Ex-Priest Charged With 4 Counts of Abuse, Seeks to Delay Arraignment

The Rev. Michael Wempe was charged Thursday with three counts of lewd conduct with a minor and a count of sexual assault and was ordered held on $800,000 bail.

Showing little emotion, Wempe, dressed in a brown jail shirt and pants, stood in the glass cage of a downtown Los Angeles criminal courtroom and told Superior Court Commissioner Jeffrey M. Harkavy that he wanted to delay his arraignment until Tuesday.

The retired Roman Catholic priest had been reassigned by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he allegedly molested a youth between 1990 and 1995.

Wempe, 63, had been transferred after Mahony heard allegations that he had molested boys at several parishes of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles in the 1980s.

Wempe was one of 10 priests in Los Angeles County whose molestation charges were dismissed after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June invalidated a law that allowed the prosecution of older abuse cases.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Todd Hicks charged that the victim, who is 24, was molested on four occasions between 1990 and 1995, beginning at the age of 11. The assaults allegedly occurred in Wempe’s car and his office at the hospital.

Wempe was a family acquaintance of the victim, police said.

“We expect to prove these charges at a preliminary hearing,” Hicks said. Donald Steier, Wempe’s attorney, said his client will plead not guilty.

“He vigorously denies these allegations,” Steier said.

At a news conference after the hearing Thursday, members of a support group for victims, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said the charges demonstrate Mahony’s failure to deal with abusive priests until the recent public scandal.

After learning in the 1980s of sex abuse allegations against the priest, Mahony ordered Wempe to undergo psychiatric treatment and transferred him to the chaplaincy of Cedars-Sinai in 1988.

Mahony acknowledged to The Times last year that he should have not reassigned Wempe without telling hospital officials about the accusations.

Last spring, Mahony forced Wempe to retire from the Cedars chaplaincy and from active Catholic clergy when the prelate retroactively applied a zero-tolerance policy for abusers in the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

A spokesman for the archdiocese said Wednesday that no new allegations against the priest had been received by the church, which thought Wempe had been rehabilitated.