CALIFORNIA
Orange County Weekly
by Gustavo Arellano
The following seven files are excerpts from a 1986 Huntington Beach Police Department report on Father Andrew Christian Andersen, who remains one of only two Orange County Catholic priests to be jailed for molesting children after pleading guilty to 26 counts of molesting four altar boys. Most of the report graphically describes how Andersen, at the time a priest at St. Bonaventure in Huntington Beach, committed his crimes—in the St. Bonaventure rectory, at a Orange diocese-owned home, inside a victim’s room, while driving to numerous funerals. Rather than dwell on the lurid, though, we’ve only included those reports that paint a picture of a diocese that, then and now, protected its pedo-priests from justice.
Please note, some of these files are large.
The highlights:
APRIL 10 REPORT
•Detectives Gary Brooks and Tom Gilligan visit St. Bonaventure and ask a secretary if they could speak with Monsignor Michael Duffy, the parish’s head priest. She informs them that Duffy is in a conference. After leaving the room for a couple of minutes, she returns with a phone number for an attorney and refuses to explain why Duffy isn’t available.
•After Brooks and Gilligan return from speaking with St. Bonaventure Elementary’s principal for a couple of minutes, the secretary informs the detectives that Duffy just left his conference "and was not sure when he would return."