Priests

Cardinal Roger Mahony is expected to testify in a clergy sexual abuse lawsuit in Fresno today, marking only the second time he has taken the witness stand to answer questions before jurors about alleged molestation by priests. The Fresno lawsuit was brought by two brothers who say they were molested by a priest for 14 years at a church in Wasco, a small town north of Bakersfield.

They first met at seminary in Dublin, two bright country lads with a vocation that offered spiritual sustenance, intellectual challenge and adventure. Their school, All Hallows College, had been founded more than a century before with the task of training priests to administer to the bedraggled Catholic multitudes then escaping to America, Australia and other outposts of the Irish diaspora.

A week ago, Father Geoffrey Farrow stood before his Roman Catholic parishioners in Fresno and delivered a sermon that placed him squarely at odds with his church over gay marriage. With Proposition 8 on the November ballot, and his own bishop urging Central Valley priests to support its definition of traditional marriage, Farrow told congregants he felt obligated to break "a numbing silence" about church prejudice against homosexuals.

Father Louis Vitale has lost track of how many times he has been arrested. More than 200, he figures, maybe 300. The gaunt Franciscan friar figures he's spent a year and a half behind bars. At 76, he is ready to go to jail again. Last month, he appeared before a federal magistrate in Santa Barbara.

Any examination of the sexual abuse crisis afflicting the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles leads inevitably to a bell-towered campus in the rolling hills of Camarillo: St. John's Seminary. The 66-year-old institution has trained hundreds of clerics for the archdiocese and smaller jurisdictions across Southern California and beyond. It is the alma mater of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Diocese of Orange Bishop Tod Brown and other prominent prelates.

The church bells rang all afternoon. Archbishop Rafael Romo Muñoz was on his way to say a Mass marking the transfer of Father Raymundo Figueroa, the beloved priest at Santisimo Sacramento parish. Hundreds of men, women and children answered the call of the bells. But they weren't there to greet the bishop. They chained the gates and locked the doors. They hung signs. "This church belongs to the people; not the church," read one. When Romo stepped out of his SUV, 20 robed priests from the Tijuana diocese tried to form a procession, but burly men blocked their way. The archbishop tried to say a prayer, but the crowd drowned him out with bullhorns and bells.

Single and unemployed, Stephanie Collopy asked a Portland judge this month to order her son's father to increase her child support and to add their chronically ill boy to his health insurance plan. Sitting on the witness stand in a white button-down shirt, gray slacks and blue blazer with a small gold cross on the lapel, Arturo Uribe -- the 12-year-old boy's father -- had an unusual defense: He is a Roman Catholic priest.

Struggling with accusations against two priests suspected of possessing child pornography, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange finds itself a reluctant pioneer in a frontier unforeseen by the church's recently adopted zero-tolerance stance on sexual abuse. The policy, adopted by U.S. dioceses last year in response to the church's molestation scandals, requires that priests facing a single credible allegation of physically abusing minors be dismissed.

The Catholic Church disclosed Monday that it has paid $5.2 million and made significant changes in the way it handles allegations of sexual abuse to settle a lawsuit alleging that a prominent Orange County priest and onetime high school principal molested one of his students. The agreement between the Los Angeles and Orange dioceses and Ryan DiMaria of Laguna Hills appears to be the largest publicly disclosed payout of its kind to an individual in church history, experts said.

For more than two decades, officials in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange covered up for priests who molested children, shuffling predators from parish to parish and diocese to diocese, protecting them from prosecution and failing to warn parishioners of the danger, according to church documents released Tuesday.

The night was filled with voices, murmuring then gathering together then rising into hymns and chants that carried far in the balmy air. This was the time for God and for spirits. On a road next to the central cemetery, residents of a small slum were lying on mattresses and pieces of cardboard set out on the broken pavement. A woman started to hum a Christian song, and soon rallied a chorus, singing and dancing and clapping for rhythm. " K em kontan Jesus renmem, aleluya ," they sang -- joyously, not mournfully.

Anthony Martinez Garduno, a 51-year-old church leader who was shot three months ago during a burglary attempt at his church in Home Gardens, was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of selling drugs from his church, the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said. Authorities say that on Dec. 21, deputies from the Jurupa Valley Station responded to a call of an alleged sexual assault at Our Lady of Tepeyac church in the 13400 block of Magnolia Avenue in Home Gardens, an unincorporated area of Riverside County.

The former vicar of clergy for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles testified under a grant of immunity last week before a federal grand jury investigating the church's role in sexual abuse by priests, according to a person familiar with the matter. Msgr. Richard Loomis, whose responsibilities as a high-ranking aide to Cardinal Roger Mahony included overseeing sexual-abuse cases against fellow priests, testified Dec. 16 under "use immunity," meaning his testimony cannot be used against him in a criminal prosecution, said the source, who asked not to be named because grand juries are confidential.

The church bells rang all afternoon. Archbishop Rafael Romo Muñoz was on his way to say a Mass marking the transfer of Father Raymundo Figueroa, the beloved priest at Santisimo Sacramento parish. Hundreds of men, women and children answered the call of the bells. But they weren't there to greet the bishop. They chained the gates and locked the doors. They hung signs. "This church belongs to the people; not the church," read one. When Romo stepped out of his SUV, 20 robed priests from the Tijuana diocese tried to form a procession, but burly men blocked their way. The archbishop tried to say a prayer, but the crowd drowned him out with bullhorns and bells.

Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Dublin engaged in a widespread cover-up of abuses by clergy members for decades, a "scandal on an astonishing scale" that even saw officials taking out insurance policies to protect dioceses against future claims by the victims, a commission reported Thursday after a three-year investigation. The commission, which investigated how the church and state agencies handled three decades of endemic child abuse by priests in the Irish capital, also criticized police and social and health authorities who, with a few exceptions, it said, ignored complaints or simply referred allegations back to the church hierarchy.

The world may not end two years from now, despite Internet predictions and this week's blockbuster disaster movie, "2012." On screen, the final day in the 5,126-year Maya calendar brings global destruction, and Los Angeles slides inexorably into the sea. Here in the cradle of Maya civilization, however, shaman/priest Calixta Gabriel said Mother Earth -- Madre Tierra -- would suffer "hunger, wind and thunder," but rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated....

Members of a support group for victims of alleged clergy abuse distributed leaflets in front of St. Columbkille Catholic Church in South Los Angeles on Sunday, urging parishioners and church employees who have information about sex crimes to speak out. St. Columbkille is the former parish of defrocked priest Michael Stephen Baker, who in 2007 was sent to prison for sexually abusing two boys, and who authorities have identified as a prolific child...

Father Eleutherius Winance, a longtime Claremont Graduate University philosophy professor and the last of the founding monks of St. Andrew's Abbey in Valyermo, has died. He was 100. Winance, an exceptionally vigorous centenarian, died Saturday at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster after a heart attack, said Father Damien Toilolo, the prior administrator of St. Andrew's. Winance had maintained a full schedule of prayer, study and preaching -- including celebrating Mass at a juvenile hall and a convalescent home -- in the week preceding his death.

In a small room above the crowds of Terminal 2, the Rev. Michael G. Zaniolo prepared to deliver his airport version of Mass. In other churches it can take an hour or more. But as an American Airlines pilot strode into the chapel with his luggage, Zaniolo was ready to deliver it a bit quicker -- 30 minutes or less. His homily, a thoughtful sermon with messages of hope, was whittled to 1 minute, 46 seconds. "People have to rock and roll," said Zaniolo, a 50-year-old Catholic priest.

Father Louis Vitale has lost track of how many times he has been arrested. More than 200, he figures, maybe 300. The gaunt Franciscan friar figures he's spent a year and a half behind bars. At 76, he is ready to go to jail again. Last month, he appeared before a federal magistrate in Santa Barbara.