NEW MEXICO
The New Mexican
[Peter Garcia – Los Angeles archdiocese]
Tom Sharpe | The New Mexican
Posted: Thursday, February 07, 2013 – 2/7/13
A pedophile priest sent to Jemez Springs for treatment in 1984 was later assigned to parishes in Socorro and Belen by then-Santa Fe Archbishop Robert Sanchez, according to letters released as part of a settlement in a California lawsuit.
The Archdiocese of Santa Fe says it has no record of Peter E. Garcia serving in any parish in New Mexico.
But according to letters from Sanchez, Roger Mahony, who was then the archbishop of Los Angeles, and other church officials, Garcia was at the San Miguel Parish in Socorro from mid-1985 through 1986, and was the parochial vicar of Our Lady of Belen Church in early 1987.
At least one New Mexico priest remembers Garcia, and said he wasn’t pleased about Garcia’s assignment. The Rev. Bill Sanchez, no kin to the late archbishop, now serves at St. Edwin Church in Albuquerque. He said that while he was working at a church in La Joya, N.M., near Belen, and as a prison chaplain in Los Lunas, Garcia briefly served as an assistant to the priest in Belen, the Rev. Dan Farris.
“They didn’t tell us why he was here, where he was coming from,” Bill Sanchez said. “He kind of volunteered some of the information. When he volunteered it to us, we just said, ‘Well, you know, he doesn’t belong here. We have a school. This is not a place for this man.’ And it didn’t seem to both of us that he was very remorseful for what he was accused of in California.”
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