The orders the Rev. Carlos Rodriguez
got from his religious superiors after he confessed to molesting a
16-year-old boy just hours before were swift and decisive: Leave
immediately. Check into a motel. Don't tell anyone where you are going.
Wait for further instructions.
Rodriguez, then 31,
picked up cash at a Catholic retreat center and waited by the phone.
The
next day, the regional leader of his religious order called and told
him to book a plane ticket out of state.
By the time the victim's family
went to police, he had checked in at a residential treatment center for
troubled priests in Maryland.
"I felt like a
fugitive. But what else could I do under the circumstances. I had no
other choice but to follow orders," he wrote years later in an essay
that was included in his Vatican petition to be defrocked.
The
essay was part of a 330-page confidential personnel file on the priest
that was released Monday along with files for five other priests who
were also accused of molesting children while working for their Roman
Catholic religious orders — the Vincentians, the Norbertines and the
Augustinians — while assigned to parishes in the Archdiocese of Los
Angeles.
Rodriguez's file stands out among the
dozens of priest files that have become public in recent months because
it includes a candid and detailed autobiographical account of his
actions and the steps his religious superiors took to shield him from
the family and civil authorities.
The file also
makes clear that officials with Rodriguez's religious order, the
Vincentians, and the LA archdiocese worked together to intercede. Both
the order and the archdiocese knew of Rodriguez's confession, but no one
spoke with police until the boy's family filed a police report a month
later, according to the file.
"The thing that Carlos
Rodriguez does is, he lays out the truth, the underbelly, and exposes
that for all that it is," said Ray Boucher, a lead plaintiff attorney in
the clergy litigation who secured the release of the files.
The
religious order files are the second set to be released this summer and
at least a half-dozen more releases are expected in the coming weeks as
religious orders comply with the final terms of a 2007 settlement with
hundreds of clergy abuse victims in Los Angeles.
The
archdiocese itself released thousands of pages under court order this
year for its own priests who were accused of sexual abuse, but the full
picture of the problem has remained elusive without records from the
religious orders, which routinely assigned priests to work in Los
Angeles parishes and schools.
Without access to
Rodriguez, the police case dried up and the priest was back at work
within seven months, where he molested two brothers beginning that same
year. Rodriguez, who was defrocked in 1998, was convicted of that abuse
17 years later, in 2004, and sentenced to prison. He was released in
2008.
Now 57, he lives as a mostly unemployed
registered sex offender in Huntington Park, a gritty, industrial city
southeast of Los Angeles. He has been accused of abuse in at least five
civil lawsuits.
"It still weighs heavy on me,"
Rodriguez, who wore a cross around his neck, said on Monday when reached
at his apartment. "It's nothing proud to talk about. I still feel
remorse and it still hurts."
The Rev. Jerome Herff,
the Vincentian regional provincial who told Rodriguez to flee after his
1987 confession and placed him back in ministry the following year, said
he urged him to leave because the boy's family was irate and he feared
for the priest's safety. The treatment center, he said, was recommended
by a law enforcement authority, although he declined to say who.
"I
did what I thought was best and had to be done and what happened,
happened," Herff said in a brief phone interview. "I've lived with this
for years and I just don't want to go back there anymore."
Rodriguez's
troubles began in the summer of 1987, when he took two teenage boys on a
trip to the Grand Canyon roughly a year after he was ordained. The
three checked into a Holiday Inn in Flagstaff, Ariz., and in his essay,
Rodriguez wrote he began molesting one teen after he fell asleep on the
floor.
The boy awoke and the novice priest,
terrified at being discovered, drove nearly 500 miles through the night
to deliver both teens to their families and immediately went back to his
parish, where he took a shower and confessed.
The
Vincentians sent him to the residential treatment center, where he
stayed for seven months.
While there, Rodriguez fretted in letters home
about the "seriousness of the law in Arizona" that could get him up to
15 years in prison and asked the Vincentians for help gathering
character references that could help convince the Arizona prosecutor not
to press charges.
When the family finally contacted
the Los Angeles police a month later, Rodriguez's superior told the
investigating detective that the "church was aware of the situation and
the defendant was currently hospitalized," according to court papers
from a criminal case filed years later.
The victim's
former attorney, Drew Antablin, said his client, who could not be
reached for comment, received a settlement in 2007 as part of an
agreement with hundreds of plaintiffs in Southern California.
After
his release from the treatment center, Rodriguez was assigned to work
for the archdiocese's office of family life in Santa Barbara in 1988 and
then to St. Mary's Seminary in Santa Barbara, a retreat center run by
the Vincentians where he served as head of maintenance and grounds.
There
were no children there, but with Herff's permission he began saying
Mass at a nearby parish and immediately attracted notice for the
attention he paid to altar boys, according to letters and memos in
Rodriguez's file.
He took a leave of absence from
the order in 1993 after complaints of abuse surfaced again and the
archdiocese revoked his faculties, meaning he could no longer minister —
but his superiors soon discovered he was saying Mass at a parish in
neighboring Riverside County in violation of his status.
In 1996,
Rodriguez asked the Vatican to be defrocked and was exiled from the
priesthood two years later.
In 2004, he pleaded
guilty to molesting two brothers whom he met in 1988 on his first
assignment after being released from the Maryland treatment center.
The
abuse came to light only in 2001, when one of the brothers wrote a
letter about it to his parents.
"He used his
position in the church and used the victims' faith as a weapon against
them," said Deputy District Attorney Anthony Wold, who handled the case
in 2004. "It was outrageous and unforgiveable."