CALIFORNIA
Mercury News
By Robin Evans
Mercury News
A retired public school principal who once was chairman of the parish council at St. Martin of Tours in San Jose testified Wednesday in a trial about abusive priests that his wife was ``cautious'' with their children around their new pastor after another guest at a dinner party commented he was ``queer or played with little boys.''
But Santa Clara resident Ronald Modeste said he didn't believe the allegations against the Rev. Joseph Pritchard, a fellow coach he had known previously through a Catholic athletics league. And, in testimony in San Francisco Superior Court in one of the first jury trials in some 160 sex-abuse cases against Roman Catholic dioceses in Northern California, he said he never reported them to anyone.
``I was reasonably upset about him saying something like that because I knew'' Pritchard, he said.
Modeste was one of two witnesses for the San Francisco Archdiocese who said they never saw anything sexually suspicious in Pritchard's behavior, as church lawyers tried to counter claims the archdiocese should have been aware of molestation by the parish pastor and done something to prevent it.
The dinner party took place in the summer of 1971, Modeste said, shortly after Pritchard had joined the church. It was in the fall of that year that the now-deceased priest began molesting a 13-year-old parish school student, according to testimony Tuesday by the boy, now a 47-year-old Palo Alto resident, Dennis Kavanaugh.
Posted by kshaw at March 17, 2005 08:16 AM