Earlier this week, when a grand jury reported that bishops had covered up decades of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania, Esther Miller suspected these crimes would touch Southern California.
Unfortunately, she was right.
“I have a new victim,” said Miller, the Southern California representative of Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. “The news triggered all these emotions and she’s a mess.”
The unnamed woman, who has declined to publicly tell her story, was a girl when she was allegedly molested by the late Rev. Ernest Paone.
Dogged by scandal in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Paone moved to Oceanside in 1966. While never formally transferred to another diocese, he assisted several Southern California parishes, including St. John the Evangelist in Encinitas and Oceanside’s St. Mary, Star of the Sea.
He also taught for 20 years, reportedly at Fallbrook’s Potter Junior High between 1966 and 1986.
While volunteering at St. Denis Catholic Church in Diamond Bar, he allegedly molested a 9-year-old girl.
“He was embedded closely in the family,” Miller said. “He would come to Sunday dinners at the house.”
Now grown, the alleged victim called Miller this week, after news on the Pennsylvania grand jury cited Paone.
“She just opened her guts,” Miller said. “She just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.”
Both the San Diego and Los Angeles dioceses say they have not received reports of Paone abusing local congregants.
Yet his long residence in Southern California, plus his long history as a serial abuser, makes some wonder if he continued preying on children here.
“They had no doubt he was an offender,” Patrick Wall, a former priest turned legal investigator, said of the Pittsburgh diocese. “That’s why they got him out of Dodge.”
Good standing?
A Pittsburgh native, Paone was ordained in 1956 and assigned to a parish in his hometown. He had an unusually short tenure there and at his next four parishes, serving in five churches in five years.
In 1962, Paone’s supervisor — the Rev. Edmund Sheedy, pastor of St. Monica — interceded to prevent his subordinate’s arrest. Paone had been accused of “molesting young boys of the parish,” Sheedy wrote Bishop John Wright, “and the illegal use of guns with even younger parishioners.”
At another Pennsylvania church, Paone in 1964 was accused of sexually abusing young boys. That investigation was quashed, the Beaver County district attorney wrote the diocese, “in order to prevent unfavorable publicity.”
In May 1966, Paone was granted indefinite leave “for reasons bound up with your psychological and physical health as well as spiritual well-being.”
By September of that year, Paone had moved to Oceanside and was teaching in Fallbrook.
The San Diego County Office of Education confirmed that Paone had enrolled in the California State Teachers’ Retirement Systems in September 1966 and began drawing retirement pay in June 1986.
The office referred further comment on Paone to William Billingsley, assistant superintendent of human resources in the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District.
Billingsley did not return several phone calls and emails.
In 1968, Paone requested and received a letter from the Pittsburgh diocese to the Los Angeles diocese, confirming he was a priest in good standing. He made the same request in 1975, and the Pittsburgh diocese again complied.
Yet Paone, according to a statement released by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles this week, “had no formal assignment at any parish in the Archdiocese and was always a priest of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.”
Nonetheless, the archdiocese noted that its own records show that Paone assisted at Immaculate Heart of Mary in Santa Ana; St. Angela in Brea; and St. Denis in Diamond Bar.
Besides serving as a substitute priest and teaching in Fallbrook, Paone also furthered his studies. In 1970, he graduated from the University of San Diego with a master’s degree in history.
‘Health issues’
Between 1982 and 2005, Paone filed several lawsuits in San Diego courts, including a 1982 case alleging fraud.
Paone and nine others had invested in a proposed 11-acre development in Valley Center. The plan collapsed, though, taking with it all of the money — including Paone’s $19,995. While all 10 were initially represented by one lawyer, Paone eventually chose to represent himself.
In 1983, his lawsuit was dismissed.
Paone moved several times in Oceanside, living there with one of his brothers. In 1992, he moved to Las Vegas and offered his services to St. Anne’s. This arrangement only lasted a month, from February until March.
Citing “health issues,” he returned to Los Angeles.
“Fr. Paone was never a priest of the Diocese of Reno-Las Vegas,” said a statement issued by that diocese this week, adding that there had been no reports of Paone molesting anyone during his month in Nevada.
The Pittsburgh diocese did not warn the Reno-Las Vegas or any other diocese of Paone’s unsavory past until 1994. That July, a woman whose sister had been abused by Paone in the 1960s complained to church authorities in Pittsburgh.
She said that her father, on learning of the crime, “went to the rectory with a shotgun and told Father Paone that he better leave town,” the grand jury report said.
Word of this complaint was forwarded to San Diego and Los Angeles, but without mention of other accusations.
In 1996, though, the San Diego diocese sent a pointed message to Pittsburgh’s bishop, Donald Wuerl.
“Acting on the advice of our insurance carrier,” the note said, Wuerl was asked to provide assurances that Paone had “not had any problems involving sexual abuse, any history of sexual involvement with minors or others, or any other inappropriate sexual behavior.”
Wuerl directed a subordinate to notify San Diego that Paone had not held an assignment within the diocese for more than 30 years.
In May 2002, the Pittsburgh diocese stripped Paone of his priestly faculties. He formally resigned his ministry in February 2003.
By 2006, Paone had returned to his home state. That year, a Pittsburgh parish reported that Paone was “apparently asking inappropriate questions” of children preparing for the sacrament of confirmation.
Another priest objected and removed Paone from this duty.
He died in Pittsburgh in 2012, at the age of 81, from complications caused by Alzheimer’s disease. He had never been formally charged or convicted.
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