LOS ANGELES (CA)
L.A. Taco
January 5, 2018
By Gustavo Arellano
A former Catholic priest in heavily brown SoCal parishes who was listed among alleged child abusers in 2004 has turned up a remote port city in Peru.
The former priest, Horacio Edgardo Arrunátegui Jimenez, appears in a Peruvian television magazine investigation that aired last month confirming that the long-hiding priest was happily posted in Chimbote, on Peru’s northern coast, serving as a hospital chaplain under the auspices of the local diocese.
Jimenez has been moving around between assignments in his native Peru and in Spain since he was abruptly removed from the ministry in Orange County. He was a popular priest in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the largely Latino parishes of St. Mary in Fullerton and St. Anthony Claret in Anaheim (yes, in Orange County).
And then he disappeared.
Diocesan officials told shocked parishioners back then that Jimenez had left on a missionary assignment, but they finally revealed the truth in 2004, in a press release that revealed all Orange County priests removed from ministry after “credible allegations” of child sexual abuse.
Those names were submitted to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice as part of the school’s pioneering 2004 study into the Catholic Church pedophile priest scandal. Jimenez was the only priest named who was not part of a $100 million settlement the Orange diocese reached with over 90 victims in 2005 — at that time, the largest settlement in the history of the American Catholic Church.
Now, Cuarto Poder — something like the 60 Minutes of Peru — has tracked down Jimenez to Chimbote. The report revealed that Jimenez had bounced around the world after Orange County by using different iterations of his full name. Horacio Jiménez in one country, Edgardo Arrunategui in another, and so forth. At one point in the report, a Cuarto Poder correspondent catches up with Jimenez as he is entering his home — accompanied by what the narrator drolly described as “an underage youth.”
“Talk to the bishop,” an angry Jimenez tells the reporter, adding:“There’s nothing to declare.”
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