WALTHAM (MA)
BishopAccountability.org
Another batch of religious order and extern files has been released in Los Angeles, as agreed in the survivors’ landmark 2007 settlement with the Los Angeles archdiocese. The released files are in non-searchable PDFs. Today BishopAccountability.org will be providing a first look at selected documents.
We begin with John Peter Lenihan, whose 269-page file from the Orange diocese is among those that have been released. Lenihan requested laicization at the insistence of Bishop Tod Brown on March 28, 2002, and his laicization was granted two months later, on May 28, 2002, an unheard-of level of efficiency in a Vatican laicization bureaucracy that usually takes years to decide a case. Why the hurry?
The new documents reveal that in 2001-2002, after Lenihan had resigned over an interview with Steve Lopez at the LA Times, revealing sexual misconduct and disagreements with the church regarding celibacy, he retracted his resignation, admitted the truth of the interview to his bishop, lied about it to parishioners, and was removed. The diocese then learned that he was violating a therapeutic relationship with a woman, abusing her sexually, and exposing her handicapped child to explicit phone sex voicemails left on the woman’s home answering machine. What’s more, people knew about this latest sexual misconduct. The woman’s lawsuit and its shocking exhibits provide the real context for Lenihan’s rapid laicization.
Much earlier in his career, when the Diocese of Orange had received an allegation on March 25, 1988, from the mother of a 16-year-old girl whom Lenihan had abused, the priest was left in ministry, and less than a month later, his positions as diocesan consultor and member of the council of priests were confirmed. By 2002, things had changed.
Here is the entire Lenihan file, re-processed to make it searchable and easier to download than the files as released.
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