The Worthy Adversary

Category: Clergy Abuse Crisis

  • What’s going on in the Philippines, Part Two: The Horror Story

    What’s going on in the Philippines, Part Two: The Horror Story

    Rita Milla had a horror story.

    It was a story that no one could believe.

    It was 1978. The California teenager said she was being sexually abused by seven priests from the Philippines. She was 16.

    Who would believe a horrible story like that?

    The abuse continued.

    Then she got pregnant. One of the priests, Santiago Tamayo, urged her to have an abortion. When she wouldn’t, he and the father of the child, Father Valentine Tugade, convinced Rita’s mother to send the now-19-year-old to the Philippines, where she could have the child in secret. Rita’s mother didn’t know her daughter was pregnant.

    Rita gave birth to a healthy and beautiful daughter. In 1983, Rita went public.

    Milla and her family demanded answers from the Archdiocese. All hell broke loose.

    Scattered priests

    The priests scattered … All under the protection of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and bishops in the Philippines.

    Why? Rita’s allegations had merit.

    Santiago Tamayo fled to Hawaii and then the Philippines. There, he continued to act as a priest, with the blessing of his local bishop and a monthly check from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

    According to The Daily Breeze:

    That was around the same time that Tamayo and the other priests fled to the Philippines to escape criminal investigation and civil litigation.

    Tamayo’s file is dominated by memos and correspondence between Cardinal Roger Mahony and Monsignor Thomas Curry, the vicar of clergy, on how to keep Tamayo out of the country. There is also a letter in the file written to the cardinal in 2002 from a man alleging he was also abused by Tamayo. | Related: Exhibit 50, Page 18

    Tamayo he continued to work as a priest in the Philippines. He died in 1996.

    Another one of the accused, Fr. Angel Cruces was an extern priest (a “borrowed” priest) from the Diocese of Nueva Segovia, Philippines.

    Fr. Angel’s file, released in 2013, tells quite the story.

    The Archdiocese of Los Angeles said he could no longer minister there in 1984, when Rita went public. But that didn’t stop his home diocese in the Philippines from giving the priest a letter of recommendation to work in Brooklyn in the 1990s. That’s the only way that Cruces could end up in Brooklyn. He would need a “letter of good standing” from his home bishop.

    The file also shows that Fr. Angel’s archbishop in the Philippines attempted to step in and asked Los Angeles to make the whole situation “go away.”

    A DNA test proved that Father Valentine Tugade was the father of Rita’s daughter. He never apologized. Like the rest of Rita’s accused assailants, he fled to the Philippines to escape prosecution. Tugade’s whereabouts are unknown. But he may have ended up back in California. It’s quite possible he’s dead.

    He certainly wasn’t kicked out of the priesthood for fathering a child with an unwilling woman. Readers of this blog series already knew that wasn’t an issue. The Catholic Church in the Philippines has long allowed a “one-child” policy for its priests.

    Rita is doing great, by the way. She’s a strong, smart, and engaging woman, who never ceases to amaze me.

  • Accused former All-American Boys Chorus vocal coach can be extradited, UK judge rules

    Accused former All-American Boys Chorus vocal coach can be extradited, UK judge rules

    A former vocal coach for Orange County’s All-American Boys Chorus—and a member of the FBI’s Most Wanted List—can be sent back to California from the UK, a judge there ruled this week.

    Roger Alan Giese, 42, according to KABC:

    has been charged with five counts of lewd acts upon a child under the age of 14, 10 counts of lewd acts upon a child age 14 or 15, three counts of anal penetration by a foreign object and one count of oral copulation of a person under 18 years of age, and a sentencing enhancement allegation for substantial sexual conduct with a child.

    He escaped to England in 2007.

    Once there, Giese changed his name, started a public relations company, and claimed that he couldn’t be sent back to the U.S. because of our “civil commitment” laws.

    According to the OC Register:

    Under civil commitment, a convicted sex offender who has served his sentence can be committed to a state mental hospital indefinitely if medical experts believe that person is likely to reoffend. The law exists in 19 other states.

    The British courts agreed. Until this week.

     

    Chorus has a record of abuse

     

    Giese is the second All-American Boys Chorus official to be accused of child sexual abuse.

    The first, founder Fr. Richard T. Coughlin, has been accused by numerous former singers, removed for allegations of abuse, and put on the Diocese of Orange’s list of credibly accused clerics.

    Call me a broken record, but just think about this: the same people who covered up for Coughlin and Giese still run The All-American Boys Chorus.

    Why does anyone allow their child to be in that group?

     

  • What’s Going on in the Philippines: 101 East’s Sins of the Father

    What’s Going on in the Philippines: 101 East’s Sins of the Father

    In February 2017, Al Jazeera’s 101 East produced this 25-minute documentary feature about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the Philippines.

    It’s a great primer for anyone interested in learning more about the clergy sexual abuse crisis in this VERY Catholic country.

    Here’s a peek at what you’ll see:

     

    • The Catholic Church in the Philippines is the strongest institution in the country, in many ways even stronger than the government.

     

    • Victims who come forward to report abuse are met with intimidation and fear. One girl was beaten by her family for reporting. Even a lawyer for priests—men who are his friends—says that these matters are best handled “behind closed doors.” The only priest who was ever convicted for abuse soon found his conviction overturned.

     

    • Sexually abusive priests are transferred from parish to parish, without church leaders informing local Catholics that the man leading Mass has admitted to molesting children.

     

    • According to Fr. Jaime Achacoso, the secretary for the Canon Law Society of the Philippines, in many dioceses, 1 in 5 priests have fathered children.

     

    • According to retired Archbishop Oscar Cruz (who is mentioned in Part One in this series and is not one to mince words), his office reviews up to sixty cases of priest misconduct at a time. This can include sexual abuse, priests fathering children, etc. But with 82 jurisdictions in the Philippines, each bishop uses discretion and only sends the worst cases to Cruz’s office. Otherwise, Cruz says, “I might drown.”

     

    • The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines put out guidelines to prevent the sexual abuse of minors in 2001. Those guidelines were rejected by the Vatican because they allowed for priests to be able to father one child. (I will write more about that in a later post.) The guidelines were approved without the provision, but the bishops didn’t know. Al Jazeera told them about it in the interview.

     

    Watch the whole thing here:

  • What’s Going on the Philippines Part One: The Priest Who Broke the Rule

    What’s Going on the Philippines Part One: The Priest Who Broke the Rule

    In the introduction to this series, I called the Philippines the “Holy Grail” of cover-up.

    Simply put, it’s the place where priests accused of abuse can hang out and still be priests. In fact, it doesn’t matter whether or not the priests abused in the Philippines or elsewhere.

    The Philippines is a place where treatment centers for sexually abusive clerics thrive, even though the clerics cannot be cured and are not reported to local authorities.

    It’s a place where local bishops turn a blind eye to abuse. Unless of course, you break the one, unspoken rule.

    Msgr. Arnel Lagarejos broke that rule. He trafficked a 13-year-old child through a pimp last month.

    Lagarejos was caught in a police anti-trafficking sting operation and couldn’t be saved by his local bishop. The global media caught wind and jumped on the story. Locals were outraged. They couldn’t believe that a priest would engage in something so horrible.

    What locals didn’t realize, however, was how abuse and cover-up have been rampant in the Philippines. Lagareros just made the mistake of getting busted.

    And when I say abuse and cover-up are rampant, I mean RAMPANT!

    In fact, according to the August 6 Philippine Star: (emphasis mine)

    But the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) is no stranger to complaints of sexual misconduct, including child molestation, against priests.
    Retired Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz, who is investigating 55-year-old Lagarejos following his arrest on July 28 for bringing a 13-year-old to a motel, has been leading the CBCP’s national tribunal that probes about 60 cases of clergy misconduct every year, including those against priests involved in money scandals, priests siring children, and pedophilic priests.
    Last year, the tribunal looked into 14 cases of pedophilia, Cruz said in an interview months before the Lagarejos incident.
    “As per experience, there are more cases of pedophilia. More of it,” he said.

     

    Fourteen?! In one year?! In 2017?!

    If you read the whole article, the archbishop goes on to “define” pedophilia as the sexual abuse of children 13 and under. So, there are even more cases if you include the older kids.

    What is even worse is that the Archbishop seems to think this is no big deal next to trafficking.

    He and his fellow bishops are just upset because one of their own was busted on the SAME DAY Pope Francis made a speech appealing to the world to end human trafficking.

    Angry yet? I am.

    Up next: It took decades, but when a teen from Los Angeles was raped by five priests from the Philippines, she fought for her daughter, her dignity, and blew open a scandal that had been simmering for years.

     

  • What’s Going on in the Philippines? A New Series

    What’s Going on in the Philippines? A New Series

    August is usually a very quiet time in my line of work. Not so much this year.

    There are currently more than 100 cases of child sexual abuse and a now controversial canonical trial on the island of Guam. Hundreds of sex abuse cases are winding through the courts in Minnesota. The Keepers controversy has everyone on the edge of their seats.

    And that is just the beginning …

    But I am going to pretend it’s quiet and spend some time talking about a place that has (FINALLY) been in the news recently.

    For those of us who have been working in the movement to expose and prevent sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and other institutions, this tropical locale has been the “Holy Grail” of cover-up. However, because of its location, its foreign nation status, and its devout Catholicism, the Philippines has been a tough nut to crack.

    Through the next series of posts, I am going to talk about some of the worst cases of sexual abuse and cover-up out of the Philippines, the bishops’ policies that allowed the abuses to happen, and why it’s taken so long for local media to be able to cover the scandal.

    Up Next ~ Part One: The Priest Who Broke the Rule