Controversial former Santa Rosa Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann has died aged 68 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Bishop Ziemann died Thursday at a monastery in Arizona, said his brother, Joe, the LA Times reports.
He resigned from the Diocese of Santa Rosa after a priest filed a lawsuit alleging that Ziemann had coerced him into a two-year sexual relationship in exchange for keeping silent about the priest's admitted theft of money from a Ukiah parish.
Ziemann publicly acknowledged his affair with Fr Jorge Hume Salas after the lawsuit was filed but said the relationship was consensual.
Authorities declined to file criminal charges, however, questioning Salas' credibility. Their investigation showed that Salas had been expelled from several seminaries and posed as a priest before he was ordained.
The Santa Rosa diocese agreed to a $535,000 settlement with Salas, who has since left the priesthood and returned to his native Costa Rica.
Church leaders, meanwhile, found Ziemann had squandered $16 million in diocese money - the result of poor oversight, bad investments and overspending, diocese officials said.
Ziemann apologized for the turmoil. In a letter read on his behalf at services throughout the diocese after his resignation, he wrote: "I acknowledge with deep regret my responsibility for the current state of affairs, about which you are justly angry. I cannot express to you enough the deep remorse and repentance I feel for letting you down."
One close friend said the experiences that ended Ziemann's seven-year tenure in Santa Rosa changed him. "He is the first one to say, 'I violated my vows,' " said Joe Piasta II, the bishop's onetime attorney who visited him in Arizona shortly before his death. "The whole crisis made him very human."
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