GUAM
Pacific Daily News
Tim Rohr
July 27, 2016
On June 6, Pope Francis removed the authority of Archbishop (Anthony) Apuron to administer the Archdiocese of Agana and named Archbishop Savio Hon Tai Fai temporary administrator.
Why did Pope Francis do this?
For the last three years, Pope Francis and the Vatican authorities who oversee our region have received a steady stream of documentation about the mounting problems in the Archdiocese of Agana:
* the illicit removal of and the public mistreatment of Fr. Paul Gofigan and Msgr. James Benavente,
* the canonically (and possibly civil) illegal alienation of the mega-million dollar Yona property,
* the misleading of Guam’s Catholics about the true nature of the Redemptoris Mater Seminary,
* the gross lack of formation evident in the priests ordained from that institution,
* the revelation that Apuron had been hiding a priest in our diocese for over a decade who had been twice credibly accused of child molestation and banned from the diocese where the molestation allegedly occurred,
* the arrest of Fr. Luis Camacho and the later discovery that he had been secretly scuttled off to a diocese in the Middle East, and even
* the May 17 allegation of sexual abuse against Apuron by Roy Quintanilla.
However, none of the above had yet caused the pope to act. On May 31, that changed.
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