Diocese Of Orange

After watching Roman Catholic schools in poor parts of Orange County close because families could not afford tuition, the Diocese of Orange on Friday announced that it was giving nearly $5 million over two years to schools that Bishop Tod D. Brown said "are struggling for their very existence." Brown said parochial schools are critical to helping children develop their faith.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange is seeking to permanently seal testimony that Bishop Tod Brown gave this week as part of a civil lawsuit accusing a former assistant basketball coach at Mater Dei High School of sexually abusing a 16-year-old student.

As the Diocese of Orange's written pledge of transparency was burned to ashes by protesters outside an Orange County courthouse, a judge unsealed testimony Thursday revealing that Bishop Tod Brown had been accused of molesting a boy early in his priesthood.

The man who accused Bishop of Orange Tod Brown of sexually abusing him in the 1960s spoke publicly for the first time about his allegations Friday, saying he was molested three times when he was a boy living in Bakersfield. Scott Hicks, 54, said he decided to go public with his identity to lend credibility to his allegations. Brown has adamantly denied the accusation, and church leaders dismissed Hicks' allegations as baseless.

Lawyers for a former Mater Dei High School student suing the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange in a sex abuse case are seeking to hold Bishop Tod Brown in contempt of court, arguing that he allowed his chief investigator of molestation complaints to be sent to a Canadian treatment center so that he could avoid testifying. Msgr.

Nearly 10 years ago, Sarah Gray stood before her fellow seniors at Mater Dei gushing about a high school experience made richer by the nurturing environment and religion. On Monday, her voice cracking and her faith shaken, the former valedictorian stood before reporters and took sharp aim at her alma mater, its administrators and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, which runs the school. Gray, 26, was one of four women who last week reached a $6.

At a small Catholic church in Huntington Beach, the pressing moral question comes to this: Does kneeling at the wrong time during worship make you a sinner? Kneeling "is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin," Father Martin Tran, pastor at St. Mary's by the Sea, told his flock in a recent church bulletin. The Diocese of Orange backs Tran's anti-kneeling edict.

Adrift in a rickety boat on the South China Sea, 10-year-old Bich Vu had gone nearly three weeks with no food and little water during his escape from Vietnam. Now a storm threatened to capsize the vessel and dump the boy and 125 fellow refugees into the sea. With tears streaming down his face, Vu held a rosary and pleaded, "God, I love my family. I'm so young; I do not want to die. If you save me and my family, I will give my whole life to you."

A Roman Catholic priest will don Father Junipero Serra's 230-year-old vestments today to offer a service for the dead. Starting at the tiny chapel named after the Spanish padre who founded California's missions, Father Arthur Holquin will lead a nearly two-mile procession from California's first church up Ortega Highway to Old Mission San Juan Capistrano Cemetery. There the group will celebrate the first Mass at the historic graveyard in more than 40 years.

Documents released Tuesday reveal the failure of the Diocese of Orange's decades-old strategy of trying to cure pedophile priests with therapy, detailing how the clerics continued to abuse young boys while in treatment but were cleared by psychologists to return to the ministry. The files also show that Roman Catholic officials ignored a recommendation to limit one cleric to an adults-only ministry and allowed him to set and enforce his own rules against being alone with children.