Community’s Healing Begins Only After the Silence Is Broken

It’s the silence that strikes you.

Not that Orange County at any time of day ever sounds like Manhattan, but stroll around Rancho Santa Margarita on a weekday afternoon and see if you’re not taken by the soundlessness of the place. You can drive up and down block after block in the city and, literally, not hear anything.

It’s not as though this is a burg of 500 people. More than 47,000 live here. You wonder how that many people can make so little noise. By contrast, neighbors Lake Forest and Mission Viejo sound positively raucous.

This is no insult to Rancho Santa Margarita.

It’s that very quiet and serenity that help identify this 2-year-old city, a community laid out and designed for comfort, a poster city for the good life in America.

The city keeps pools heated year-round. A Sheriff’s Department spokesman refers to it as virtually “problem-free and crime-free.”

From some vantage points, you can see people on horseback. A merchant jokes that the city of 40,000-plus has five Starbucks. One small strip mall features two pet-care centers.

Walk around this idyllic community built in the foothills and backed by the Cleveland National Forest and all the suburban stereotypes leap to mind.

The town is peaceful and boring, and that’s the way the residents like it, thank you very much.

All of which makes the psychic pain rippling through part of Rancho Santa Margarita all the more incongruous.

The pain--and that is the correct word--stems from the recent disclosures of sexual misconduct by a popular priest and by a former high school principal.

Both men--priest Michael Pecharich and principal Msgr. Michael Harris--were more than figureheads in the community.

San Francisco Solano Church and Santa Margarita High School, both on the same plot of ground just down the road from the entrance to upscale Coto de Caza, are centers of educational, cultural and spiritual life in town.

Earlier this month, Pecharich, the founding pastor at San Francisco Solano, announced the end of his 12-year service. Harris, the first principal at Santa Margarita, left several years ago and was the central figure in a $5.2-million lawsuit settled by the Los Angeles and Orange dioceses last year.

One of San Francisco Solano’s parishioners recently left me a phone message.

“You can only imagine the pain and fear and the healing process that we’re all experiencing at this time,” she said.

“There’s a lot of soul-searching and questions. As a devout Roman Catholic, it’s very difficult to pick up the paper. Not only after what we’ve suffered here, but to see what’s happening across the country. It’s devastating.”

It would be convenient to say that the privacy and semi-isolation that mark Rancho Santa Margarita--not to mention its image as a sanctuary from the larger society’s problems--fostered the secrecy over misdeeds at the local church and school.

Convenient, but not accurate. Churches across the country have come forward to reveal similar hushed-up situations.

Nor am I suggesting that the revelations that have rocked America’s Catholics go down any smoother in bustling urban centers like Boston than they do in tranquil communities like Rancho Santa Margarita.

In fact, I’m noting the opposite.

“It’s not that people are saying, ‘This is Rancho Santa Margarita and it couldn’t happen here,’” a merchant tells me. “It’s an awful thing, but it’s not being seen in terms of, ‘We deserve better.’ It’s our children who deserve better than that.”

The merchant, who didn’t want to be identified, says the story isn’t the overlay of such awful allegations against the backdrop of a tranquil community.

“The story is that it’s being flushed out by the church,” he says. “Our community is not above any other.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. 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.