LOS ANGELES (CA)
Wall Street Journal
By JENNIFER LEVITZ
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 New Mexico mountain retreat undergoing psychological evaluations and spiritual counseling at the center, known as Foundation House and run by the Servants of Paraclete, according to the personnel file of Michael Baker, a priest who was treated there. The Servants of Paraclete, a Missouri-based religious order founded in 1947, treats Roman Catholic priests who are “facing particular challenges in their vocations and lives,” according to the order’s website.
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