LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times
By Jean Guccione and Nita Lelyveld, Times Staff Writers
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles allowed at least eight priests to remain in contact with children even after receiving complaints that the clerics had a sexual interest in minors, according to church documents produced in the lawsuits by hundreds of alleged sexual-abuse victims.
That is twice as many as the church had previously conceded.
The documents, which became public Tuesday, indicate that numerous children might have avoided harm if church leaders in the 1960s, '70s and '80s had reacted more vigorously to warnings about abusive priests. Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the archdiocese, said the documents would be posted at midnight Tuesday on the archdiocese website, http://www.la-archdiocese.org .
The documents offer the most unfiltered look yet at the way the archdiocese responded to child-molestation allegations involving its priests over the last half-century.
In one of the newly revealed cases, a parishioner in 1980 passed a rumor to archdiocese officials that a young boy was spending every weekend at Father Richard Henry's home. In the decade that followed, the church received additional reports about Henry, including two in 1988, one from a nun at Our Lady of the Rosary in Paramount who said that the priest was partial to boys, and the other from a layperson who said he "grabs little boys and hugs them."