CALIFORNIA
Radar
By Jen Heger
On Pope Benedict XVI’s final day as head of the Catholic Church, attorney Gloria Allred, and her client, Rita Milla, who went public in 1984 and filed a lawsuit against the church, accusing seven priests of sexual abuse, will hold a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday to discuss newly revealed documents about the case that point to a massive cover-up and obstruction of justice by the Archdiocese, RadarOnline.com is exclusively reporting.
The famed civil rights attorney filed the groundbreaking lawsuit almost two decades before the priest sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church made international headlines. On the day that Allred filed the lawsuit on Milla’s behalf in 1984, all seven priests mysteriously disappeared from their parishes. Milla filed the lawsuit after giving birth to a child fathered by one of the priests.
According to a Los Angeles Times report from June of 1991, then-Archbishop Roger Mahony held a news conference and said, “The responsibility for apologies rests on the priests who misused their vow of priestly celibacy, not on the archdiocese,” which had supervised them and advised one of them to stay out of the United States after the story broke. On the same day, a former priest, Rev. Santiago (Henry) Tamayo, publicly apologized to Milla, and he admitted to having a sexual relationship with her.
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