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	Fugitive Priest Kept Allegations from Past Secret By John W. Gonzalez Houston Chronicle June 25, 2002 The Roman Catholic priest arrested in Laredo last week on New York sexual assault charges apparently kept the allegations secret from employers during the two years he lived in the Texas border city, but what church officials in Laredo knew about the priest's past remained unclear Monday. Many Laredoans knew the Rev. Cyriacus Udegbulem, 38, as an older college student and youth counselor who happened to be a priest visiting from Africa. His arrest in Laredo on Friday stunned the community, and some people who dealt with him said he gave no clues of a troubled past. A New York woman told police she was raped by the priest in January 2000 when she went to him about a marriage annulment. He was relieved of his temporary duties at a Brooklyn church soon after the incident, but he surfaced in Laredo two months later. Church officials in New York said they thought the priest had returned to his native Nigeria and that they had no idea he was in the United States, so no information about the sexual assault allegation was passed on to the Diocese of Laredo. Nor was the allegation immediately disclosed to New York police. It was only this past April, amid public and official pressure on church leaders to disclose any suspicions of wrongdoing by priests, that the Brooklyn diocese shared its 2-year-old information against Udegbulem as well as allegations about 35 other clerics. The complaint led to the priest's arrest and extradition to New York, where he was awaiting arraignment Monday on 10 charges: rape, sodomy, two counts of sexual assault, two counts of sexual molestation and four counts of sexual abuse. All the alleged acts occurred Jan. 1, 2000, at a church rectory in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. When he arrived in Laredo, the priest found a job as a chaplain at Mercy Health Center, where he worked from March 2000 to last August. During that time, he lived at Christ the King Church and occasionally said Mass, church officials have acknowledged. But upon his departure from the hospital staff - under circumstances that remain undisclosed - "his faculties with the Diocese of Laredo were immediately removed," Laredo Bishop James A. Tamayo said last week. "As a result, he has had no authority to serve as a priest in the Diocese of Laredo since Aug. 16, 2001," the bishop said. Tamayo's aides could not be reached Monday to elaborate on that statement. It remained unclear what steps the diocese took to check on the priest's background and whether it was alerted to the New York allegation by the priest himself or by his home diocese in Orlu, Nigeria. By the time Udegbulem's employment at Mercy Health Center ended, he was well on the way to earning a master's degree at Texas A&M International University at Laredo. With undergraduate credentials from a university in Spain, he began pursuing a master's in counseling psychology in January 2001. He was enrolled for the summer session at the time of his arrest and was scheduled to complete degree requirements in August, a university spokesman said. In mid-May, the priest took a full-time job as a counselor in a program serving young male substance abusers. Everything seemed to be going well there, too - until his arrest. "I never heard anything negative about him," said Isela Dabdoub, director of Serving Children and Adolescents in Need. "He cleared the Department of Public Safety criminal check. He cleared the drug test. He cleared the reference check. His English is pretty good," she added. In a community where qualified counselors are in short supply, Udegbulem worked with troubled adolescent boys in a residential treatment facility. He told co-workers he planned to seek a doctorate in counseling, apparently in another city because none is offered here. "He was going to leave us anyway the latter part of August because he was going to go work on his Ph.D.," Dabdoub said, adding that she doesn't fault anyone but Udegbulem for concealing his past. "I don't blame necessarily the diocese or the system," Dabdoub said. "He should have been forthright about this. We have forms that get filled out that include 'do you have any charges pending,' things like that. Ours even has a question, 'Have there ever been any allegations against you?' and he put 'no' on everything," Dabdoub said. "You would think people in this field would be more honest," she said.
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