2020 - Democrats vote two pedophiles into the White House.

[Bradley K. Sherman]

Pedo Biden.

Pedo protector Kamala.

Column: California needs to take another look at its Catholic
Church sexual abuse cases

California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra has gained a reputation for
going after anyone or anything that he feels threatens our
Golden State. He’s filed 35 lawsuits just against the Trump
administration. He’s prosecuted landlords who gouged renters
after the devastating Tubbs fire last year. He has stood with
“Dreamers” and against gun manufacturers.

So far, however, Becerra’s office has stayed mum on one of
California’s biggest criminal outrages: sex abuse in the
Catholic Church.

This decades-long scandal flared up again last month with the
release of a Pennsylvania grand jury report. It detailed how 300
priests molested at least 1,000 children and groomed them for
abuse over the last 70 years. But the equally horrific crime,
Pennsylvania Atty. Gen. Josh Shapiro correctly argued, was that
church hierarchy and law enforcement officials largely ignored
victims and let offenders continue their depravities.

That was the case in California, too. Many of the still-alive
monsignors, bishops and cardinals involved in California’s part
of the pedophile priest problem have never faced appropriate
consequences for their inaction. In New Jersey and New York, the
attorneys general have launched new investigations. Becerra
should do the same here.

I’ve covered the scandal in the Diocese of Orange since 2003,
and even then it was evident to me that this wasn’t just a
problem of a few bad padres.

The cover-up involved political players. In 1981, a Benicia
police officer found Jerome Henson, a Dominican priest, with a
13-year-old boy’s legs around his shoulders late at night.
Officials with the Diocese of Sacramento transferred Henson
within days to the Diocese of Reno, then to the Orange diocese.
There, Henson worked under Tom Fuentes in the communications
office, where the two helped to keep parishioners unaware of the
predators within their pews. Fuentes went on to become the
architect of the modern-day Republican Party in Orange County.

Many of the still-alive monsignors, bishops and cardinals
involved in California’s part of the pedophile priest problem
have never faced prosecution.

The cover-up involved police. In 1984, Oliver O’Grady, an Irish
priest working in Stockton, admitted to local detectives that he
had molested children. But when lieutenants of Roger Mahony, who
was then bishop of the Diocese of Stockton, promised to put
O’Grady into therapy and keep him away from children, the
detectives halted their investigation. O’Grady went on to
assault dozens of children across the Central Valley before he
was finally convicted in 1993. By then, Mahony was a cardinal
for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, where he presided over more
pedophile priests.

The cover-up involved district attorneys. In 1975, church
officials in Orange County told prosecutors that Eleuterio Ramos
had molested a boy; the district attorney’s office suggested
psychological care instead of prison. Ramos became the most
prolific pedophile priest in Orange County history, admitting to
a victim last decade that he assaulted at least 25 boys.

Our sainted Sen. Kamala Harris, who trumpets her prosecution of
Backpage.com as evidence that she’s tough on sex crimes, is also
among those tarred in my mind. In 2005, while she was San
Francisco’s district attorney, Harris rebuffed a public-records
request by SF Weekly to release personnel files from the
Archdiocese of San Francisco. (Her predecessor had planned to
make them public after prosecuting criminal priests, but the
California Supreme Court stopped those cases when it declared
unconstitutional a 2002 law that lifted the criminal statute of
limitations.) Similar archives in Boston had exposed the scope
of the scandal there. “We’re not interested in selling out our
victims to look good in the paper,” Harris told SF Weekly in a
statement — this, even though many of those victims pleaded with
her to release the documents.

And she never prosecuted any pedophile priest.

Even Gov. Jerry Brown sinned. He twice vetoed bills that would
have extended the statute of limitations for victims to bring
civil lawsuits against the church leaders who protected abusive
priests.

“There comes a time,” Brown wrote in 2013, “when an individual
or organization should be secure in the reasonable expectation
that past acts are indeed in the past and not subject to further
lawsuits.”

So who feels secure as a result? People like Mahony live in easy
retirement. Rev. Msgr. John Urell, a clergy sex abuse
investigator in the Orange diocese as priests were shuffled
around and paid to leave the priesthood, sits comfy as pastor of
St. Timothy Church in Laguna Niguel.

The Catholic Church has always played an outsized, romanticized
role in California, from the mission system to powerhouse
parochial sports programs. The public deserves to know which
church leaders did nothing as its priests raped kids and who in
law enforcement and beyond enabled the abuse to go unchecked.

I can hear the naysayers already: Where’s the news? Why should
Becerra go on a fishing expedition into decades-old cases for
which the Orange, San Diego, and Los Angeles dioceses paid out
over $1 billion in the last 15 years alone?

“That’s a big misconception that most of the [cover-up] stuff is
already out there,” counters Joelle Casteix, an expert on
institutional child sex abuse who was molested by a choir
teacher at Mater Dei High in Santa Ana during the 1980s. “Most
of what we learned about clergy sex abuse and cover-up in
Pennsylvania concerned victims whose statutes had expired. I bet
it will be the same in California.”

Casteix and other survivors are now calling on the Catholic
Becerra to investigate California’s 12 Catholic dioceses. His
office put out a statement neither confirming nor denying that
it is investigating. That’s not good enough. The church
hierarchy inflicted horrendous pain on children for decades —
and it’s time that the princes of the church face justice.

mexicanwi...@gmail.com

Twitter: @GustavoArellano

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-catholic-
church-sex-abuse-california-20180912-story.html