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Camp Ped By Ron Russell To know Father Michael Baker was to love him. Handsome, articulate and
charismatic, he practically oozed trust. The parents of altar boys adored
him for the special attention he gave their sons. Of course, they had
no idea how special. The boys Baker zeroed in on also adored him. Unfortunately,
he couldn't resist manipulating them for sex. In December 1986, after
deciding to confess some of his sexual sins, his secret weakness was about
to cost him big-time. Or so he thought. Baker didn't turn himself in to
just anyone. He went straight to Roger Mahony, then as now the titular
head of the nation's largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, fully expecting
to be drummed out of the priesthood after confessing to having had sex
with "two or three" of his altar boys. But, astonishingly, Mahony wasn't inquisitive. The archbishop and then soon-to-be cardinal seemed more concerned with damage control. To Baker's relief, Mahony -- a close friend and confidante -- squelched the idea of turning him over to police. Neither were unsuspecting parishioners at the L.A.-area churches where his admitted abuses had occurred informed that a predator was among them. Far from being over, his priestly career was merely sidetracked. Instead of notifying the cops, Mahony -- in typical fashion -- quietly packed his pal off to a remote corner of New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains. There, near the village of Jemez Springs, at a secluded retreat operated by a little-known Roman Catholic religious order called the Holy Servants of the Paraclete, Baker joined other priests receiving "therapy" for pedophilia. It was an exercise that Mahony -- and, indeed, fellow bishops from coast to coast -- already knew, or should have known, was a sham. Since at least the early 1970s Catholic scholars had collectively provided an unambiguous warning to the church hierarchy that too many of its priests suffered from sexual disorders. One of those experts, Father Michael Peterson, a clinical psychologist who in 1982 founded St. Luke Institute in Maryland, had sought to provide a more professional approach to treatment than ever existed at Jemez Springs. He was part of the chorus of experts who, in sharp contrast to the prevailing view of the '60s and '70s, concluded that people who sexually abuse young children stand little chance of getting cured. By the time Peterson began his work, the psychology profession had come to realize that recidivism, or the relapse rate, for pedophiles is second only to that of exhibitionists. In 1985, on the heels of a notorious case involving a Louisiana priest, Peterson and two other highly respected Catholic insiders issued a secret 92-page report on priestly sex abuse that dismissed the church's attempts to rehabilitate pedo-priests as a colossal failure. The report, which came to be known as "the manual," was delivered to every bishop in the United States. Mahony received his copy while bishop of Stockton. It urged church leaders back then to immediately remove priests accused of sexual misconduct, report such priests to law enforcement and to never reassign them to new parishes if the allegations proved to be true. But Mahony and other church leaders scarcely needed the manual to understand that shuffling errant clerics off to New Mexico, or anywhere else, for supposed rehabilitation was a fool's errand. Camp Ped, as even some of the priests assigned to psychosexual treatment there derisively referred to it, had become more than the American hierarchy's dirty little secret. It was a cruel joke. From the time the Paraclete brothers -- over the objections of the order's founder -- began treating pedophiles there in 1965, Camp Ped was little more than a recycling center for child-molesting priests. Bishops used it as a holding tank for clerical sickos until they could foist them on new and unsuspecting parishioners. Its miserable track record can be measured in countless children's ruined lives. As documents and interviews show, long before Mahony sent some of his most notorious offenders there, including Baker in late 1986 and Father Michael Wempe the following year, the retreat's dismal reputation was well established among church leaders, even if they pretended not to know. (The late Father Ted Llanos, who molested at least 35 altar boys to become the L.A. Archdiocese's most notorious child abuser, had pulled time at Jemez Springs in the early '70s under Mahony's predecessor, Cardinal Timothy Manning.) After all, the bishops were dealing firsthand with Camp Ped's failures -- clerics who invariably had been discharged by the Paracletes with a clean bill of health and who, like Baker, resumed molesting after settling into new assignments back home. New Times has learned that a few bishops, including the recently retired Leroy Matthiesen of Amarillo, Texas, actively recruited new priests from the ranks of Jemez Spring's pedophiles. Camp Ped is where Matthiesen found Father John Salazar, the former Los Angeles priest who not only had been caught molesting boys at an Eastside parish in the 1980s, but who had served three years in prison and was newly paroled when the bishop swooped into the retreat in 1990 and revived his career. As ecclesiastical parole officers, the Paracletes were an easy touch from the outset, turning loose their uncured "patients" with abandon despite whatever advice they may have received from outside medical professionals. Astonishingly, even while pedo-priests were ostensibly being treated there, the religious order's supervisors allowed many to be furloughed on weekends or sometimes for weeks at a stretch to fill in as parish priests in New Mexico and nearby states. Notorious Massachusetts pedo-priest James Porter, who arrived at the retreat in 1967, received three such furloughs, each time molesting new victims. Yet his Paraclete superior, Father John B. Feit, continued to write glowing letters of recommendation on Porter's behalf, and was instrumental in placing him in a Minnesota diocese at the end of his "treatment" -- where he molested again before ultimately being sent to prison. Jemez Spring's outrages caught up with it in 1994, when the Paracletes were forced to close the psychosexual treatment operation there as the result of scores of lawsuits by abuse victims across New Mexico. The litigation cost the Archdiocese of Santa Fe more than $50 million and pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy. "What went on there was abominable," says Father Tom Doyle, a U.S. Air Force chaplain and co-author of the manual. Placing the blame for the abysmal Camp Ped experiment at the feet of American bishops, Doyle is especially disdainful of Mahony's repeated insistence that his mishandling of pedo-priests was the result of following the prevailing medical advice of the day. "It simply isn't true!" he says. "He's replaying the same tired and meaningless excuse. He knew that sexual abuse of a child was harmful, that it was the vilest form of crime and that sex offenders [of children] are considered the lowest form of life even in prisons. He knew it was and is a felony in every state. So just what is it that Mahony didn't know?" In Baker's case, Mahony apparently did little to monitor him after his return. It is claimed in a letter of complaint -- which led to a $1.3 million payment to two victims whom Baker allegedly abused for years after Mahony welcomed him back into the L.A. Archdiocese -- that Baker kept pictures of the victims in his room at a rectory long after returning from Camp Ped. The photos were taken during times he had molested them in his quarters. In 1999, after two of Baker's nine known accusers came forward, Mahony apparently hoped to buy the silence of the victims and their attorney by authorizing the payment before a lawsuit could be filed. One well-placed source calls it "maybe the fastest payoff of its kind ever." This source says that when an Arizona attorney for the victims showed up in L.A. after merely announcing an intent to sue, Mahony personally "took her to the Wilshire Country Club and later had a check in her hand so fast it would make your head swim." Having kept Baker's misdeeds secret for at least 14 years, the cardinal quietly arranged for his retirement from the archdiocese in late 2000. It wasn't until earlier this year, after the current scandal erupted, that Mahony reluctantly turned over Baker's name, along with a handful of others, to law enforcement. Nowhere, with the possible exception of Boston, has the church's failed rehabilitation model come to haunt it more than in the sprawling L.A. Archdiocese, which includes Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. At least 72 of Mahony's current or former priests are under investigation by law enforcement in at least 142 cases. As this article went to press, the L.A. County Grand Jury was known to have issued subpoenas for materials related to 17 priests -- after Mahony spent months stonewalling District Attorney Steve Cooley and investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department, the Sheriff's Department and other agencies. Now, with the Labor Day opening of Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral (the lavish $193 million monument to the cardinal's legacy) only weeks away, sources tell New Times that more subpoenas are imminent and that authorities may soon begin to arrest some of Mahony's clerics. * Father John Salazar rumbled through his victims' lives like a runaway train. But unlike most priestly sex abuse victims, those he molested at least had the satisfaction of seeing him sent to prison. That was in 1988, after the then 31-year-old cleric pleaded guilty to molesting two boys, ages 13 and 14, who were students at Santa Teresita Parish School in the City Terrace section of L.A.'s Eastside. As a member of the Piarist Fathers, a small order of priests based in Italy who oversee several parishes in the L.A. Archdiocese, Salazar taught at the school and helped out with mass on Sundays. His admissions didn't come easily. In fact, if it had been left to church officials, he would have gotten off scot-free. After the mother of one of the boys went to Salazar's superiors in 1986 upon learning that her son had been molested, she was told that it was the boy's fault -- even while she was assured that Salazar would receive "counseling" from the church. She and the parents of a second child who came forward refused to let the matter drop. Two years later, facing the prospect of a much longer jail term, Salazar copped a plea to two felony counts in exchange for a six-year sentence. Although Salazar served at Santa Teresita under Mahony's authorization, the archdiocese -- as it typically does with miscreant "order" priests assigned within its jurisdiction -- washed its hands of him, passing the buck to the Piarists. About the same time Salazar was cutting his deal with prosecutors, another scandal erupted involving one of Mahony's priests at a neighboring parish in El Sereno. At least 26 altar boys there and at a South-Central L.A. church accused Father Nicholas Aguilar Rivera of molesting them. Mahony ordered Rivera hauled into the chancery office for interrogation over a weekend after the first few of the accusers lodged complaints, but didn't bother to notify Los Angeles police until two days later. By then, Rivera had fled to his native Mexico and vanished. As they've often done during Mahony's tenure, the cardinal's subordinates concocted a lie to tell parishioners to explain the priest's departure, chalking it up to a "family emergency." Like the Salazar episode, the Rivera caper passed with almost no publicity. Salazar's victims in Los Angeles may have thought they had heard the last of him, but his extraordinary saga didn't end with his imprisonment. Paroled in 1990 after serving three years behind bars (including time spent before sentencing), Salazar was sent by church officials to Jemez Springs for psychosexual treatment. California parole authorities agreed to the move, obliging Salazar to report regularly to authorities in New Mexico as a condition of his parole. No one could have predicted that within a few months of his arrival at Camp Ped the convicted felon's moribund career as a priest would be revived, courtesy of Amarillo's Matthiesen. Shortly before Christmas of 1990, Matthiesen arrived at Camp Ped with his vicar general and three members of his diocesan personnel committee, hoping to recruit a priest or two. The bishop was immediately impressed with Salazar. His Paraclete superiors had reported their pedophile guest as well-mannered, studious and hard-working. Like countless priestly child molesters funneled through the infamous retreat before him, Salazar was deemed ready to resume active ministry. That was good enough for the bishop. As for the prison rap, Salazar had reportedly told Matthiesen that he had gotten a raw deal and that he had expected to receive probation upon pleading guilty instead of going to jail. By the bishop's account, the priest also claimed that there had been only one victim. If the Paracletes knew otherwise, they didn't say. Photo: Carlos Perez-Carrillo, 36: His alleged abuser, convicted child-molester John Salazar, thrived as a priest after getting out of prison. In fact, besides the boys he was convicted of molesting, there were at least two other accusers from Salazar's stint at Santa Teresita, although neither had come forward. Carlos Perez-Carrillo, 36, now a supervisor with the L.A. County Department of Social Services, tells New Times that he was abused by Salazar off and on for at least three and a half years beginning in 1981. Perez-Carrillo, who grew up in Sun Valley, met Salazar at a gathering his parents hosted at home (his father was a church deacon) and quickly joined the circle of boys whom the priest regularly took on weekend outings to a Catholic vacation retreat near Lake Arrowhead and elsewhere. Perez-Carrillo says he didn't begin to come to grips with his molestation until he was newly married and living in Las Vegas in 1986, after his dad called with news that Salazar had been accused of molesting boys. Typical of many victims, Perez-Carrillo had previously assumed that he had been the only one. But by the time his father called, he says, "I had been losing a lot of weight and I was mistakenly convinced that he had given me AIDS. It was a horrible time in my life." From a devout and well-connected Roman Catholic family (he recalls the family driving to Tucson, Arizona, in 1982 for the induction of his father's friend -- and Mahony crony -- Manuel Moreno, as the new bishop there), Perez-Carrillo turned to his dad for help. He says his father approached a well-placed friend at the time, newly installed L.A. auxiliary bishop G. Patrick Zieman, to complain about Salazar but that Zieman "turned his back on my dad. He just blew him off." (Zieman, a longtime protégé of Mahony's, is the disgraced former bishop of Santa Rosa who was accused of extorting a subordinate priest for sex in 1999 and who looms as a key figure in Mahony's coverups of sex abuse in the L.A. Archdiocese. Last August, shortly before Mahony would have been forced to answer potentially embarrassing questions about Zieman at a civil trial, the cardinal approved a $5.2 million settlement with abuse victim Ryan DiMaria. As part of the settlement, Mahony was forced to accept a list of demands by DiMaria. Since then, Mahony has shamelessly pitched the demands as his own initiatives while becoming one of the first American hierarchs to adopt "zero tolerance" as a public relations mantra. Zieman remains a bishop, living in ecclesiastical exile at an Arizona monastery, courtesy of Tucson's Moreno. The person in charge of his "spiritual rehabilitation" is yet another Mahony crony, San Francisco archbishop William Levada, who like Moreno was a Mahony classmate at St. John's Seminary College in Camarillo. Just last month, a former Huntington Park altar boy filed a lawsuit accusing Zieman of sexually molesting him for nearly two decades ending in 1987. Not long afterward, and subsequent to New Times' reporting about Zieman's violation of the terms of his stay at Holy Trinity Monastery near the hamlet of St. David, the Vatican took the highly unusual step of stripping the bishop of his priestly duties, including his presiding at Mass on the monastery grounds.) Someone else who might have come forward against Salazar but didn't is Lorenzo Najera, 37, who with his physician wife and three children lives in the eastern San Fernando Valley. Najera says he rebuffed an attempt by Salazar to fondle his genitals during one of numerous trips to the Lake Arrowhead retreat that he and fellow altar boys from Santa Teresita took in the 1980s. Najera says he and about six other boys were staying with Salazar and another priest at the retreat's two-story cabin when he awoke early one morning to find Salazar kneeling beside his bed and attempting to slip his hand beneath his underpants. On another occasion, he says, when he got up in the night to go to the restroom, he saw Salazar performing oral sex on an altar boy in an upstairs bedroom. Najera says he later told one of Salazar's Piarist superiors about the incident and that the priest "didn't want to hear it." Najera says he himself was being molested at the time by another priest at the same parish, an abuse that began when he was 12 and lasted until about age 17. "I was so mixed up and fearful that I never opened my mouth about [Salazar] again," Najera recalls. "I just tried to blot it out of my mind, even though I certainly knew he was dirty." * Not dirty enough, however, to prevent a Roman Catholic bishop from scooping him up out of pedophile treatment. Early in 1991, after Matthiesen saw to it that he was released from Piarist vows, Salazar left Jemez Springs and was encardinated, or officially installed, as a regular priest of the Diocese of Amarillo, assigned as pastor of churches in the farming communities of Tulia and Kress. He was placed under no restrictions with respect to proximity to children. Indeed, parishioners were never told that their priest was a convicted felon. As Mahony had done with child-molesting clerics Baker, Wempe, Carl Sutphin and others, Matthiesen kept his new priest's history of pedophilia a closely guarded secret. It wasn't easy. Especially after officials in California discovered in 1993 that their parolee was no longer in New Mexico. Salazar was given an edict: He could return to California or New Mexico, or he would be sent back to prison. He chose to go to back to Jemez Springs. So with the bishop's help, he made up a plausible story to tell his Texas parishioners as to why he needed a leave of absence and left for the Paraclete retreat to fulfill the remaining nine months of his parole. No one was the wiser. Upon returning to Texas with parole behind him, Salazar assumed a bolder public profile. In 1995, he spoke before a large gathering of Promise Keepers, an evangelical men's movement (whose ranks include growing numbers of Roman Catholics) who emphasize moral rectitude and family values. Telling the men to value themselves because they were made in the image of God, he added, "That is the [message of] Jesus Christ we need to bring, especially to other men and to young men." Something else had also changed about him. In Los Angeles, he had been known simply as John Salazar. In Texas, he took to using his full name. He became Father John Anthony Salazar-Jimenez. Salazar enjoyed popularity with Matthiesen until the bishop's retirement in 1997, and afterward with his successor, current bishop John Yanta. From the outset, Yanta was privy to Salazar's criminal background. As with his predecessor, it apparently hadn't offended his sensibilities that one of his priests was a known sex offender. In fact, there were at least six other priests with "therapeutic" backgrounds whom Matthiesen had brought to Amarillo, several of whom, like Salazar, were recruited out of Jemez Springs. Not only that, but Yanta himself brought in at least one such priest, who was removed in 1988 from a parish in Yakima, Washington, after a lawsuit accusing him and another cleric of molesting a young boy. Yet the current bishop has steadfastly stonewalled the press, refusing to discuss whether any accused cleric has been transferred there from elsewhere. In a Mahonyesque statement earlier this year, Yanta defended his stonewalling by citing canon law. "No one is permitted to damage unlawfully the good reputation which another person enjoys nor to violate the right of another person to protect his or her own privacy," the diocese quotes him as saying. But after the Boston scandal broke last January and pedo-priests became a hot topic everywhere, Yanta -- in an echo of Mahony's maneuvers in L.A. -- finally had to toss overboard his so-called "therapeutic" clerics, including Salazar. Monsignor Harold Waldow, Amarillo's vicar for clergy, tells New Times that although each of the seven priests his boss quietly placed on inactive status before the national bishops conference in Dallas in June had "very good ministerial track records" and (as far as is known) had not reoffended, "it became clear that many priests who had engaged in sexual misconduct were not going to be able to remain in ministry." As an ex-convict, Salazar zoomed to the head of that class. Among other things, he was "uninsurable," Waldow says. Asked how a convicted felon and child molester could have come out of prison and been installed as a parish priest in the first place, Waldow deflected criticism from his boss, saying, "Maybe you should ask Bishop Matthiesen, since he's the one who brought him here." Matthiesen doesn't skip a beat in defending his appointment of Salazar and is amazingly open about his frequent trips to Jemez Springs for the purpose of acquiring priests during 17 years as Amarillo's bishop. "I've never had any reason to regret that decision," he says, referring to the Salazar appointment. "I can understand his case looks particularly bad because he was convicted and spent three years in prison, but I must tell you he was one of the best pastors I ever had." The bishop emeritus says that "from 1990 until now I've never heard a negative word about him, and there were never any reports of his reoffending" with a minor. Asked how he could know, especially since there was no one to observe Salazar with a knowledge of his problem other than himself and, later, Yanta, Matthiesen says, "There was a parole officer who came up once a month for a while." Matthiesen defends keeping parishioners in the dark about Salazar, saying that he "had a lot of confidence" in the rehabilitation program at Jemez Springs and was "convinced that [Salazar] was able to stay within the boundaries" in his dealings with young people. Pressed as to how he could bring into the diocese a child molester and convicted felon fresh out of prison without feeling an obligation to inform parishioners, Matthiesen says, "Well, sure, I suppose hindsight can be much better than foresight." In April, Yanta, the current bishop, met with Salazar and gave him the advance word: He would still be on the diocesan payroll, but he would have to give up his parish. A month ago, to the shock of parishioners who finally heard the truth about their priest, Salazar abruptly left town, having been shuffled off to a church retreat in Canada where Waldow, the vicar for clergy, describes him as being "in transition." To what isn't exactly clear. Now that Governor Gray Davis has signed a landmark California law to give any alleged sex-abuse victim a one-year window of opportunity to sue the church, starting January 1 -- regardless of whether previous legal time limits for doing so have expired -- Salazar's legal problems may not be over. Perez-Carrillo, for one, has obtained a lawyer. And sources say Salazar is among the current and former priests within the L.A. Archdiocese whom police are investigating. * If Matthiesen used Camp Ped as a job fair, the way Mahony and other bishops used it is perhaps only slightly less outrageous. Mahony may not have recruited priests from Jemez Springs, but he shuffled his share of errant clerics there and elsewhere for "treatment" and then placed them back into priestly service when he had to have known they were beyond cure. "I don't think bishops, Cardinal Mahony included, are very impressed with the evil of sexual abuse with a minor," says psychoanalyst A.W. Richard Sipe of La Jolla, who has counseled hundreds of priests and abuse victims and written three groundbreaking books on sexuality among Roman Catholic clergy. Aside from the public-relations disaster that the current scandal has become, the former Benedictine monk says, "I don't think it has offended [Mahony] at all." In his repeated professions of sorrow as the L.A. scandal has unraveled, Mahony -- who, as usual, declined to be interviewed for this article -- insists that it is unfair to judge his and other church leaders' past mishandling of pedo-priests since they were relying on the best advice of mental-health experts at the time. "Everyone is taking the matrix of 2002 knowledge and placing that matrix on what happened some time 15, 20, 30 years ago," Mahony told a recent gathering of editors and reporters. Coincidentally or not, his if-only-we-knew-then-what-we-know-now pitch has intensified since May, after hiring Sitrick & Co., Enron Corporation's former public-relations firm, to shore up his sagging image. Such a legalistic explanation for his failings by one of the most powerful members of the American church's hierarchy, and the leader of 3.6 million Southern California Catholics, leaves Mahony's critics dumbstruck. "Just when did he and other bishops learn that it is illegal to have sex with a minor?" says Sipe. "His [had-we-known] defense is just another type of denial, a rationalization." Beyond that, he and others say, Mahony's claim of merely having followed the advice of the day is exceptionally misleading. Although mental-health experts in the 1960s and 1970s held the view that pedophilia could be treated much the same as alcoholism and that those who engaged in it could learn to lead productive lives without reoffending, that view had changed dramatically by the mid-1980s, after which Mahony and other hierarchs continued to send priests to Camp Ped. "There was this crazy kind of unspoken conspiracy of "don't ask, don't tell' among the bishops," says Gary Schoener, a Minnesota clinical psychologist who has consulted in hundreds of sex-abuse cases involving priests. "Even after it was well-known that a lot of these priests had problems that were beyond fixing, the bishops just kept sending them to [Jemez Springs] and other places rather than getting rid of them, as if it gave them a moral "out.'" Photo: Ex-altar boy and abuse victim Lorenzo Najera at L.A.’s Santa Teresita Parish Church. Considering Mahony's track record, the manual could have been written with him in mind upon its release in 1985. As revealed earlier by New Times, Mahony surrendered his license as a California social worker in March 1980, shortly after he was installed as Stockton's bishop. He thus removed himself from any legal obligation to report incidents of child abuse at a time when, as a new bishop, he would have become privy to such information regarding priests. (Clerics in California weren't required to report child abuse until 1997, when, over the vigorous opposition of the church, the law was changed.) He then proceeded to cover up for notorious former priest Oliver O'Grady, who molested more than 20 children, including a nine-month-old girl, after Mahony promoted him, despite knowing that O'Grady was a sex abuser. And in 17 years as L.A.'s archbishop, Mahony's dismal record of reshuffling and harboring known pedo-priests has come to rival -- if not exceed -- that of Boston's much-maligned Cardinal Bernard Law. The American hierarchy turned its back on the manual, its members preferring to hide the problem of priestly sex abuse under their cassocks. That the bishops were well aware of the problem in 1985 is irrefutable. A 1992 letter from Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, then the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, to Doyle, the manual's co-author, makes that clear. In response to Doyle's plea for the bishops to stop resisting the report's recommendations seven years after they were issued, Pilarczyk wrote, "The fact remains that your report presented no new issue (of which the NCCB was unaware) or presented information that required some materially different response." As a driving force behind the U.S. bishops' ad hoc committee on sexual abuse, established in the early 1990s, Mahony played a key role in helping turn back some of the same reforms that he now pretends to champion. "The Mahonys and the Laws within the church won out and, as we've seen even since the current scandal erupted, they're still treating it as if it's only a public-relations problem rather than pursuing real reform," says Doyle, who is also a canon lawyer. He was an aide to the Vatican's ambassador to the United States when the report was issued. Besides Peterson -- St. Luke's founder, who is now deceased -- the document's other author was former Louisiana defense attorney Ray Mouton. Since opening its doors 20 years ago, St. Luke has become the primary treatment center for sex-abusing priests and nuns. "St. Luke, at least in the early years, offered a more professional approach than anything available at Jemez Springs," says Michael Schwartz, a Washington, D.C., lobbyist and former director of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, an advocacy group. He became involved in helping abuse victims in the 1970s after befriending a Florida man who filed the first known lawsuit accusing a sitting Roman Catholic bishop of sex abuse. In 1993, a judge dismissed the suit against former Hawaii bishop Joseph Ferrario, ruling that it had not been filed in a timely manner. Ferrario's critics at the time accused him and several other unnamed bishops of stocking their dioceses with priests who were alums of Jemez Springs. Says Schwartz, "No one wants to admit it [with the obvious exception of Matthiesen], but the truth is, there were plenty of bishops who recruited out of there." * Nestled in a scenic canyon 60 miles north of Albuquerque, next to the ruins of a 17th century Spanish mission, the Father Fitzgerald Center, as the Jemez Springs retreat is formally known, lies secluded among 2,000 acres that have belonged to the Paracletes for more than half a century. The order's founder, Father Gerald Fitzgerald, a former military chaplain, chose the spot in 1947, the year reports of "flying saucers" made the New Mexico town of Roswell famous and, just over the mountains, the U.S. government was settling the secret atomic city of Los Alamos. Fitzgerald's was a noble idea: to provide a refuge for priests having difficulties with their vocations, mainly alcoholics and those suffering from depression who couldn't cope and had nowhere else to go. At its peak in the '70s and '80s more than 1,000 clerics a year spent time there, soaking in its mineral baths and inhaling the clear air for a few weeks or months at a time. Ironically, Fitzgerald had wanted nothing to do with clerical child abusers, holding the view that they were incurable and should be forcibly removed from the priesthood. In 1965, after losing a battle within the order to devote one of the several communal halls at the facility to pedophile treatment, Fitzgerald left in disgust, accepting a new assignment in Italy for the remaining four years of his life. Amazingly, before the momentous decision to introduce child-abusers at Jemez Springs, officials of the order briefly considered buying a remote Caribbean island where banished pedophile clerics from throughout the United States could be sent. Few Roman Catholics, much less anyone else, knew about the psychosexual treatment offered there. Jemez Springs, along with a handful of smaller treatment facilities in the Northeast and elsewhere, operated in strictest secrecy. For a while, at least, even locals were in the dark. "The retreat used to invite the local kids to come use the pool during the summer," recalls Jay Nelson, 50, of Albuquerque, who spent summers as a child at his family's vacation cabin near Jemez Springs. "They'd tell the parents, "Send them down. We'll watch them.'" Although there was opposition at first, residents who've long relied on the business generated by the retreat, came to tolerate Camp Ped, he says. Once, when a local parish priest, himself a Paraclete, complained to officials that clerics from the treatment center were making eyes at some of his altar boys, "they packed him off to a new assignment immediately," Nelson says. From the outset, Camp Ped was a disaster. Even Father Peter Lechner, the Paracletes' current director, whose office is in St. Louis, acknowledges that mental-health professionals were ill-equipped in the early years of the retreat to deal with molesters. But its problems went beyond merely the limits of medicine. "They may have had competent outside professionals working with the priests, but there was a disconnect in the way the "patients' wound up being shuffled through there and back into active priesthood," says Schoener, the clinical psychologist. He and others suggest that Camp Ped operated in a kind of netherworld between vacation retreat and treatment center. Considering its dismal track record, as exemplified by scandals involving numerous of its priestly alumni, Mahony and other bishops appear to have sent their bad-boy priests there to get them out of their hair rather than to treat them. There's no denying the Paracletes' proclivity for giving pedo-priests a clean bill of health, and bishops' propensity for welcoming such priests back and foisting them on unsuspecting parishioners. Take the notorious Father James Porter, for example. A three-time Camp Ped veteran, the Massachusetts native was finally sentenced to prison in the early 1980s after molesting more than 100 boys at parishes in the Northeast, Midwest and Southwest. In 1967, the staff at Jemez Springs saw "real hope" for Porter's rehabilitation and recommended that he be allowed to conduct mass on a trial basis at several churches in New Mexico while receiving treatment. But not long after filling in for a vacationing priest in the town of Truth or Consequences, Porter returned to his old ways, molesting at least six children, including a boy confined to a full-body cast in a hospital. Ever optimistic, a few months later the staff gave him another probationary assignment, this time in Houston, where he molested more children before he was shipped back to New Mexico. Incredibly, in 1969, Porter was cleared for release from Camp Ped and on the recommendation of the Paracletes was assigned to a parish in Bemidji, Minnesota, where he resumed molesting children. The Minnesota bishop who had agreed to take him had no clue as to his long sordid record when he showed up there. Astonishingly, a letter from the Paracletes, a copy of which was obtained by New Times, simply says that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. "During the throes of his illness he did have some moral problems which were, from all appearances, the result of his illness, something for which he was not responsible. Now, having recovered, he gives every sign of having the former problems under control," the letter says. * The author of that letter and other glowing reports about Porter and fellow priests who molested during furloughs from Jemez Springs during its early days was Father John B. Feit, who became the superior in charge of the psychosexual treatment program after only two years there. Feit, who had no professional training other than in theology, exemplifies all that was wrong with Camp Ped, not to mention the cynicism -- or incompetence -- of bishops who sent their priests there. Incredibly, Feit had switched from another religious order to join the Paracletes in 1962, just months after pleading "no contest" to a reduced charge of assault while a priest in Texas. A 20-year-old school teacher had accused him of attempting to sexually assault her as she knelt to pray inside a church in Edinburg, Texas, where he was the pastor, in 1960. What's more, Feit had been a suspect -- although no charges were filed against him -- in the murder of a 25-year-old South Texas beauty queen. Three days after she went missing, the woman's partially clad body was found in a drainage ditch near the same Edinburg church, barely a month after the assault on the teacher. Irene Garcia had been raped and suffocated. Garcia's car was found parked at the church, where Feit, who had heard her confession, was the last known person to have seen her alive. "It pains me even now that the person who killed that girl was never brought to justice," retired McAllen, Texas, police officer W.L. "Sonny" Miller, now 70, tells New Times. Miller reviewed the evidence at the request of a now-deceased police chief in the 1970s. Four polygraph tests administered to Feit were "inconclusive," and for lack of physical evidence no charges were brought in the case against anybody, he says. Garza's clothing and other items remain in an evidence locker at the McAllen Police Department. Miller has pushed in vain to have authorities use DNA testing, which wasn't available at the time of the murder, to revive the investigation. "It's the only right thing to do," he says. Feit, now 69, left the priesthood years ago and works for a Catholic charity in another state. He did not respond to interview requests from New Times, but he told the Brownsville Herald newspaper -- which cited the four inconclusive polygraph tests -- that he had had nothing to do with the Garcia slaying. He also said he would never have pleaded to the earlier charge if, at the time, he had known what a no-contest plea suggested. Yet, sadly, the Feit era wasn't an aberration. Camp Ped's track record continued to be the source of tragedy -- and the butt of jokes by critics of the bishops' failed rehabilitation model -- until it closed in 1994. The case of Father Andrew Christian Anderson of Huntington Beach is typical of the program's failure. In 1986, the popular pastor was convicted of 26 counts of molesting four altar boys. An Orange County superior court judge sentenced him to five years' probation on condition that he complete long-term treatment at Jemez Springs. After the slap-on-the-wrist ruling, Anderson was smothered in hugs from dozens of still-loyal parishioners who had crowded into the courtroom. Mahony protégé John Steinbock, bishop of the Diocese of Orange at the time (and now Fresno's bishop) adopted a wait-and-see attitude, saying he would decide Anderson's future as a priest after the therapy. Anderson went off to Jemez Springs for treatment, followed by six months at a Paraclete halfway house in Albuquerque. In 1990, just two months after leaving the house to live on his own, Anderson was arrested after dragging a 14-year-old boy off a downtown Albuquerque street and molesting him. Due in no small part to Camp Ped's priestly patients having molested children across New Mexico during furloughs (a practice unchecked since the Porter days), by 1994 the Archdiocese of Santa Fe had become ground zero in an explosion of clerical sex-abuse cases. The archbishop at the time, Robert Sanchez, had appointed a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the Jemez Springs problem, but it was too little, too late. It didn't help that Sanchez became embroiled in a sex scandal in 1993 after at least five women came forward to say they had had affairs with him, including the daughter of a wealthy New Mexico family that had conducted an annual fund-raiser named for Sanchez. Facing nearly 200 lawsuits and more than $50 million in damages, the archdiocese was forced to sell off choice real estate. Even so, it would have likely gone into insolvency if not for help from the national bishops' conference, spearheaded by Mahony, which chipped in some pricey New Mexico property of its own that the archdiocese sold to pay its remaining legal bills. The lawsuits guaranteed Camp Ped's demise. But Lechner, the head of the Paracletes, acknowledges that psychosexual treatment probably would have been discontinued even if litigation hadn't finished it off. "Jemez Springs became undesirable [as a place to go] for many priests," he laments. "With all the publicity, more and more priests resisted going there for any reason for fear they would be branded as pedophiles." (He refused to say how many of the estimated three-dozen priests being treated at the Paracletes' St. Jean Vianney Renewal Center outside St. Louis have psychosexual problems.) It's an image that refuses to die. Just last month, Lechner announced that after half a century, the Paracletes will shutter the Jemez Springs retreat entirely in December. But, already, there is speculation that it may end up as a permanent dumping ground for child-molesting priests. Under the watered-down "zero tolerance" policy adopted in June by American bishops -- but not yet approved by Rome -- abusive clerics are to be removed from "active ministry" but kept on church payrolls. "I really can't comment on whether that will happen," Lechner says. "All I can say is, I hope not." New Lawsuit Filed In Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal NBC4.TV LOS ANGELES -- Another molestation suit has been filed against a Roman Catholic priest and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. A "John Doe" alleges in the suit that he was molested while serving as an altar boy in the 1970s. The plaintiff alleges the molestation started in 1973, and the priest, who died in 1987, supplied Playboy magazines and alcohol while on trips with the prelate, according to the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. The plaintiff and priest are identified only as "John Doe" and "John Doe 2" in the lawsuit. The archdiocese is listed as "John Doe 1." Employees and agents of the church are named as "John Does 3 through 100." The lawsuit alleges the church engaged in fraud by concealing its knowledge of the abuses and conspired to protect the priest by moving him from parish to parish while misrepresenting the reasons for the transfers. The plaintiff alleges that it was not until this past year that he "discovered that the defendants' conduct was responsible for the psychological condition he has been suffering with most of his adult life." According to court papers, the plaintiff was a fourth- or fifth-grader when he was an altar boy for the defendant priest. The boy became one of the priest's "special" boys, along with one other, identified only as Albert, the lawsuit stated. The two boys were taken on trips, occasionally as long as two weeks, alone with the priest to the desert, the Lake Arrowhead and to Oregon, the suit claims. It was on these trips, it is alleged, that the priest "supplied alcohol and Playboy magazines to the boys and then fondled their genitals." The lawsuit alleges that the priest "put them to bed" in this manner many times. The plaintiff "does not 'know' what happened once they went to sleep," according to the filing. The molestation continued for "a period of no longer than four years," according to the lawsuit. The plaintiff claims `the remaining defendants" knew of the abuse and "negligently and/or willfully refused to and/or did not act effectively to stop the sexual assaults." Tod Tamberg of the archdiocese declined to comment on the allegations, saying had not seen the lawsuit. Cardinal Roger Mahony became cardinal in Los Angeles in 1985 and, within 14 months, established written policy on molestation by priests, he said. By 1992, the church had a so called zero-tolerance policy, Tamberg said. "Any priest found to have committed sexual molestation was removed from priestly duties and never returned to such duties," he said. The suit seeks general and special damages, loss of earnings and punitive damages in an unspecified amount.
By Richard Winton In what one lawyer described as "a way to hasten the healing," three attorneys Tuesday filed a class-action lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Church's Los Angeles Archdiocese on behalf of known and unidentified victims of clergy sexual abuse. The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, is the first known class action to be filed against the church in Southern California's molestation scandal, which has seen more than 60 current and former priests come under investigation by law enforcement agencies this year. The suit names two Ventura County men as plaintiffs and alleges childhood sexual abuse, sexual battery and negligence by one unnamed priest. The archdiocese, the suit alleges, failed to ensure the safety of children and prevent future acts of molestation while engaging in a pattern of concealment. The attorneys said the class action, if certified by a judge, would allow dozens of others alleging sexual abuse by a variety of priests to join the litigation. "We could continue to file individual cases on behalf of victims--a long, drawn-out process," said Raymond Boucher, a Beverly Hills attorney and one of the three filing the suit. "Or we could pursue the class-action approach that provides the greatest possibility for victims to resolve their claims." Clients could obtain out-of-court settlements or court verdicts "with as little pain as possible" because a class-action suit involves less rigorous examinations of individual cases and puts more emphasis on a pattern of conduct, he said. Boucher said he and attorneys Larry Drivon of Stockton and Jeffrey Anderson of St. Paul, Minn., have more than 50 clients who allege sexual abuse by one-time archdiocese priests. Tuesday's lawsuit was filed on behalf of two men identified as Manny V. and Tranquilano G. Although the suit did not name a specific priest, the lawyers said Tuesday that the two men were sexually abused as minors by Father Fidencio Silva while he was pastor at Oxnard's Our Lady of Guadalupe parish during the late 1970s and early '80s. Silva, 45, who was named in a previous lawsuit by eight Ventura County men, is the subject of an Oxnard police investigation. Silva, who now serves as a priest with the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit in Mexico, has denied the allegations. The archdiocese, anticipating the lawsuit, released a statement Monday saying it wants to resolve as many cases as possible in the shortest amount of time and emphasizing actions taken in the past by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony to limit the possibility of priestly abuse. "It is important for the victims, their families and the church to expedite this process and move toward a brighter future," said Tod Tamberg, an archdiocese spokesman. The archdiocese has a zero-tolerance policy for abusers and no priest accused of molestation is in active ministry, he said. Since Mahony directed the removal of seven priests from the ministry earlier this year, dozens of victims have made additional allegations against clerics, triggering law enforcement investigations of more than five dozen current and former priests. The nation's largest archdiocese covers 287 parishes in Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. The lawsuit comes days after Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation that creates a 12-month window in 2003 permitting the filing of cases involving sexual abuse, regardless of when incident occurred. Tamberg said the law is unfair and "plainly focused against the Catholic Church." He added that the passage of time makes decades-old allegations hard to disprove. Attorney Drivon said the new law allows victims to seek justice and holds the church hierarchy responsible. "They are the ones who covered up criminal conduct for decades," he said. "They cannot scream now [because] they have to answer." Mahony, archbishop since 1985, early this year adopted a zero-tolerance policy for cases of past, present and future abuse. That policy, church officials say, went further than a policy Mahony adopted in 1992, which established a zero-tolerance policy for new allegations of abuse, but did not oust some clerics with prior allegations who had received psychological treatment. In the wake of the U.S. Conference of Bishops in Dallas adopting a zero-tolerance policy for clergy abuse nationwide in June, Mahony last month asked "for forgiveness" from Southern California Catholics "for not understanding earlier the extent of the problem" or acting sooner to remove priests who abused minors. He also beefed up an existing clergy misconduct board. Mahony, however, has come under fire for his transfer of Father Michael Stephen Baker to several parishes after the priest told him in 1986 that he had molested young boys. Mahony later approved a $1.3-million settlement with two men who had allegedly been abused by Baker in the 1990s and forcibly laicized him. Archdiocese officials say that Baker already knew those victims and that the cardinal has never transferred a known molester into a parish where they found a new victim. Prosecutors convinced a grand jury to subpoena church documents related to Baker and two other priests, but have yet to complete the process of obtaining them. D.A. Steve Cooley says he'll take his investigation of Cardinal Mahony's pedo-priests "wherever it leads" By Ron Russell If Cardinal Roger M. Mahony had hoped that the priestly sex-abuse scandal
afflicting the Los Angeles Archdiocese might have blown over by now, he's
bound to be disappointed with the latest pronouncements of L.A. County
district attorney Steve Cooley. Calling the burgeoning investigation of L.A. pedo-priests "unprecedented" and "uniquely challenging," Cooley -- who has been criticized for moving too slowly to force Mahony to cooperate with law enforcement -- has set up a special team of prosecutors devoted exclusively to the scandal. It is headed by veteran deputy district attorney William Hodgman, who oversees the D.A.'s sex crimes unit. Although Cooley declined to speculate about how many current and former priests within the sprawling archdiocese -- which includes Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties -- may ultimately be caught up in the scandal, he pledged to bring guilty clerics and those who criminally protect them to justice "whether the number turns out to be in the single digits, double digits or triple digits." And to underscore his point, he suggested that his own prosecution of a San Fernando Valley priest for child molestation in the early 1990s be viewed as "the model" for his determination to let the chips fall where they may in dealing with the current crisis. As a deputy to former D.A. Gil Garcetti, Cooley rejected a plea arrangement that would have let Father Richard Allen Henry off the hook lightly after he was accused of molesting four boys from the same family. Henry was convicted and sent to prison, becoming the first and only Roman Catholic cleric in Los Angeles to serve time behind bars for molesting children. "If people want an indication of how I will respond when the evidence is there, they should look at [the Henry] case," Cooley says. "We intend to be thorough and cautious. We want to make sure the evidence we gather is not suppressed [in court]," he says. And in a rebuttal to critics -- cops among them -- he says his office has coordinated information not only with the dozens of law enforcement agencies within the boundaries of the archdiocese, but "has for some time shared information with other agencies throughout California. We've been out front on this. I'm proud of what we've done. But we're only at the beginning of a very long and detailed investigatory process." A New Times survey of dozens of law enforcement agencies within the three counties that make up the archdiocese reveals that at least 72 -- and likely more than 100 -- current or former priests are under suspicion in at least 142 cases of suspected abuse, and the number of cases is increasing almost daily. Such statistics already place L.A. on a plane with the Boston Archdiocese, where authorities are investigating about 200 abuse cases involving nearly 100 priests. Yet even as the number of cases being reported to law enforcement via telephone hot lines has mushroomed in recent weeks, Mahony has stonewalled authorities while claiming to cooperate with them. It wasn't until June 18 -- three and a half months after Cooley first ordered Mahony to turn over documents pertaining to accused pedo-priests -- that the archdiocese finally surrendered its first scrap of paper to law enforcement. And that was only after the D.A. made good on his threats to have the L.A. County grand jury force the cardinal's hand with a subpoena. The documents released so far relate to only three of the dozens of priests under investigation. Whether the documents are of any use to investigators -- or for that matter whether the cops are allowed to examine them -- remains unresolved. That's because Donald Steier, a lawyer for the three priests, has gone to court to keep the records under seal. A judge's decision on the matter, which could come any day, looms large. It is widely expected that lawyers for many if not all of the accused priests may similarly fight to keep the clerics' files out of investigators' hands. The three priests whose records were turned over are all under investigation by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department. Once the issue of whether their personnel files and other records may be used by investigators is resolved, authorities are expected to move swiftly to seek the records of other clerics being investigated. Two of the priests are longtime close friends of Mahony whom the cardinal shuffled to new assignments long after he knew they were pedophiles. Father Michael Baker was jettisoned by Mahony in 1999 after abusing numerous young men during more than a decade after Mahony welcomed him back to the fold, despite Baker's confessed abuse of three boys in the mid-1980s. Mahony similarly reassigned Father Michael Wempe, a former classmate of Mahony's at St. John's Seminary College in Camarillo, as a chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center without bothering to tell hospital officials that he was a pedophile. The third cleric, Father David Granadino, was relieved of his duties in May after abuse allegations were leveled against him at a parish in the San Gabriel Valley suburb of Azusa. Mahony on Web Site's List of 'Worst Bishops' By Teresa Waranabe Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, was named Tuesday by a leading religion Web site as one of the nation's nine "worst bishops" in handling clergy sexual abuse cases. Beliefnet.com said that despite Mahony's recent efforts to take a tough stand on reform, he had failed to promptly dismiss at least three priests who reportedly admitted to sexual abuse of minors. The Web site said plaintiffs have charged Mahony with "concealing information" from law enforcement officials on abuse allegations and it criticized the archdiocese's approach to victims as "potential litigants rather than wounded souls." Those developments and claims have been chronicled by The Times. The respected site, which reaches nearly 5 million people a month, features news, features and commentary on a broad range of religious traditions. Columnists range from Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention to Catholic sociologist Andrew Greeley to Starhawk, a leader in goddess spirituality. The site's posting on Mahony--based largely on its editors' interpretation of news media reports rather than independent research--comes two weeks after the nation's Roman Catholic bishops passed a tough "zero-tolerance" policy that calls for permanently ousting from public ministry all priests and deacons who sexually abuse minors. The leaders failed, however, to take substantive action to hold the American church's nearly 300 bishops accountable for failing to properly discipline predatory priests--an omission that has triggered discontent among many Catholics. Archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg criticized the Web site for failing to contact the Los Angeles Archdiocese to verify the information on Mahony before posting the list. He said he was first contacted by Beliefnet at 2:45 p.m. Tuesday, nearly three hours after it had sent out a news release naming the nine bishops. Tamberg declined to say whether the report on Mahony was inaccurate, however. "Beliefnet has done a great disservice to readers who look to it for reliable information, and to those in the church who are working diligently and compassionately to reach out to victims and to ensure that all of the ministries of the Catholic Church are safe, especially for our children and young people," Tamberg said. He added that the cardinal had established a tough "zero-tolerance" policy against abusive priests, formed an independent clergy misconduct oversight board to review all allegations of sex abuse and was expanding "child-safe programs in all of our 287 schools and parishes." Beliefnet Editor in Chief Steven Waldman said the list was compiled in an attempt to "put the spotlight on bishops who failed to solve the problem." He said he was "struck over the head" by the anger many bishops voiced during their recent national conference in Dallas against the minority of bishops who had mishandled cases, creating a crisis for the entire church. "We've been hearing from all quarters about not just how horrible the crime of child abuse is, but how people are upset with the actions and inactions of the bishops," Waldman said. Waldman said the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops did not return a call to comment on the list in advance of its posting this week. He added that he would promptly post any comments from bishops or other church authorities on the list. In a poll posted Monday night by Beliefnet and ABC News, eight in 10 Americans--and seven in 10 Catholics--favored criminal charges against bishops who failed to act on abuse allegations. The poll, which surveyed 1,023 Americans, including 251 Catholics, also found dissatisfaction with the bishops' performance in Dallas. Although 77% of Catholics believed the Dallas meeting would produce "meaningful improvements," only 44% said such progress had actually materialized. Only two in 10 of those surveyed--Catholics and non-Catholics alike--supported the bishops' policy to allow some offenders to stay in the priesthood, even with the harsh restrictions of stripping them of their Roman collar or right to celebrate Mass. Aside from Mahony, the Web site named as "worst bishops": Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, Bishop Charles Grahmann of Dallas, Bishop Thomas J. O'Brien of Phoenix, Bishop John B. McCormack of New Hampshire, Archbishop Manuel Moreno of Tucson, Bishop Gerald Gettelfinger of Evansville, Ind., Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre, N.Y., and Bishop Elden Curtiss of Nebraska. Beliefnet also cited three bishops for "exemplifying a positive approach to the crisis." They were Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh, who appealed to Rome when the Vatican refused to accept his request to defrock an abusive priest; Bishop John Kinney of St. Cloud, Minn.; and Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Ill., president of the bishops conference, who led the efforts in Dallas to adopt the tough reform policy. Mahony Asks Forgiveness for Handling of Scandal By Richard Winton Acknowledging his own shortcomings in handling sexual abuse by the clergy, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony on Sunday asked "for forgiveness" from Southern California Catholics "for not understanding earlier the extent of the problem" or acting sooner to remove priests who abused minors. Reading a pastoral letter at a Mass at his childhood parish in North Hollywood, Mahony also told parishioners that he deeply apologized to "members of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and especially to the victims of clergy sexual abuse." "I ask for your forgiveness for not understanding earlier the extent of the problem, and for not taking swifter action to remove from the ministry anyone who had abused a minor in the past," Mahony said, reading from a two-page letter that was read to congregations at the 287 churches throughout the three-county archdiocese. "The crisis has caused me many sleepless nights filled with concern for the victims, as well as sadness and anger toward those priests who have preyed upon the most vulnerable among us—our children." At St. Charles Borromeo Church, some parishioners called the cardinal's letter his most forthright statement yet on past errors and how to ensure that children never fear for their safety in the church again. "I think it is great [the cardinal] is trying to be as upfront with people," said Tom Soule of Los Angeles. Another parishioner, John Adair of Los Angeles, said Mahony's pastoral letter seeks forgiveness for the past and offers a vision to improve the future. "It goes some of the way to addressing the hurt felt by many Catholics," he said. 'Zero Tolerance' Policy Mahony's letter to parishioners in the nation's largest archdiocese is his first since the U.S. Conference of Bishops in Dallas adopted a "zero tolerance" policy for clergy abuse nationwide. During Sunday's Mass, Mahony said such a policy was already in place in the Los Angeles Archdiocese. It was instituted after the settlement of a lawsuit with a victim last year. When asked about the letter Mahony read, Mary Grant, Southern California regional director for Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said the cardinal is "cranking up the PR campaign because he does not want to end up like Cardinal [Bernard] Law." A grand jury is examining whether Law covered up cases of clergy abuse in Boston. "The only reason Cardinal Mahony is doing anything is because he got caught covering it," Grant said. "It is like a public plea bargain: 'Please don't call it a cover-up. It was just a mistake.' " Mahony made no mention Sunday about specific priests he has transferred after learning they had been accused of sexual misconduct. Mahony transferred Father Michael Stephen Baker to several parishes after the priest told him in 1986 that he had molested young boys. He later approved a secret $1.3-million settlement with two men who had allegedly been abused by Baker in the 1990s. Mahony has admitted he erred in transferring Father Michael Wempe, who is accused of molesting children, to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center about 14 years ago without telling hospital officials about the accusations. Mahony forced Baker to retire in 2000 and Wempe to retire this year. A grand jury has subpoenaed from the archdiocese all documents related to Baker and Wempe. They are among more than 50 current and former priests under investigation in the archdiocese. Nine grand juries are examining priest abuse nationwide. Before reading the letter Sunday, Mahony told parishioners that no message is stronger in the Gospels than the message of forgiveness, that every Mass begins with an acknowledgment of everyone's sinfulness and that the church is made up of human beings. Church Is a 'Safe Place' "Our church is safe. It is a safe place most especially for the most vulnerable of vulnerable," he told St. Charles parishioners. "I can assure you today that as far as is humanly possible to know, there is no priest serving in ministry in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles who has abused a minor even one time," Mahony said later in the letter. "Moreover, I pledge to all of you that I will never knowingly allow a priest who has abused a minor to be reassigned to any ministry." Archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg said a "handful" of priests under investigation are still with the archdiocese; they have been removed from active church work and placed on temporary administrative leave pending the criminal investigation. Since returning from Dallas, Mahony told parishioners, he has expanded the membership and powers of an existing board whose members examine accusations of sexual misconduct by priests. Establishing such boards was among the changes agreed upon by the bishops in Dallas. Mahony said he will seek to laicize all priests found guilty of abusing a minor—a position the bishops declined to take. St. Charles parishioners greeted the conclusion of Mahony's pastoral letter with gentle applause. "It was a well thought out letter, very direct and to the point," said Sami Kawaratani of Sherman Oaks. She said she agrees with Mahony that the scandal is part of the process of renewal for the church, one that eventually will make it stronger. "Finally, something has been done," said Thamara Mendez of North Hollywood. "It does not matter how long it took." Sisters Allege Abuse by Transferred Priest By Richard Winton Three sisters are alleging they were molested as youngsters by a priest after the Los Angeles archdiocese transferred him to their parish despite knowing allegations of abuse had been made against the priest in the past. The sisters allege they were abused by Father G. Neville Rucker in the early 1970s at St. Agatha Church in Los Angeles' West Adams district. They are demanding an apology from Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and a face-to-face meeting with the now-retired priest. Rucker came to St. Agatha in 1970, three years after two 9-year-old girls told the El Segundo police that the cleric molested them while he was at St. Anthony Church, police records show. Rucker retired in 1987. In April, Mahony removed him from the ministry because of the 1967 allegations and forced him to move out of the Pacific Palisades rectory, saying Rucker had run afoul of the archdiocese's new zero tolerance policy for priests who molest minors. Rucker's removal came 35 years after Mahony's predecessor--then-Bishop Timothy Manning--persuaded the mother of one of the El Segundo girls not to seek criminal charges against Rucker, records show. The mother told police Manning had assured her "he would like the Church to take care of the matter, and he would see that it was done properly," according to a police report. The Times' report of Rucker's removal from the ministry in April caused one of the sisters who claim he molested them at St. Agatha to go to the police. Los Angeles Police Lt. Daniel Mulrenin said the publicity caused others to call, and detectives now are investigating "several" reports of abuse by Rucker. "After all these years, I hoped he'd died of natural causes," said the middle sister, now 40. The recent report of Rucker's removal "forced me to relive some horrible memories. They are memories I'll never forget. I locked them away. I prayed no one would open that door. Now I learn he's done it before. I just want to know, why did they let it happen?" The Times does not name alleged sex crime victims. Rucker, who lives in a Catholic retirement facility in West Los Angeles, refused to comment. The sister recalls Rucker as the pastor who liked to share cookies, hugs and touches in places that she could not tell anyone about. She and her sisters said the abuse occurred for parts of two years, 1973 and 1974. Then, one night, overhearing her mother say how glad she was her children attended St. Agatha's school, the girl blurted out her secret. After that night, she and her mother said, her father marched down to the rectory and confronted parish officials. Tod Tamberg, archdiocese spokesman, acknowledged that Rucker was transferred after the 1967 El Segundo molestation claim. Rucker told El Segundo police he was innocent. One of the two alleged victims, whose mother agreed not to press charges, sued Rucker and the archdiocese in 1993. Two years later, the priest settled the lawsuit with a confidential $20,000 payment. In the settlement agreement, he maintained his innocence. Rucker's name was turned over to authorities early this year, Tamberg said. Los Angeles police and sheriff's deputies now are investigating allegations against 50 current or former priests. Amid the growing number of complaints, the archdiocese this week revamped its clergy misconduct review board. An attorney for the three sisters said he sent a letter Monday to the board's chairman , retired Judge Richard P. Byrne, and to Mahony. The attorney, Arthur Goldberg, said he requested an apology from the cardinal, an explanation for why Rucker was allowed to continue as a cleric after the 1967 abuse complaint, and a face-to-face meeting with the priest so the women can "confront their demons." "What is disturbing to these now mature women is that officials of the Catholic Church knew as early as the 1960s that Father Rucker was a sexual predator of young girls," Goldberg wrote. Goldberg also asked for the church to cover therapy costs, issue a public declaration on a zero tolerance policy and provide financial compensation to the victims for their "pain and suffering." "These women are not seeking revenge. They will work as long as it takes to achieve justice." Four days after the police closed the 1967 case, the archdiocese transferred Rucker to St. Teresa of Avila in Los Angeles, then to Holy Trinity Church in Los Angeles and Holy Cross Church and eventually to St. Agatha Church in July 1970. At St. Agatha, the middle sister said, "Rucker would take me to the rectory. He'd give me an oatmeal cookie. He'd be smiling and talking and then reach inside my panties." She said it left her scarred mentally and struggling with her faith. Seven years ago, she said, she went on a pilgrimage to Venezuela in hopes of forgiving Rucker and restoring her trust in priests. Today, she attends the Faithful Central Baptist Church, which holds its services at the Forum, but she says her fear and depression have turned to anger. "I want him charged," she said. Her younger sister said she suppressed her memories of Rucker until she
was told about his ousting by Mahony this year. "I'd never talked
to anyone about this. I remember going into the rectory with him and him
touching me," the 37-year-old woman alleges. What happened when their father went to see parish officials remains unclear because he is dead. "My husband went to the church, and we never saw the priest after that," said the sisters' mother. Rucker was the pastor assigned to St. Agatha Church until 1979, when he became pastor at Corpus Christi Church in Pacific Palisades. Stronger Clergy Sex-Abuse Board Getting Started in L.A. Archdiocese By Teresa Watanabe A newly strengthened clergy misconduct review board vowed Thursday to rid the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles of any priest who sexually preys on children. Board members, some of whom were formally introduced Thursday by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, include a sexual-abuse survivor, parents of young children, mental-health professionals, attorneys, a priest and a nun. The new board, which will address only sexual misconduct, replaces a more informal advisory group whose names were kept secret. It wields broader authority to review every such allegation against clergy in the three-county archdiocese and make direct recommendations to Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles. "The main thing we're interested in is ensuring that the priests ... are not predators, that they're not going to take advantage of our children or anyone," said board Chairman Richard P. Byrne, a former Los Angeles Superior Court presiding judge. "If there is a bias at all, it is in removing a person from ministry." Mahony said the new panel, called the Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board, represents "another chapter in efforts of the archdiocese ... to make certain all [churches] are safe for children and young people." Asked about further measures that would strengthen the board's independence, such as making board recommendations binding, or allowing an outside lay council to make some appointments, Mahony said there were roadblocks. He said he could not surrender such authority because only bishops are empowered under canon law to make personnel decisions about priests. He said, however, that he had widely consulted the community about potential board members and had closely followed the past board's advice. More than 50 priests in the archdiocese are under investigation by law enforcement for allegations of sexually abusing minors. The new board will have 13 members, not all of whom have yet been appointed by Mahony. Among other things, it will annually review archdiocesan sexual abuse policies, review all sexual misconduct complaints and verify that the archdiocese has reported them to civil authorities. It will also make recommendations on such things as pastoral outreach and whether to notify parishes of abuse allegations or remove offenders from ministry. Unlike the previous board, the new oversight panel will monitor how closely Mahony follows its recommendations. Other board members include: * William and Judi Arnold, parents of boys molested by a priest. * Nanette DeFuentes, a psychologist. DeFuentes said she was abused by a minister in a nondenominational Christian church from age 18 to 22, an experience she said has helped drive her passion to help survivors and help treat perpetrators. * Sister Diane Donoghue, director of Esperanza Community Housing Corp., which builds affordable housing for low-income families. Donoghue, a member of Sisters of Social Service and a community organizer, said she brings experience working with immigrant communities and Catholic values of social and economic justice. * James McGough, a professor of clinical psychiatry at UCLA, specializing in treatment of adults and children. McGough said he also brings the perspective of a father with two young children. * Kevin Jablonski, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist. * The Rev. Jarlath Cunnane, pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Los Angeles. Cunnane works on immigrant rights, labor issues and improving community-police relations. A strong advocate of "zero tolerance" for sexually abusive priests, Cunnane said he hopes the new board will "bring some openness and transparency to the process and to the judgments that are made here." New Panel on Priestly Abuse Is Planned By Teresa Watanabe The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles plans to unveil a newly revamped clergy misconduct review board today with more lay members, authority to review every allegation of priestly sex abuse in the region and direct reporting access to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony. The revamped board, which will be headed by former Los Angeles County Superior Court Presiding Judge Richard P. Byrne, will replace a more informal group whose responsibilities were not as clearly spelled out. In the past, members essentially advised the vicar of clergy on whatever cases he chose to bring them, and recommendations were not always implemented quickly, according to board member Nanette de Fuentes, a psychologist and sex-abuse survivor who helped found the original board in 1994. But she said the old board had also successfully pushed the archdiocese to make several tough changes, such as more quickly removing priests under investigation from active duty and informing parishes that their priests had been removed for sexual misconduct. The new Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board, among other things, will conduct an annual review of archdiocesan sexual misconduct policies, review all complaints and verify that the archdiocese has reported them to civil authorities. The board will also make recommendations to Mahony on such issues as outreach to victims, whether a priest should be removed from ministry and whether a parish should be notified of the alleged misconduct. The new board represents one of several changes Mahony has made in the last several months to strengthen policies against priestly sex abuse in the region. Today's announcement comes just days after the nation's Roman Catholic bishops approved a sweeping national policy to permanently oust from public ministry all priests and deacons found to have sexually abused minors. "I truly believe this is a reaffirmation of many years of professionalism and commitment of the archdiocese ... to effectively and compassionately deal with the problem of clergy sexual abuse," De Fuentes said. She said she was initially "a little skeptical" about whether the new board would represent any substantive improvement. But two days of meetings on the board's new duties and Mahony's assurances of a more central role in archdiocesan policymaking have convinced her that the panel will become a "cutting edge" model for other cities, she said. More than 50 priests in the three-county archdiocese are under investigation by authorities for alleged abuse of minors. Although Mahony is regarded as one of the nation's leading proponents of tough reform, he has also come under fire for his handling of some misconduct cases. The cardinal had, for instance, transferred Father Michael Stephen Baker from parish to parish even after the priest confessed his sexual misconduct of minors to archdiocesan authorities in 1986. Baker was finally asked to retire in 2000 after a $1.3-million settlement was made. Asked how such a case could fall through the review board's cracks, Byrne replied, "I'm not really sure." But De Fuentes said she was upset after reading of the Baker case in The Times and met with Mahony to find out if it had been reported to the board. (Cases come to the board without the names of priests, parishes or victims, she said.) According to De Fuentes, Mahony told her the Baker case first surfaced before the board was formed and had subsequently been taken to the board, but not in great detail. De Fuentes, who could not remember the board's recommendation on the case, said Mahony's explanations assured her that such handling of cases "would not happen now." "I do not feel there was any malicious intent," she said. "I really feel [the lack of board involvement] had to do with it being an old case." The national policy adopted by the nation's bishops in Dallas last week requires all dioceses to establish lay-dominated review boards to assist dioceses in evaluating allegations and assessing an accused perpetrator's fitness for ministry. Some Catholic reform groups have argued that the only way such boards can act truly independently of church authorities is for members to be appointed by lay pastoral councils rather than bishops and to have binding, not advisory, authority. But no diocese has yet created such a board--including in Los Angeles, where Mahony has appointed all members to serve in a strictly advisory capacity. "The bishops are not letting go of any control, which means the same people who made the mistakes that created this crisis are still the ones making the decisions alone. So we haven't really progressed very much," said Linda Pieczynski, spokeswoman for Call to Action, a Catholic reform group. Byrne, who helped develop the new board's duties in consultation with Mahony and his representatives, disagreed. "Cardinal Mahony is the CEO, is the fellow in charge," Byrne said. "He's the one who's going to have to make the tough decisions and take ultimate responsibility. He can't give that [authority] to some lay board such as ours." In April, Byrne helped direct an archdiocesan attorney on which court official to call to arrange an extraordinary late-night court hearing seeking to prevent The Times from publishing e-mails by Mahony and others. But Byrne said he is unbiased and "can be completely independent" as board chairman. Unlike the previous board, all members of the new panel will be publicly identified, as a step toward making archdiocesan policies more transparent. The new board will have 13 rather than nine members, nearly all of them laypeople. They will include one or two priests, a nun, an abuse victim, parents of abuse victims and mental-health professionals. One new member, Sister Diane Donoghue of Esperanza Community Housing Corp., said she hoped the new board would "live by the Catholic social and economic justice teachings of accountability, transparency and challenging abusive power." She also said she would bring the values of her Sisters of Social Service to champion "those without voices."
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