Catholic Church’s Ultimate Hypocrisy Over Molestations

Mary says she was not quite 14 years old. A Christmas social had just ended, and a priest offered to give her a ride home. But the priest, who was youth minister at her Orange County church, decided to take a little detour.

Mary, an eighth-grader at the time, wondered what was going on as he pulled up to a vacant lot in the Nohl Ranch area. But the priest, 32, soon made his purpose clear.

“He said he wanted to touch my private parts, and he wanted me to touch his,” says Mary. “He took my hand and put it between his legs. . . . He told me it was something that God wanted to happen.”

God apparently wanted the diocese to keep the incident quiet too. When Mary’s family complained about that and other sexual contact between her and the priest, diocese officials gave Father X a talking to and told him to stay away from Mary. But he was not disciplined.

Church officials didn’t even bother interviewing Mary, nor did they offer an apology or any therapeutic help. And Father X was not asked the details of the liaisons, nor was he sent for therapy. He saw a therapist on his own.

Four years after the molestation began in the late 1970s, he was named pastor of another parish, where he took charge of both church and school. Not even Mary’s 1990 lawsuit against him, settled by the diocese in 1991, stood in the way of Father X’s progress. He was sent to run yet another parish and school, and he remains in charge there to this day.

“He belongs behind bars,” Mary insists, indignant that confusion over the statute of limitations has twice figured in decisions against criminal prosecution. “I can’t believe he’s still a priest.”

It was after talking to Mary that I called the priest, and since then we’ve had several conversations. I’m calling him Father X here because that’s the deal I struck with him. A little protection in return for some insights into how the Catholic church handles scandal, the curse of the celibacy policy for priests, and the price of one man’s redemption.

Father X’s behavior became a side issue last month in a heavily publicized sexual molestation case against a monsignor in the Diocese of Orange. Lawyers for the young man who claimed the monsignor molested him called former Bishop Norman F. McFarland in for a deposition.

The victim’s lawyers wanted to talk to McFarland about Mary and Father X to establish that “diocese policy was that if they knew a priest was a molester, all they would do is send him into some kind of counseling and then put him back into circulation among minors,” said one attorney, Katherine Freberg.

They asked Bishop McFarland how it could be that Mary’s molester later became pastor of two major Orange County parishes, giving him authority over hundreds of schoolchildren.

Because Father X “had served well,” McFarland answered. He condemned what Father X had done with Mary, but said there’s a difference between molesting a 3-year-old and molesting a 15- or 17-year-old.

“I can understand the temptation of that more,” he said. “She may be very, very precocious or adult-looking and everything else, and there would be a temptation there.”

With all due respect, Father X was a priest, and Mary was a child less than half his age. The bishop’s remark was the ultimate hypocrisy coming from an institution that publicly condemns any sexual contact between anyone other than husband and wife.

I called the bishop to give him a chance to explain himself, but he declined. He said a column of mine about the church’s history of abuse and cover-up proved that I had “no integrity.”

“I wouldn’t talk to you if the pope told me to,” he said.

Be that as it may, court documents suggest that the precocious one was not Mary, but Father X. In court records, he described being with Mary on her mother’s bed, removing her panties and kissing her all over her body.

When I read the bishop’s remarks to Mary, she said they made her ill. But she wasn’t surprised.

“It’s the classic denial and minimizing,” said Mary, who has joined the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “I’m a child in the company of an authority figure I look up to, a priest who molests me--and the church hierarchy’s response is to blame me.”

Father X says Mary, who came forward after several years of suppressing the abuse, has either imagined or exaggerated the truth.

He did wrong, he admits, and might not have gotten off as lightly if the same thing happened today, now that the church’s history of dark secrets has been exposed and prosecution is more likely. But he says there were only two incidents with Mary over six months beginning when she was 15, not dozens over the course of four years, as Mary claims. He reminded me that he has stood in front of his congregation and confessed his sins.

“I’m a fallible and frail human being, and I made a mistake,” Father X told me. “I have suffered through it for 23 years.”

If you enter a seminary young, you never deal with your sexuality in a normal way, Father X said. He thinks that reality, and the celibacy requirement, partly explain a legacy of scandal in the Catholic church.

Priests fall in love, he added, and don’t know what to do with the feelings. More than once, it has happened to him.

Coming up next: I pay a visit to Father X, and I’m the one hearing confession.

*

Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com