When his grandmother and grandfather died, Wayne Presley deeply wished to attend their funerals.But Presley couldn't bring himself to walk through the church doors.
Inside, at the lectern, was the man who Presley said had sexually molested him as a child.
Presley on Sunday joined the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a support organization of self-help groups, at a demonstration outside the Cathedral of Christ the Light, mother church to the 84 Catholic parishes that make up the Diocese of Oakland.
Members of SNAP expressed outrage, citing recent news stories exploring the extent of sexual and child abuse in Bay Area parishes.
The news stories have prompted a heated discussion of Pope Benedict XVI's role in a growing crisis facing the Catholic Church.
Presley, now a 51-year-old Fremont resident, said he was in sixth grade when Monsignor Patrick O'Shea began abusing him.
"He took me to 'The Exorcist' opening day — in his collar," Presley said. "I obviously never forgot that. I could never watch that movie now."
Criminal charges were filed against O'Shea in 1994, dropped and refiled, then dropped again, owing to a statute of limitations on abuses that O'Shea was accused of committing in the 1960s and 1970s.
Although O'Shea was never convicted, the Archdiocese of San Francisco in 2005 agreed to pay two brothers $2.6 million to settle their claims that O'Shea molested them in 1972.
O'Shea could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
Also speaking at Sunday's news conference was a San Francisco woman who says she was molested by an Oakland priest. She described in vivid terms how she was sexually abused and later intimidated by her attacker.
The woman, Melinda Costello, said she had been abused for several years, beginning at age 7, as a parishioner in Fremont, where the Rev. Stephen Kiesle was working at a church as a seminarian in the late 1960s and early '70s.
Costello, now 48 and on disability because of arthritis, says that Kiesle — who was ordained as a priest in 1972 — first playfully invited her to sit on his lap, part of a youthful demeanor that he fostered, she said, including wearing purple tennis shoes in church.
"He was considered to be the Pied Piper," Costello recalled. "He was a kid. And who doesn't like a big kid?"
But Costello says Kiesle's touching and tickling soon progressed to fondling her chest and genitals. "He told me the devil was inside me," she said, adding that Kiesle sometimes cast his actions as an exorcism. "I always knew that I was uncomfortable and that it wasn't right."
Kiesle was convicted in 1978 of tying up and molesting two boys in another California church rectory. But he was not defrocked until 1987 — despite concerns voiced to the Vatican over several years by Bishop John S. Cummins of Oakland.
Kiesle now lives in Walnut Creek, where he is registered as a sex offender. Questions about the slow pace by which Kiesle was removed from the clergy have intensified since it was learned that Pope Benedict — then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and serving as a top Vatican official — had signed a 1985 letter telling Bishop Cummins that Kiesle's case needed more time and that the "good of the Universal Church" should be considered in coming to a decision.
A Vatican lawyer has defended the church's handling of Kiesle's case, saying that it had acted "expeditiously" by its own standards and that the onus was on Bishop Cummins to make sure the priest did not abuse again.
Kiesle, who could not be reached for comment, served three years' probation for his 1978 conviction and underwent treatment. In 2004, he was convicted of a second sex offense — molesting a girl in 1995 in Truckee — and sentenced to six years in prison.
Mike Brown, a spokesman for the Diocese of Oakland, said Kiesle was removed from active ministry in 1978.
"For all purposes, his life in the diocese was over," Brown said, adding that his continued membership in priesthood between 1978 and 1987 had been mischaracterized.
"It's been implied that the diocese just let him roam about as an employee, but that's not the case."
Tim Stier, who was a pastor at Corpus Christi Church in Fremont for more than a decade, said Sunday he went into "voluntary exile" five years ago when he told then-Bishop Allen Vigneron that he would not take any assignments unless he could "publicly dialogue about the crisis in the church."
Stier said he didn't get the answer he wanted and left his parish. He now works at the YMCA and aids SNAP in its efforts to stir reform among Catholic leaders.
"The time for apologizing is in the past,'' he said. "It's time the church started assigning women to positions of leadership. We need to end mandatory celibacy, and also begin welcoming gay people into our worship without them having to jettison their sexuality. We need to tell the truth about priests who were molesters, and we need to launch and maintain a proactive campaign of outreach to victims who survived this abuse."
But Brown said the diocese already has such a program.
"I am very confident in the local diocese and in our ability in Oakland to continue to minister to the victims of clergy sexual abuse," Brown said. "The reason I'm confident and feel positive about that is because Oakland, in the mid-'90s, was one of the first dioceses in the United States to set up a very active ministry to the victims. Ours is called No More Secrets, and it's active today."
Brown said diocese officials were not given a chance to respond to recent Associated Press and Bay Area News Group stories, contending that the allegations essentially "fell out of the sky."
"What they did was guerrilla journalism," he said. "And that's their right, but we're digging up 30-year-old files and can't respond to everything right away until we can go through the records."
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