A couple of years ago, sex-abuse survivor advocate Joelle Casteix brought legendary reporter Jason Berry to OC. Berry essentially created the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal beat, and deserved the biggest possible auditorium. Instead? Only a beauty salon in Newport Beach would take him--no other venue would give Casteix or Berry the time of day.

Flash-forward to last month. Casteix asked me if I could host a panel on the sex-abuse crisis as part of my "Gustavo's Awesome Lecture Series" at the Fullerton Library's main branch to celebrate the release of Michael D'Antonio's Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal. Of course! So that's what's happening NEXT THURSDAY.

More »

Boner Jesus

One of the first stories I ever did on the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal was about a scandalous mural on the back of St. Joseph's in SanTana that its detractors lovingly referred to as the Boner Jesus. Per my writeup then, "Jesus is completely nude. Nowhere is the tattered cloth that two millennia of Christian art universally placed across His crotch. Instead, a red bulge suggests the Savior's scrotum, while a swath of pink appears to indicate the Holy Johnson."

I don't know of anyone who liked the piece--even former Diocese of Orange Bishop Norman McFarland described it in a court deposition as "quite a bizarre painting...it wasn't something that I thought was anywhere [near] good art." Well, critics won't have Boner Jesus to kick around anymore: in March, the church painted over the mural, literally whitewashing it of its ickiness.

More »

Funcheon

Wow, the pathetic legacy of former Diocese of Orange Bishop Tod D. Brown just keeps getting pathetic-er and pathetic-er-er. The Weekly has obtained a copy of a letter that His Excellency wrote back when he was merely His Stupidity, when Brownie was a Reverend Monsignor at the Diocese of Monterey during the mid-1980s. It concerns one Gerald Funcheon, a guy who was looking for a job after getting driven out of Hawaii after parents complained he told boys he wanted to get naked with them. Before Hawaii, Funcheon had been pushed out of other parishes after similar complaints--and this was the man Brownie would vouch for?

You know it!

More »

We have long covered the destruction wrought by Eleuterio Ramos, the worst-ever pedophile priest in the history of the Diocese of Orange. But we've only occasionally discussed the second-worst: Siegfried Widera, who molested at least nine children and most likely many more.

And now, a horrifying prospect has emerged: Widera and Ramos probably molested together, or at the very least coordinated, because not only did they know of each other, but they were good friends.

I first became aware of this in a comment left on my latest exposé of former Bishop Tod D. Brown, left by an eyewitness who saw this between 1982 and 1984.
More »

Here at OC's afflict-er of the comfortable, we rarely give a damn about anything that happens outside of the county because the rest of the country can pound sand. But I do want to take just this post to acknowledge a pioneer in pedo-priest profiles: the Boston Phoenix, which announced yesterday that it was shutting down next week after 47 years.

I'll be honest: I rarely read the Phoenix, given that I really don't care for Boston (the Celtics will do that to you, although Bobby Orr was GANGSTA). But I did revere them for their bravery more than a decade ago of breaking open the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal long before its rival, the Boston Globe, made it into a national story.

More »

KCET-TV Channel 28's SoCal Connected devoted a segment yesterday to the travesty that is the Archdiocese of Los Angeles sex-abuse scandal, specifically on their program of dumping pedo-priests in predominantly Latino parishes. But it also included a small aside to bring in the story of OC's worst-ever pedo-priest: Eleuterio Ramos.

The hook was the experience of Weekly friend-of-the-show Daniel A. Olivas, who made national news last month with his beautifully written op-ed for the New York Times on his childhood priest and how he escaped his molesting ways.

More »

Joelle Casteix has long been a pal of the Weekly, and not just because she's a hilarious, multitalented gal. She has been one of the most prominent Catholic Church sex-abuse survivors in Orange County, molested by some pig who's now a--I kid you not--choir director at some no-name college in the Midwest. She has also been a constant companion to other sex-abuse survivors who need a shoulder, who need someone to face off against pedophile apologists, who need someone to contact the media.

And now Casteix is taking her story to a national level by serving as one of the faces for a national campaign to help pass something called the Child Victims Act.
More »

The recent Archdiocese of Los Angeles document dump continues to reveal more and more with every plunge into the pedo-priest pool, specifically with Orange County angles. But the latest one comes as an especially strange story: the tale of one Wallace J. Daley.

Daley had lawsuits against him settled in 2006, back when the LA Archdiocese settled a bunch of them for about $600 million, but his personnel file wasn't released until this year. It showed that the priest ministered at Our Lady of Guadalupe in SanTana in the mid-1970s...then disappeared into Baja.
More »

This one goes out to the Catholic League haha

Last month, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles released thousands of pages of documents pertaining to its long, proud history of protecting pedophile priests. Yesterday, Terence McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org, which archives documents pertaining to the Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandal going back to the 1950s, discovered that LA Archbishop Jose H. Gomez had also sneaked in a list of 49 priests accused of child rape, including 24 previously never publicly acknowledged. Sneaky!

Orange County has been well-documented in this document dump, given parishes here were under the domain of the archdiocese until 1976, so it's no surprise that an OC priest would be among those listed for the first time.

More »

I have long admired the work of Mark Pinsky, the longtime religion reporter for the Orlando Sentinel and author of the best-selling The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of America's Most Animated Family, a fabulous book that makes its points in a way that leaves you knowing Pinsky knows his Jesus from Jeebus. Guy's a rock star, so imagine my shock years ago when first digging into the Eleuterio Ramos sex-abuse scandal and discovering that the first person to ever write about the Diocese of Orange's worst-ever pedophile priest was none other than Pinsky.

His articles appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1993. Twenty years later, I finally had the chance to talk to Pinsky about them.

More »