Former Priest Jailed in Sex Case

A former Santa Paula priest has been arrested for a second time on suspicion of child molestation after previous charges against him were dismissed for being too old.

Carlos Rene Rodriguez, 48, is accused of molesting two boys he met while serving as a priest at Santa Paula’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where he worked between 1988 and 1993, Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Anthony Wold said.

Jailed in Los Angeles after his arrest Wednesday, Rodriguez is awaiting transfer to Ventura County for arraignment. His bail was set at $150,000.

Most of the alleged molestations occurred at the homes of the boys, said Wold, who would not disclose where the youths lived. The alleged incidents spanned a period when one of the boys was 13 to 17 years old and the other was 14 to 17, authorities said.

During that time, Rodriguez was also a regional consultant for the archdiocese’s Office of Family Life in Santa Barbara. He lived in Santa Barbara at St. Mary’s Seminary. Rodriguez left the archdiocese in 1993.

Wold said a nine-month investigation led to the warrant for his arrest, which was filed last July 30. That was just weeks after an L.A. judge dismissed unrelated molestation charges against Rodriguez. Authorities said those felony charges stemmed from his alleged sexual abuse of an altar boy at St. Vincent de Paul Church.

Rodriguez served at St. Vincent de Paul in downtown Los Angeles before taking his Santa Paula post in 1988. The alleged incidents took place from 1985, when the boy was 12, to 1987, authorities said.

Arrested in September 2002, Rodriguez was jailed for 10 months while awaiting trial.

He was released after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of a 1994 California law that allowed prosecutors to file charges in sex-abuse cases that were decades old.

As a result of the ruling, dozens of inmates have been released from California prisons and criminal charges were dropped against at least two priests in addition to Rodriguez.

Father Carl Sutphin had been accused of molesting six boys, age 7 to 12, between 1968 and 1978. At the time he was associate pastor at St. Mary Magdalen Church in Camarillo and a chaplain at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard.

While criminal charges against him were dropped, Sutphin has been sued by two of his alleged victims.

Molestation charges also were dropped against Father Fidencio Silva, who had been in charge of the altar-boy program at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Oxnard from 1978 to 1986. He is believed to be in Mexico.

In the current case against Rodriguez, prosecutors said they are confident the high court decision will not affect them.

While the alleged incidents took place as long as 15 years ago, the statute of limitations would not have expired until after 1994, when the law in question took effect.

That means the case is not subject to being thrown out, as were cases whose statute of limitations expired before that time, Wold said.