OAKLAND (CA)
San Francisco Chronicle
By Matthias Gafni
March 3, 2020
As a future pope and officials from the Catholic Diocese of Oakland weighed the fate of a convicted child molester priest more than three decades ago, the Rev. Stephen Kiesle took a 5-year-old boy into a closet of a Pinole church and sexually assaulted him, according to a claim filed Monday in Alameda County Superior Court.
The boy, now a 39-year-old man living in Del Norte County, sued Kiesle, the diocese and retired Bishop John Cummins, claiming that they knew the priest was a danger to children but allowed him to continue working with children. It has previously been reported that internal church letters found that Cummins had been communicating about Kiesle’s behavior with then-Vatican official Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, in 1985, the same year the plaintiff alleges he was assaulted.
“What makes this case unique is literally everybody in the chain of command knows and yet they allow this guy to go back to the parish,” said the plaintiff’s attorney John Manly. “They put him in his target population. To me, that’s not a mistake or reckless, it’s malicious.”
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