Los Angeles Archdiocese Kept Sexual Abuse in the Shadows

By Special Report
The Press-Telegram
January 26, 2013

http://www.presstelegram.com/ci_22457658

A parishoner makes his way to an early mass at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in Van Nuys, Ca January 24, 2013. (Andy Holzman/Los Angeles Daily News)

Join Los Angeles News Group City Editor Harrison Sheppard and reporters Susan Abram and Tracy Manzer in a live chat Monday at 11 a.m. to discuss this report.

Thousands of pages of court documents show how the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for decades knowingly shielded more than a dozen priests suspected of child sex abuse.

A Los Angeles News Group special report offers an in-depth look into how and when the church knew about the abuse and chose instead to move accused priests from parish to parish, even allowing the most abusive to move out of the country.

Church officials in some cases tried to get priests into therapy, but at the same time took steps to keep the horrific accusations from ever surfacing or being reported to authorities. Victims and their families pleaded for justice, only to fall on deaf ears. This report details the depth of secrecy and covert actions taken by top church officials to keep the accusations in the shadows.

In the decades since, archdioceses everywhere have taken steps to recognize and stop such abuse from happening again.

In the meantime, victims feel the weight and still live in the shadow of abuse. Cardinal Roger Mahony squarely at the center of the sex-abuse scandal

• "We must realize that Christ came as the son of God not only to spend his time in the synagogue, but also to involve himself in the daily life of the people," he said in an interview at the time.
  
  "We as his disciples must realize the Gospel must speak to actual, current situations."
  
  For Mahony, those situations would include complaints that scores of his priests were abusing children - altar boys, students in parochial schools, sons and daughters of their parishioners.
  
  

• It's been more than 10 years since the Catholic Church faced the pinnacle of its sex abuse scandal, one which many refer to as the church's greatest crisis since the Reformation.
  
  In this last decade, church leaders and members say, they have had to come to terms with feelings of anger, confusion and shame over the dark history of child molestation and the cover-up.
  
  

• What transpired in the predominantly Latino congregation in East L.A., and at nearby St. Agatha's Church, is at the heart of a suit that led to the release last week of thousands of pages of personnel documents.
  
  A 35-year-old man who says he was molested by the priest as a youth claims church leaders knew Aguilar Rivera was a pedophile when they assigned him to the two local parishes and that they knowingly concealed his misdeeds.
  
  

• In a scandal that implicated dozens of priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, the case of Father Michael Baker is the one that Cardinal Roger Mahony has said troubles him the most.
  
  An energetic priest who was popular with the young people in his congregations, Baker confided to Mahony during a spiritual retreat in late December 1986 that he'd molested two young boys from 1978-85.
  
  

• Retired priest Michael Wempe cried during his 2006 molestation trial as witness after witness testified how his sexual abuse of them had damaged them for life.
  
  But files released last week reveal his efforts and those of church officials to shield Wempe from the law.
  
  

• Father James M. Ford's career in the Los Angeles Archdiocese didn't end until 2005, though he faced questions back to the early 1980s about inappropriate contact with male students and was known to have had an affair with a former seminary student who died of AIDS, according to his personnel files.

• It took 30 years for the victim of Father Matthew Michael Sprouffske to work up the courage to confront her abuser, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
  
  It was 1986 when the woman penned two eloquent and powerful missives, one to Sprouffske and one to Monsignor John Rawden, an archdiocese official, and she spoke plainly about the abuse she suffered from the age of about 4 until 16.
  
  

• In the case of Father Michael Daniel Buckley, the signs of abuse were there as early as 1965.
  
  That was the year parents of children at Immaculate Conception Church in Monrovia sent two letters to then-Bishop Timothy Manning demanding Buckley's removal due to "grave moral reasons" and threatening to picket if their demands were not met.
  
  

• The case files of Father Santiago Tamayo and Father Angel Cruces read like lurid dime-store novels.
  
  Appropriately enough, the tales of how Tamayo, Cruces and five other priests sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl were fodder for the tabloids in the 1980s, which dubbed it "Snow White and the Seven Priests."
  
  

• After washing his hands and asking the Lord to cleanse him of his sins, Monsignor Benjamin Hawkes turned to an altar boy and winked.
  
  Hawkes would do this during Sunday Mass, just before serving Holy Communion.
  
  

• In a 2004 letter to the Vatican, Cardinal Roger Mahony revealed that a priest within the Los Angeles Archdiocese was a danger to children and must be dismissed.
  
  "(Father) Caffoe has not truly resolved his inner anger and sexual tension, so that he remains a real threat to minors. This is confirmed by his subsequent behavior," Mahony wrote to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.
  
  

• Father Eleutorio Ramos admitted to police in Orange County that he had molested at least 25 boys over the span of a decade. It was, according to published reports, the largest single admission of child abuse in the history of the Orange County diocese

• Among the various priests accused over the years of sexual abuse, Monsignor Peter E. Garcia seemed to have a specialty.
  
  Garcia's victims - he confessed at one point to having 20 - were primarily young undocumented immigrants, a quality that made their families less likely to prosecute.
  
  

• Father Vincent Serpa, pastor of St. Dominic Catholic Church in Eagle Rock, knew he had a problem with Father Cristobal Garcia.
  
  He just didn't know how big.
  
  

• When Father Fidencio Silva first appeared at Oxnard's Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in 1979, he was young, good-looking and charismatic.
  
  He was apparently also far too chummy with some of the 60 altar boys in his charge. He would eventually be accused of molesting more than two dozen of them.
  
  

• Whatever church Father Larry Lovell passed through, he left abused children and sickened parents in his wake.
  
  The defrocked Claretian priest, convicted of sexually molesting boys at two Arizona parishes in the 1970s and '80s, is now serving a 26-year combined prison sentence.