CALIFORNIA
Merced Sun-Star
By Marcos Breton — mbreton@sacbee.com
The nature of faith is to believe in something larger than yourself.
The danger of faith is to believe something that isn’t true – either because you need to believe it or because you can’t face the truth.
That’s when faith becomes delusion and denial.
It happened Friday, when celestial faith was projected onto a mortal, a priest, who pleaded no contest to sexually molesting a 13-year-old girl – even as the priest’s friends watched the proceedings in court.
The Rev. Uriel Ojeda, once the shining star of the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento, was handcuffed and taken into custody after accepting a plea for forcing himself on a young girl. It was a cold legal conclusion to a tragedy of faith placed too fervently in one young man.
But his followers saw something else.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.