SAN JOSE (CA)
Bay Area News Group via the Mercury News
September 16, 2018
By John Woolfolk
In what many consider a long-overdue confessional, Catholic church leaders from San Jose to San Diego have taken the extraordinary step of promising to bare some of their darkest secrets by revealing previously undisclosed names of priests credibly accused of sexual abuse.
And names now being disclosed reveal a disturbing fact — at least one of those priests remains active. An itinerant Roman Catholic priest who holds Bay Area retreats is among eight clergymen the Diocese of San Diego just identified as having been the subject of previously undisclosed accusations of sexual abuse.
The Rev. J. Patrick Foley, who held retreats in Soquel and Danville this year costing participants more than $200 a person, faced a church tribunal after a couple in the Sacramento area accused him in 2010 of sexually molesting their boys, said San Diego diocese spokesman Kevin C. Eckery. The tribunal was inconclusive, he said, and although church officials also alerted local police, nothing ever came of it. But the diocese in 2015 stripped him of his priestly faculties.
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