Old lawsuit renews push at school to oust priest
In the latest scandal to hit San Francisco’s Catholic Church, elementary school parents at Star of the Sea School have renewed calls for the ouster of the parish’s controversial pastor after learning of a decade-old civil court case in which a jury found he inflicted emotional distress on an 11-year-old girl at his former parish in Modesto.
The lawsuit in San Joaquin County Superior Court in 2005 said that when the girl came to the Rev. Joseph Illo in September 2001 to report alleged sexual abuse by another priest, the Rev. Francis Arakal, Illo called her a liar, yelled at her and forced her to confront Arakal.
No criminal charges were filed against Arakal. The jury in the civil lawsuit did not find him liable for any wrongful touching, but awarded the family $20,000 for emotional distress based on how the incident was handled.
“Whether the story was real or not, he had no right to treat a child the way he did as a responsible adult in a position of authority,” said Christy Brooks, a parent of two students at Star of the Sea, a K-8 school. “We really need an explanation from the archdiocese of how this person was vetted and put into a parish that had an elementary school. He is ill-equipped to be sitting anywhere near children.”
Parents at the Richmond District school were already roiled after Illo introduced a new policy banning girls from serving Mass, and allowed pamphlets discussing such topics as masturbation, sodomy and abortion to be handed out to students as young as seven before they went to confession.
At a meeting with officials from the Archdiocese of San Francisco last month, more than 100 parents of Star of the Sea children pleaded for the removal of Illo and the Rev. Patrick Driscoll, the parish’s parochial vicar.
Brooks said that under Illo, policies in the parish and at the school have been “very exclusive and dictatorial.”
A settlement conference statement filed by plaintiffs’ attorneys in February 2005 said that “rather than protect and minister to the 11-year-old ... Fr. Illo breached the child’s confidences by forcing the child to confront the offending priest.”
A Jan. 6, 2003, canonical investigation by the Diocese of Stockton into the incident con- cluded that there was “sufficient testimony to indicate that Fr. Illo on occasion can exhibit two opposite facets of a personality — on the one hand kind and helpful and sensitive and on the other hand dictatorial, manipulative and insensitive.”
It said Illo’s “handling of the incident with the child, and ... other incidents, indicate a need for improvement of his pastoral management skills.”
When reached on his cell phone, Illo declined to comment. Archdiocese officials also declined to comment.