BishopAccountability.org
 
  Defrocked Priest Stephen Kiesle Named in Suits Alleging Catholic Church Coverup; One Plaintiff Is Stepdaughter

By Martha Ross
Walnut Creek Patch
August 17 2010

http://walnutcreek.patch.com/articles/defrocked-priest-stephen-kiesle-named-in-suits-alleging-catholic-church-coverup-one-plaintiff-is-stepdaughter



Defrocked Catholic Church priest Stephen Kiesle, who has supposedly retired to a quiet life in Rossmoor, once again became a figure of public scrutiny and outrage Wednesday when news came that he is at the center of new sex abuse lawsuits, including allegations that he abused his own stepdaughter.

KTVU reports that Kiesle is named in two lawsuits filed Wednesday by seven people who accuse him of abuse. One accuser is stepdaughter Teresa Rosson, who said Kiesle started abusing her when she was 11 and he was a priest at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Pinole.

"This monster pedophile was in my life for 30 years. And he continued his abuse with me and others," Rossen told KTVU news. Rossen said her mother is still married to Kiesle, and KTVU reports that the two live in the gated Rossmoor senior community.

"This is what they love to say, my mother and he: He doesn't know his boundaries, of what he's able to touch and not to touch," Rosson said.

In the two lawsuits filed Wednesday, seven people--six women and one man--claim that the Oakland Diocese is a part of a sex abuse coverup. The plaintiffs say the abuse incidents go back to 1966.

This spring, Kiesle wound up in the center of a new scandal involving clergy sex abuse in the Catholic Church when the Associated Press reported on documents showing that the future Pope Benedict XVI, back in 1985, resisted pleas to defrock Kiesle who had a record of molesting children.

According to a 1985 letter bearing his signature, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said the arguments for removing Stephen Kiesle, then 38, from the priesthood were of "grave significance." Ratzinger, who then headed the Vatican's office involved in disciplining abusive priests, told Oakland Bishop John Cummins that he should use "as much paternal care as possible" with regard to Kiesle, the AP says.

The future pope also said that any decision to defrock Kiesle must take into account "the good of the universal church."

Ratzinger's letter went out eight years after Kiesle was sentenced in 1978 to three years' probation for pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges of lewd conduct. Kiesle was convicted of tying up and molesting two young boys in a San Francisco Bay Area church refrectory, the AP says. When this probation ended in 1981, Kiesle asked to leave the priesthood, and the diocese submitted papers to Rome to defrock him. That same year, the diocese recommended removing Kiesle from the priesthood. Cummins himself asked the Vatican in a letter that Kiesle be defrocked, according to ABC7. "

But it apparently took six years for Kiesle to leave the priesthood. In 1985, then Cardinal Ratzinger was saying that the case needed more time. During the six years that Rome was deciding Kiesle's future, he was allowed to return to Pinole to volunteer as a youth minister at St. Joseph Church, AP says.

Kiesle ultimately left the priesthood in 1987--and records don't show if Ratzinger had any role in that decision, AP says. Five years later, in 2002, he was arrested and charged with 13 counts of child molestation in the 1970s. All but two of those charges were thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down a California law that extended the statute of limitations. Kiesle pleaded no contest in 2004 to a felony charge for molesting a young girl in Truckee in 1995 and was sentenced to six years in state prison.

 
 

Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.