Priests

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.

Gunmen kidnapped a Chaldean Catholic archbishop and killed three of his guards Friday in the latest attack targeting Iraq's dwindling Christian minority in this northern city. The armed group intercepted Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho as he left the Church of the Holy Spirit after celebrating Mass, said Iraqi Brig. Gen. Khalid Abdul Sattar, a spokesman for Nineveh province security forces.

Still in a daze from the crash, Donald Ashman walked over to the first body. Ashman knelt down and lifted a corner of a white blanket covering the body, placed his hand on the man's forehead and said the words he had said so many times before, almost always at a hospital: "May God Almighty have mercy upon thee, forgive thee thy sins and bring thee to everlasting life." The prayer took just a few seconds.

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.

A Roman Catholic priest sexually molested a young parishioner while he was unconscious during a weekend trip and staged a blood ceremony cementing their "friendship," prosecutors alleged in new charges filed Wednesday. The former priest, Michael Stephen Baker, 59, has pleaded not guilty to earlier molestation charges. Arraignment on the new charges was expected today. Baker told Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of his interest in children 20 years ago.

Sexual abuse victims of a defrocked priest can seek punitive damages from the Diocese of San Diego in a lawsuit that alleges officials knew the priest was abusive and did not protect them, a judge ruled Tuesday. Former priest Edward Anthony Rodrigue was convicted of sexual abuse of children and has admitted to molesting five or six boys a year over 15 years. Twenty people claim in a lawsuit against the San Diego diocese that Rodrigue, 69, abused them in the 1960s and 1970s.

A pedophile priest could be kept in prison despite completing his sentence if he is found to be a sexually violent predator, prison officials said Wednesday. Michael Edwin Wempe, 67, was convicted and sentenced to a maximum of three years in prison last year for molesting a boy in Los Angeles. But Wempe spent 600 days in custody awaiting trial, and had been due for release Jan. 6.

A Roman Catholic priest accused of beating, groping and choking a woman at his Las Vegas church was arrested Thursday in Arizona, authorities said. Father George Chaanine, 52, was taken into custody in Apache Junction, east of Phoenix, said Deb McCarley, a spokeswoman for the Phoenix office of the FBI. Chaanine has been a fugitive since the alleged assault Jan. 26 at the Our Lady of Las Vegas parish office.

A Los Angeles judge Tuesday ordered the release of secret church files on a late Orange County priest convicted of molesting children, ruling the documents show that "priests with known sexual proclivities have been handed off from one location to another without regard to the potential harm" to children. Superior Court Judge Peter D.

"Deliver Us From Evil," a documentary about pedophile priest Oliver O'Grady and his devastating California legacy, has earned its filmmaker multiple awards and an Oscar nomination. Now the film is kicking up new controversy and litigation from L.A. to Ireland, where O'Grady now lives. Released in the U.S.