Tag: Priest Abusers

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Diocese offers loan to priest accused in sex case

The Archdiocese of Portland has offered an open-ended loan to the Rev. Angel Armando Perez to cover legal fees as he fights an accusation that he fondled a 12-year-old boy.

Archbishop John G. Vlazny approved the loan to Perez this week, Archdiocese of Portland spokesman Bud Bunce said Friday. Police said Perez chased a 12-year-old boy down a Woodburn street early Monday while dressed only in his underwear.

Perez served a parochial vicar at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Corvallis from May 2002 to July 2005.

“It’s available if he needs it,” Bunce said of the loan.

Bunce said he didn’t have details on the loan or how it would work. Parishioners in Woodburn also have begun to raise money for Perez’s defense, he said.

The Salem boy told investigators he ran from Perez’s church-owned house, with Perez chasing after him.

The 46-year-old parish priest at St. Luke Catholic Church made an initial appearance Tuesday in Marion County Circuit Court on accusations of sexual abuse, abuse of a child in the display of sexually explicit conduct, furnishing alcohol to a minor and driving under the influence.

Police said the boy told them the priest gave him a beer and he drank about half of it and that Perez also fondled him. Court documents filed after Perez’s arrest say the boy awoke to flashes and thinks the priest was taking cellphone photos of him.

Detectives wrote in their affidavit that the priest, a native of Mexico who has permanent legal residency in the U.S., told them he drank too much at a community event and doesn’t remember what happened after he and the boy watched a movie.

David Clohessy, director of the Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, said the church will cover the cost of defense for priests “in the overwhelming majority of cases,” but it’s usually not called a loan.

Complete Article HERE!

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Fort Worth Roman Catholic Diocese settles sexual abuse case

A man who accused disgraced priest Philip Magaldi of sexual abuse settled his claim Tuesday with the Fort Worth Roman Catholic Diocese, according to a news release.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed at the man’s request, the diocese said.

The man’s attorney, Tom McElyea, said the abuse occurred in Tarrant County and started in about 1994 when his client was 9.

Magaldi was being defrocked when he died in 2008. Before his death, the diocese announced that he was HIV positive. McElyea said his client does not have the virus.

As with two other known accusations against Magaldi, the man was subjected to enemas as part of his abuse, McElyea said.

In 1997, while serving at a parish in North Richland Hills, Magaldi was accused of paying a young man to give him enemas. Within two years, another man came forward to say Magaldi had given him enemas and had raped him as a boy.

People also claimed that Magaldi engaged in other inappropriate behavior, including “looking for minors” in Web chat rooms and possessing “pedophilic material,” according to court documents.

Bishop Kevin Vann, leader of the diocese, said in a statement that “he is deeply sorry for any sexual abuse this victim may have endured and suffered by Magaldi.”

McElyea said the diocese worked to resolve the matter and “hopefully my client can live a productive life.”

Magaldi served at St. John the Apostle Catholic Church in North Richland Hills. Besides accusations of sexual abuse, he was a convicted embezzler of church funds from his Rhode Island parish.

He had also been accused of perjury in 1985 at the second attempted-murder trial of socialite Claus von Bulow.

Complete Article HERE!

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Belgian bishop faces new abuse allegations

A Belgian lawyer said on Monday he had launched an inquiry into a new case of alleged sexual abuse by the former bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, who has already admitted to having abused his under-age nephews.

“The present case concerns sexual abuse in the 1990s,” at a care home in Loker, in western Belgium near the French border, the lawyer, Walter Van Steenbrugge, said.

He said he had handed the allegations to a court in Brussels and lodged an inquiry with it. It was up to the court to decide whether the statute of limitations ruled out a prosecution, and if not, whether or not to prosecute the bishop, he added.

Vangheluwe, who was bishop of Bruges from 1984 to 2010, is the highest-ranking member of the Belgian Catholic Church to be involved in a child abuse scandal which resulted in 475 complaints of molestation by priests.

Vangheluwe admitted in 2010 that he had abused one of his nephews during the 1980s, when the nephew was a child.

That case was beyond the statute of limitations, but he was forced to resign as bishop and left Belgium under Vatican orders.

He caused outrage in 2011 when he told a Belgian TV station that he had also abused a second nephew but that he did not consider himself a paedophile.

Complete Article HERE!

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‘We’re not supposed to touch,’ said Woodburn priest accused of sex abuse

The ordination of Rev. Angel Perez in 2002 was significant for two reasons: He was the rare Mexico native among priests in Oregon and, in a year when the Catholic Church sex abuse scandals were making national news, he was the rare priest ordained period in the state.

A decade ago, Oregonian reporter Shelby Oppel wrote a profile of Perez that described his ascent from a seminary student in Mexico to the archdiocese in Portland. The piece, which follows in its entirety, was published on the front page on Aug. 5, 2002.

On Monday, Perez, now the parish priest at Saint Luke Catholic Church in Woodburn, was arrested after police responded to a complaint at about 1:30 a.m. Monday alleging inappropriate contact between the priest and a 12-year-old boy.
He faces accusations of sexual abuse, use of a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct and furnishing alcohol to a minor. Perez, 46, was booked into Marion County Jail Monday evening and remains held without bail. He is scheduled to be arraigned at 3 p.m. in Marion County Circuit Court, according to the jail.

Perez is only the second priest to face criminal charges in Oregon since 1983, when the Rev. Thomas Laughlin was convicted of molesting two boys in Multnomah County.

Complete Article HERE!