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Two arrested priests bring total to 10 in L.A.
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Two more priests were arrested Thursday in connection with an ongoing investigation into clerical sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, officials said. There are now 10 priests and one seminarian facing charges of sexually abusing parishioners. Father Michael Wempe and Father Titian Miani will be charged Monday. More arrests are expected. Wempe, who was forced to retire in 2001 by Cardinal Roger Mahony, was arrested outside his home by deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, authorities said. He will be charged with nearly 40 counts of sexual child molestation, said Jane Robinson, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. Miani, who was arrested in Stockton, California, faces two counts of lewd acts against a child, said Los Angeles County Sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Dan Scott. Robinson estimated another 11 priests will be charged by the end of the year. According to a statement from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, Wempe molested five boys between the ages of 7 and 16 from 1977 to 1986. He was forced to retire in November 2001 after the archdiocese made its "zero tolerance" policy against sexual abuse retroactive, said archdiocese spokesman Todd Tamberg. Miani is accused of molesting at least two people in the 1960s when he was assigned to St. John Bosco High School in Bellflower, California, Scott said. Cardinal Mahony is in St. Louis, Missouri attending the annual Bishop's Conference. Earlier in the day, he praised the church's "extraordinary steps" in the past year to protect children from priestly sex abuse and weed out predatory clergy from the Catholic fold. But he was criticized by former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, who recently stepped down as head of the board monitoring the church's response to the sexual abuse scandal, as obstructing the efforts of the board. Keating left his post after he was quoted in a Los Angeles Times interview saying "A number of serious officials in my faith have very clay feet. To act like La Cosa Nostra and hide and suppress, I think, is very unhealthy." (Full story) Keating also remarked, "I think there are a number of bishops -- and I put Cardinal Mahony in that category -- who listen too much to his lawyer and not enough to his heart." He stood by his comments after criticism from other board members. The investigation into the allegations of molestation by several Los Angeles-area law enforcement agencies began early in 2002, when stories of sexual abuse by priests hit the headlines. Tamberg said Mahony acted before the national outcry and forced two priests -- including Wempe -- to retire. He forced five others, who were already retired, to disassociate themselves from the church and its institutions because of sexual abuse allegations against them. Tamberg said the archdiocese is cooperating with the county district attorney's office "to the point where we don't violate California privacy laws." Robinson said the archdiocese turned in 2,000 pages of documents in the cases last year, but they are under seal and not available to the public. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge is expected to rule within days on releasing the documents. Scott said many of the alleged victims may have thought it was too late for the accused perpetrators to be brought to justice -- since some of the reported crimes date back to 1947. "Once cases began to break across the country, it woke people to the fact that this is reportable, that law enforcement will investigate and take it seriously, and it snowballed from there," Scott said. There have been 30 investigations involving priests or personnel from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Scott said, and 24 of them are still open. Scott said investigators are looking at all aspects in the inquiry -- including whether Cardinal Mahony or the archdiocese covered up any crimes or moved accused priests to other parishes when problems arose. "Nobody gets a free pass. If we have legitimate criminal charges, we will present them to the district attorney's office," he said. California's mandated reporting laws exempt priests from reporting abuse if admissions to such or reports of such come in the confessional.
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