The personnel files of Catholic priests who abused 25 children in Santa Barbara may be opened for public scrutiny after a precedent-setting decision handed down Monday by a Los Angeles County judge.
The released information could include their home addresses.
The judge also took into account the language of a $28 million settlement agreement reached a year ago between the Franciscan religious order -- which ran the school where most of the sexual abuse occurred -- and the victims.
“This is a great day for the children of California,” Tim Hale, attorney for the victims, said Monday.
The attorney representing the individual priests who raised privacy concerns did not return phone calls late Monday.
The Franciscan order had already agreed to release the personnel files, along with affidavits, depositions and other sealed documents. But lawyers for six of the 11 priests named in the suit raised privacy objections. The ruling by Judge Lichtman essentially denied those objections, saying that their privacy concerns were outweighed by the public's interest.
The judge said that because only convicted sex offenders must register themselves in a public database under Megan's Law -- and because the statute of limitations for pressing criminal charges has expired for all but one of the priests -- the communities in which these men live have no access to information about their past.
“The state has a compelling interest in making the information known to the community,” Lichtman wrote.
Most of the sexual abuse in question occurred at St. Anthony’s Seminary, an all-boys high school in Santa Barbara that closed in 1986. An internal audit conducted by the Franciscan Order in the early 1990s showed that at least 34 boys had been abused between 1960 and 1990.
Some of the victims decided to sue the order, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and other Roman Catholic entities when the California Legislature lifted the statute of limitation on old cases of abuse (but only for civil cases) in 2002.
The settlement agreement reached last year came after years of legal wrangling between lawyers for the victims and the Franciscan Order. Each of the 25 victims received about a million dollars, and the Franciscan Order agreed to release documents that would have come out in court had the cases gone to trial.
Because of that wording in the settlement agreement, Lichtman ruled that the personnel files should be released now. The courts will now go through each individual priest file and determine what will be released and when.
It is the first time a judge in California has made such a ruling. In a similar case against the Diocese of Orange two years ago, the judge ruled that the documents could not be released because it wasn’t clear whether they would have been released in court, and whether all of the priests had admitted to abuse.
In this case, “all of the above named individuals have either admitted to acts of sexual molestations of a minor, the friars themselves have conceded such conduct, or prior records have indicated a propensity to commit sexual acts,” the judge wrote.
The six priests who raised the privacy concerns include: Brother Samuel Cabot, the Rev. Mario Cimmarrusti, the Rev. David Johnson, the Rev. Gus Krumm, the Rev. Gary Pacheco and Robert Van Handel, who was defrocked.
In their internal audit, the friars themselves conceded that the Rev. Cimmarrusti was one of the most prolific abusers at St. Anthony’s. He currently resides at a retreat house in Danville, but the Franciscans have said in the past he has no access to children.
Brother Cabot, who allegedly admitted to sexual abuse, lives at a retreat house in Malibu within walking distance of residential neighborhoods, according to lawyers for the victims. The Rev. Van Handel is the only priest convicted criminally; he is a registered sex offender who lives in the Santa Cruz area.