Priests

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.

A Roman Catholic cardinal in Mexico said he warned Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in 1987 about a priest then seeking employment with the Los Angeles Archdiocese, who was later charged with molesting eight boys before fleeing back to Mexico, court documents said. Father Nicolas Aguilar, 64, continued to work as a priest in Mexico, where the abuse allegedly continued, according to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles last year accusing the cardinals of conspiring to conceal the priest's conduct.

The Catholic Diocese of San Diego announced Tuesday that it was filing for bankruptcy protection rather than face lawsuits from 150 people who alleged that they were sexually abused by priests. The first court case was set to begin today. The diocese decision came despite a request Monday from a settlement judge to not file for bankruptcy until after a negotiating session set for Friday.

The Vatican is preparing to discipline Father Jon Sobrino, a well-known proponent of liberation theology who worked for decades in El Salvador even as fellow priests were murdered, church sources said Tuesday. Sobrino will be sanctioned for alleged errors in his teachings and writings about the divinity of Jesus, according to members of his Jesuit order in Rome. A Vatican spokesman this week confirmed to reporters that an investigation was underway.

When a Salvadoran army death squad dragged six Jesuit priests from their beds in the middle of a November night in 1989, then dumped their bloodied bodies on a lawn, Father Jon Sobrino was 11,000 miles away, delivering a lecture. But for that assignment, Sobrino would have become another of the "martyrs," the long line of priests, nuns and other religious workers killed during years of civil strife in El Salvador.