L.A. bishop steps down in misconduct case
Resignation comes after church says it knew of claims in ’05
ROME — Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, the Vatican announced Wednesday, after an investigation into an accusation of misconduct with a minor.
On its own, the announcement that the pope had accepted Bishop Alexander Salazar’s resignation, made in the daily Bulletin issued by the Holy See Press Office, would have been unlikely to attract much attention. But a surprising follow-up open letter by Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles explained what had pushed Salazar to step down.
Gomez, who took over in Los Angeles in 2011, acknowledged that the archdiocese had known of the accusation against Salazar since 2005, a year after he had been ordained a bishop, but had allowed him to keep working.
After learning of the reported misconduct, the archdiocese referred the allegation to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is tasked with looking into claims of sexual misconduct. The body “conducted an investigation and imposed certain precautionary measures on the ministry of Bishop Salazar,” the archbishop wrote in his letter, but he did not specify what these measures had been.
In the letter, addressed to his followers and posted on a news website associated with the archdiocese, Gomez wrote that a more recent investigation by the archdiocese’s independent Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board had found an allegation against the bishop of “misconduct with a minor” to be credible.
The archbishop gave no details about the alleged misconduct, which dated to the 1990s, when Salazar was serving as a parish priest.
He wrote that he had submitted the board’s findings, along with his own “votum,” or opinion, to the Holy See.
The pope accepted the bishop’s resignation, though Gomez said in his letter that “Bishop Salazar has consistently denied any wrongdoing.”
Clerical sex abuse scandals and accusations of cover-ups have grown into a global crisis for the church, even producing demands that the pope step down. Francis seems to have finally begun enacting zero tolerance toward prelates accused of sexual abuse of minors, a policy that he had long promised but that his critics had said he had failed to impose.
Further steps may come in February, when the pope is summoning more than 100 bishops from around the world to a summit meeting at the Vatican on the protection of minors.
Ricardo Santiago, a spokesman for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, confirmed that the Pasadena Police Department had investigated Salazar in 2002 concerning an accusation of a “lewd act upon a child,” and had submitted a report to the district attorney’s office, which declined to file charges. From 1988 to 1992, Salazar served in a parish in Pasadena.
Santiago said he could not determine why the office did not prosecute.
Years later, Gomez said, the archdiocese initiated its own investigation, leading to the resignation.
Advocates for victims of church sex abuse in California reacted with skepticism, questioning how the archdiocese could not have known at the time about the 2002 police investigation.
“The first place they would go when they had an allegation, after speaking with an alleged victim, would be knocking on the door of the archdiocese,” said Joelle Casteix, founder of Survivors Taking on Predators, an advocacy group. “And the archdiocese is saying they have no idea.”