BishopAccountability.org
	Trial of Ex-County Priest to Start Next Week in L.A. Ventura County Star [Los Angeles CA] June 1, 2005 LOS ANGELES -- A retired Roman Catholic priest will stand trial next week for allegedly molesting a boy in the 1990s. Jury selection is scheduled to begin June 9 in the case against Michael Wempe, who faces three counts of committing a lewd act on a child and one count of oral copulation of a person under 16. The current case stems from charges filed in September, months after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling voided 42 other sexual abuse allegations against Wempe. The alleged victim, now in his mid-20s, is the brother of two previous alleged victims. Wempe, who is free on bond, was first charged with molesting five boys across Southern California between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. The charges were thrown out when the nation's high court struck down a California law that erased the statute of limitations on sexual abuse cases from 1988 and earlier. Wempe served throughout the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, including time as an associate pastor during the 1970s and '80s at St. Rose of Lima Church in Simi Valley, St. Jude Church in Westlake Village, Sacred Heart Church in Ventura, and St. Sebastian Church in Santa Paula. Among those who made charges that were thrown out because of the statute of limitations was Lee Bashforth of Newport Beach. He had alleged that Wempe molested him and his brother when they lived in the Conejo Valley in the '70s and '80s. Bashforth alleged he and his older brother, Mark, were molested when they were children and attending St. Jude Church in Westlake Village, where Wempe was an associate pastor. Bashforth said his abuse, blocked from memory until 2002, included molestations by Wempe at the rectories of Sacred Heart Church in Ventura and St. Mary Church in Palmdale. Wempe served as an associate pastor in the Ventura County area intermittently from 1969 to 1987, starting at St. Rose of Lima in Simi Valley, moving to St. Jude and then to Sacred Heart in the 1970s. After several years at Paraclete High School in Lancaster, he was at St. Sebastian Church in Santa Paula until about 1987. Cardinal Roger Mahony then sent him to a sexual disorders treatment center in New Mexico. After treatment in New Mexico, Wempe was reassigned as chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. That became controversial several years ago when Mahony acknowledged he should have told hospital officials more about the priest's background. Wempe was removed from the ministry in 2002 by Mahony.