Addressing the long history of sexual abuse by clergy in the local Catholic Church, Santa Rosa Bishop Robert F. Vasa told reporters Monday that it was a source of “tremendous sadness and grief and shame and, honestly, a raging anger that these men did what they did.”
But Vasa said he would not second-guess the manner in which they were handled by his predecessors, saying cultural shifts and improved understanding of the traumatic harm suffered by victims have changed the way the church manages accusations brought forward in the modern age.
Critics have long believed church leaders of the past allowed abusive priests to take refuge in the large, semirural Diocese of Santa Rosa, which runs from Petaluma to the Oregon border. But Vasa said Monday diocesan authorities, like those anywhere else, were merely willing to “give a priest another chance.”
In a 30-minute news conference he suggested, however, that he might have acted more promptly than his predecessors when learning of abuse accusations.
“We can only live forward,” he said. “We can’t live backwards, and so I suspect I would have done some things differently. But in a different era, in a different age, when a bishop is assigned to a diocese, and he is in some kind of fraternity with his priests and has to maintain a cordial working relationship with his priests, it’s very difficult that a bishop can kind of step out of that role and say, ‘I’m going to report you to police.’ In the ’60s and ’70s that was a very difficult thing to do.
“Now, given the tenor of our times, I’m strongly inclined to do that,” he continued. “Even when I’m fairly certain that nothing untoward had occurred, I will report it to the police because that’s the route I need to take.”
Vasa, who has served the Northern California diocese for eight years, met with members of the Bay Area press corps following his release Saturday of a carefully curated list of credibly accused clergy who had served in the diocese since its founding in 1962 and had, at any time, been credibly accused of child sex abuse.
It includes four priests responsible on their own for abusing 63 of 100 known diocesan victims, he said, and 14 men whose alleged offenses occurred outside the diocese. Twenty-five of those on the list are deceased and none are in current pastoral service to the diocese.
Only four have been prosecuted criminally, with varying success. “Part of that is, sadly, the church’s fault,” Vasa said, and part of that is the function of the typical yearslong delay between childhood sexual abuse and reporting, combined with the statute of limitations on criminal prosecution.
Other cases have been settled in or outside of court, costing the diocese about $31 million, a figure that has inched up slightly from last fall due to some recent settlement negotiations, Vasa said. About $13 million of that has been covered through insurance, he said.
Vasa said he produced the list of accused clergy, as well as a series of articles published in the North Coast Catholic on Saturday, “as a sign of the church’s seriousness in regard to the sexual abuse of children in our society and especially in our church.”
