Suing a Priest but Keeping the Faith

Diana Stuart, who turns 79 on Friday, became a Catholic 30 years ago. She still attends Mass daily and has been a generous contributor as well as a lector in her parish church at Sts. Simon and Jude in Huntington Beach.

The last thing in the world she pictured was one day suing a priest.

But that’s the drama that now dominates the life of this former British stage actress who came to the United States 42 years ago. She says she can still picture the young, charismatic Father Edd Anthony sitting in her living room and asking for money. He had been a visiting priest at Sts. Simon and Jude since the early 1980s and became one of Stuart’s favorites. So a few years later when he asked for money to help support a nonprofit, religious-based enterprise he and a partner had set up in Victorville, she willingly gave. Always, she says, she considered the money a loan. She received promissory notes from Anthony and his business partner, and the property was used as security for her loans, she says.

In a series of payments from March 1989 through July 1993, she says, she gave Father Anthony and his partner $205,000, refinancing her home to make some of the loans. As of today, she says the $65,000 she’s gotten back in payments has only partially offset her own interest payments on the money she borrowed.

She gave the money, she says, for only one reason: “He was a priest. I was trusting him. I was comfortable all the way along [in lending the money] because he kept assuring me.”

That relationship has ended in a lawsuit in which Stuart is asking for $235,600. She is suing Anthony, his business partner Curtis Johnson, the Franciscan Order in St. Louis that sponsors Anthony, and the Diocese of San Bernardino County. Last week, however, a judge dismissed the diocese from the suit.

Even so, it is an impressive array of opponents for Stuart, who says the lost money threatens to cost her the home that was once all but paid off.

Richard Brakefield, a Palm Springs attorney representing Anthony and Johnson, says Stuart knows, or should have known, that the money she gave Anthony was not a loan. Stuart’s contribution was a gift, just like others she had made to the church, Brakefield says. But even if it were a loan, Brakefield says, it was a loan to Anthony and Johnson’s company, known as the Franciscan Canticle. Stuart has lost her money, Brakefield says, because the company has gone bankrupt and the property used to secure her financial involvement is in foreclosure.

“The documents all show the money [from Stuart] went to Canticle, the promissory notes come from Canticle,” Brakefield says. “She’s just going around defaming Anthony and Johnson by claiming they were personal notes. She lent money to a corporation, which is now in bankruptcy. I’d be unhappy if I did that too, but good grief, there’s no nefariousness here.”

The Rev. Kurt Hartrich, provincial minister for the Franciscan Order of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis, says he sympathizes with Stuart but discounts any responsibility by the order. “This, to me, is a dispute between an individual and [Anthony’s corporation],” Hartrich says.

Brakefield says he’s instructed his clients, Anthony and Johnson, not to discuss the case.

Carol Matheis, an Irvine attorney representing Stuart, says Brakefield’s depiction of the transaction as anything other than a loan to Anthony “is a joke.” She says the corporation formed by Anthony and Johnson was “used and abused as an alter ego for them.” She insists that if the money were an investment or a gift, property wouldn’t have been used to secure it.

Stuart says the lost money has deprived her of “my traveling time and my supposedly, quote, golden years. Golden? There’s nothing much golden about it at the moment.

“The main thing is the misplaced trust,” she says. “That’s where I beat myself up. When trust is misplaced, it is very crushing. You feel such a fool, that you’ve really been an idiot to have been taken in.”

Brakefield charges that Stuart is using the media to win sympathy. Stuart was a board member of Anthony’s corporation and should have known the ins and outs of its financial situation, he says. “If you buy stock in a corporation and someone is soliciting the sale of the stock, do you hold that person responsible if the company goes under?” Brakefield says.

That’s not the way it was at all, Stuart says, but it’s an argument that may not prevail in court. A “status conference” for the suit is scheduled in May.

And in the meantime?

“I’m trying to get on with my life,” Stuart says. “It really has taken my life over. I think of it day and night. I wake up in the night and it’s on my mind. It’s not like I wake up in the morning and think of flowers that are growing or birds singing. I wake up with this before me all the time.”

Has it caused you to lose your faith, I ask.

“No,” she says. “It’s strengthened it, if anything.”

How so?

“I guess I’m praying more.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com