Diocese Sent Priests to Church-Run Center for Treatment

By Jennifer Levitz
Wall Street Journal
February 2, 2013

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323926104578278600322685648.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The thicket of personnel files released Thursday night by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles showed that several of its priests accused of sexual abuse were sent to New Mexico in the mid-1980s for psychological treatment.

The Servants of Paraclete treatment center in Jemez Springs, N.M., about 60 miles north of Albuquerque, served clergy who had problems such as alcoholism, emotional disorders, or, increasingly from the 1970s on, priests who had been accused of sexual abuse, said Thomas Plante, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University in California who researches sex-offending clergy.

Priests would stay for months in the ...