LOS ANGELES (CA)
Sun Herald
[September 2013 Religious Orders Released Files via Raymond Boucher law offices]
By GILLIAN FLACCUS and GREG RISLING — The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — The orders the Rev. Carlos Rodriguez got from his religious superiors after he confessed to molesting a 16-year-old boy just hours before were swift and decisive: Leave immediately. Check into a motel. Don’t tell anyone where you are going. Wait for further instructions.
Rodriguez, then 31, picked up cash at a Catholic retreat center and waited by the phone. The next day, the regional leader of his religious order called and told him to book a plane ticket out of state. By the time the victim’s family went to police, he had checked in at a residential treatment center for troubled priests in Maryland.
“I felt like a fugitive. But what else could I do under the circumstances. I had no other choice but to follow orders,” he wrote years later in an essay that was included in his Vatican petition to be defrocked.
The essay was part of a 330-page confidential personnel file on the priest that was released Monday along with files for five other priests who were also accused of molesting children while working for their Roman Catholic religious orders — the Vincentians, the Norbertines and the Augustinians — while assigned to parishes in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
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