.
Looking back, his mother wondered why she hadn't immediately called police, though it's common for victims and their families to hold their secrets close for years.
"I thought they'd say, 'That's what priests do, they love their flock,' " she said. "I feel guilty about it. Why didn't I do anything?"
The more McIlvain investigated, the more bystanders she found. In her 21 years in law enforcement, she said, she would never handle an abuse case in which so many people could have interceded but didn't.
McIlvain spoke to a special education teacher at a public elementary school where Roemer showed up every Monday at lunch to chat with students. About four months before his arrest, a mother confided in the teacher that Roemer had abused her son.
The teacher notified several supervisors, she said. By all indications, no one called police. Roemer's lunchtime visits continued, the teacher said, though he skipped the table where she and her pupils ate.
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About a month before Roemer's arrest, another mother and son sat down with the priest's supervisor, Father Colm O'Ryan, McIlvain learned. A devout Catholic and religion teacher, the mother had joined St. Paschal's because she found Roemer engaging.
ReplyDeleteThe mother and son told O'Ryan they had joined Roemer on a religious retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains area. With the boy's father asleep nearby, the 6-year-old asked Roemer to pray with him. The priest did, the boy said, and stuck his hand down the boy's pajama bottoms.
O'Ryan, the mother said, offered to get help for her son, who since the retreat had slashed the headboard of his bed with a knife and singed his blankets and pillows.
"I had nightmares about Father Roemer dying because he did sin," the boy said, according to court papers.
O'Ryan promised to discipline Roemer, the mother said, but instead sat on the accusations. He didn't get the boy counseling, either. The pastor, who recently retired from a parish in Beverly Hills, did not respond to requests for comment.
After arresting Roemer, McIlvain found a report someone had tossed on her desk. The mother and son who spoke to O'Ryan, the report said, had also alerted the sheriff's office. The mother was wary of pressing charges, but she expected deputies to do something.
Instead, Lt. Braden McKinley sought advice from a priest at the Catholic church where McKinley was a deacon. Then he talked to the mother. Because she said O'Ryan had promised to handle things, McKinley wrote in the report, "no further action is warranted by this department."
He never called Roemer. Or anyone at St. Paschal's.
McKinley said recently that he wasn't trying to cover up anything. Because the alleged abuse occurred in San Bernardino County, there was little he could do. McIlvain, however, remembered how woozy she felt reading his report, which ended with a definitive: "Case closed."
A few months later, in March 1981, Roemer pleaded no contest to molesting three boys. He spent nearly two years in a state mental hospital and was eventually defrocked. By 2004, the church had identified at least 13 others who said Roemer had abused them.
For McIlvain, one question still haunts her: Why didn't someone confront Roemer sooner?
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-bystanders-20130626-dto,0,2590497.htmlstory
Five Catholic religious orders release files on L.A. clergy abuse
ReplyDeleteBy Victoria Kim and Harriet Ryan, Los Angeles Times July 31, 2013
Confidential personnel records from five Catholic religious orders were turned over to victims of sexual abuse Wednesday in the first wave of a court-ordered public disclosure expected to shed light on the role the groups, operating independently of the L.A. Archdiocese, played in the region’s clergy molestation scandal.
The documents pertain to a dozen priests, brothers and nuns accused of sexual misconduct in the landmark 2007 settlement with hundreds of people who filed abuse claims against the Roman Catholic Church in Los Angeles. An additional 45 religious orders will release the personnel files of their accused clergy by this fall, completing what is believed to be the fullest accounting yet of the abuse crisis anywhere in the Catholic Church.
The 1,700 pages released by the religious orders differ markedly from those disclosed in January by the Los Angeles Archdiocese to comply with the terms of its settlement with all victims abused within its three-county jurisdiction. The archdiocese handed over materials reflecting Cardinal Roger M. Mahony’s meticulous record-keeping of molestation claims and treatment of accused offenders.
By contrast, the order files are a hodgepodge of seminary report cards, vacation requests, baptismal certificates and breezy dispatches in which priests update their higher-ups on parish projects. For the most part, the files have little or no reference to abuse allegations that surfaced in lawsuits a decade ago, suggesting the orders were either unaware of molestation claims or opted not to document them.
When matters of abuse were referenced, officials sometimes seemed reluctant to commit the ugly details to paper. In the case of Benedictine priest Mathias Faue, one supervisor wrote vaguely of “his problem” or “difficulty.” In the file of Oblate Father Ruben Martinez, an order official repeatedly switched to Japanese characters to note sensitive subjects, including his admissions of “homosexuality” and “relations with boys.”
Although the archdiocese took the lead in the litigation, about half of the alleged perpetrators belonged to religious orders, such as the Jesuits, Salesians and Vincentians, and answered to those orders rather than the local archbishop.
Wednesday’s release also covers the Marianists, the Benedictines, the Oblates and two orders of nuns. The disclosures by the Cabrini Sisters and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet mark the first time in the L.A. litigation the files of women have been made public. The two nuns, who are deceased, were accused in lawsuits of sexually abusing students decades ago. Their files contained no information on misconduct allegations.
The files that do detail abuse allegations show superiors at order headquarters in Shawnee, Okla., Washington D.C., and other far-flung locales struggling to keep tabs on repeat molesters working in Southern California.
In the decades before email and cheap air travel, their efforts to track problem priests often relied on the U.S. Postal Service. In a 1985 letter to Faue, his supervisor in Oklahoma wrote that he’d heard of misconduct around the globe but knew little for sure.
“I never found out [the] exact circumstances in Prague. There are rumors that float in the community about some difficulty you had years ago in Montebello and in Anadarko,” the supervisor wrote. Faue died in 1989 while working at the Montebello parish.
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In the case of Martinez, order officials in Oakland and Washington, D.C., began trying to deal with his abuse of boys in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, but didn’t realize the full scope of his misdeeds until 2005 when he admitted his victims could number as many as a hundred.
ReplyDeleteAt 521 pages, Martinez’s file is the longest and chronicles decades of molestation that began soon after his 1968 ordination. In the 1980s, at churches in Pacoima and Wilmington, two mothers raised concerns about Martinez’s behavior with altar boys. But it was several years later, when Martinez himself complained of fatigue and burnout from parish work, that he was sent to therapy at a New Mexico center for troubled clergy.
After completing the treatment in 1991, he was allowed back into ministry by Father Paul Nourie, a newly appointed head of the order, even though Nourie wrote that he had “every reason” to believe the veracity of complaints of Martinez’s “alleged misbehavior with younger males.” Calling him “blessed and gifted,” Nourie sent Martinez to an Imperial Valley church, where he was soon working with youth.
“Today we had first Holy Communions. We had about 30 children,” Martinez wrote to a superior in May 1992.
In 1993, a 25-year-old man came forward with another allegation, saying Martinez had abused him as a teenager some years back. The man asked that the authorities be notified, and said he wanted to make sure no other children were hurt. Officials took Martinez out of ministry and sent him for another evaluation, but told the man they were limited in what they could do.
“I indicated ... that the Oblates could not really tie a person down, but that we could provide treatment, a healthy environment, and continued supervision,” Nourie wrote. There is no indication in the file that authorities were alerted.
By 2003, with the sexual abuse crisis making international headlines, the Oblates had a drastically different response to any whiff of scandal. Complaints that Martinez had made “off-color jokes” at a California retreat were met with a stern letter telling him the behavior would not be tolerated and threatening to move him to a restricted-living community for abusive priests. When he was found downloading unspecified “inappropriate material” on office computers the following year, he was once again sent away for an evaluation, where he told therapists he had had “sexual contact with about 100 minors” in the past. As of 2006, Martinez was living at a Catholic center in Missouri for troubled clergy. Now 72, he did not immediately respond to a request for comment through order attorneys.
One man who received a settlement for abuse by Martinez at Holy Family Parish in Wilmington in the 1970s said he hoped the disclosure of the priest’s personnel file would be the final step in his healing process.
“I always felt angry and that my childhood had really been ruined,” said the man, now 50 and an Inland Empire resident. “After the records being released, I have closure.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-catholic-clergy-abuse-files-20130731,0,1598144.story
L.A. archdiocese settles final priest abuse case; $740 million spent
ReplyDeleteBy Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times February 18, 2014
The Los Angeles Archdiocese has settled what officials said is the last of its pending priest molestation lawsuits, bringing to a close a decade of wrenching abuse litigation that cost the Catholic Church more than $740 million.
The church reached the $13-million agreement with 17 victims last week, on the eve of a trial scheduled to begin Feb. 14 over the alleged acts of Father Nicolas Aguilar-Rivera, a visiting cleric from Mexico who police believe molested more than two dozen boys over a mere nine months in 1987.
Eleven men, who were ages 7 to 12 when they were allegedly abused by the priest, were scheduled to appear in court to argue that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and his aides had allowed the priest to flee in the days before police were notified.
Attorneys for the men alleged in court papers that Mahony and his top aide, Msgr. Thomas Curry, had "actively thwarted" and "misled" Los Angeles Police Department investigators at the time.
The settlement includes about $1 million for the 11 alleged victims of Aguilar-Rivera as well as lesser sums for six others who say they were molested by other priests, Anthony De Marco, the victims' attorney, said.
"We think all of these cases are now behind us," said J. Michael Hennigan, the archdiocese attorney who has defended the church throughout the abuse litigation.
The flood of lawsuits began in 2002, when a national scandal led to hundreds of people coming forward to say they had been abused as children in decades past.
The massive payout to more than 500 victims – far larger than sums paid elsewhere – have been financially devastating for the L.A. church, which sold off real estate, took out a $175-million loan and tapped $115 million set aside for cemetery maintenance to pay the settlements. Last year, the church explored the possibility of a $200-million capital campaign to help repay the loan.
It wasn’t only church coffers that took a hit from the long-running litigation: The diocese’s standing in the community suffered as tens of thousands of internal church records became public, containing revelations that archdiocese leaders knew the intimate details of priests’ abuses and nonetheless shielded molesters from law enforcement.
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If the Aguilar-Rivera case had gone to trial as scheduled, it would have marked the first of hundreds of abuse lawsuits to see an airing of allegations against the archdiocese in open court. Among the witnesses scheduled to take the stand were Mahony and Curry, who were publicly criticized last year by Archbishop Jose Gomez for their handling of abuse claims.
ReplyDeleteAguilar-Rivera was 46 in 1987 when he came asking to serve Los Angeles, saying he needed to be away from his home diocese of Tehuacan, Mexico, for family and health reasons. When two families came forward with allegations of the priest’s abuses in early 1988, Curry met with the priest and informed him of the charges.
"I told him that it was likely the accusations would be reported to the police and that he was in a good deal of danger," he wrote in a memo at the time.
The priest, Curry wrote, said he would leave for Mexico. By the time police were notified by a school principal at one of the parishes two days later, Aguilar-Rivera had left the country.
Aguilar-Rivera was formally charged in 1988 but was never criminally prosecuted and remains at large. De Marco said that while investigating the case in Mexico, he spoke to witnesses who said they saw the priest as recently as last year at a church and a convent near his hometown.
"He had, it looks like, the support of the church then and now," De Marco said.
The settlements reached last week also cover alleged abuses by former priests George Miller and Michael Nocita dating from the late 1970s and early 1980s; John Malburg, a former teacher at Daniel Murphy High School, from 1999 to 2006; and Rene Velmonte, who allegedly posed as a priest at a local church, in 1997.
Additional abuse suits may still be filed. De Marco said that although the statute of limitations is long expired on most cases, California’s insurance code may allow some abuse victims to still file lawsuit.
"I don't believe we've seen the end of it," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-la-church-settles-final-priest-abuse-case-740-million-spent-20140218,0,7997563.story#axzz2tYqsEZUq