Ousted priest leaves Guam

By Gaynor Dumat-Ol Daleno
Pacific Daily News
July 23, 2014

http://www.guampdn.com/article/20140723/NEWS01/140723012/Ousted-priest-leaves-Guam

Father John Wadeson, second from right, stands next to Archbishop Anthony Apuron, center, in this 2013 photo posted on umatuna.org, the website of Umatuna Si Yu'os, the Archdiocese of Agana's newspaper. The photo was taken on Feb. 19, 2013, as Apuron celebrated the 30-year anniversary of his Episcopal Ordination at the St. Augustine by-the-Sea Parish in Honolulu, Hawaii, the caption on the website states.

Father John Howard Wadeson, who has been removed from the Archdiocese of Agana over a cloud of sexual abuse allegations in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, has left Guam.

As he left, Wadeson responded to the Pacific Daily News. Here are excerpts:

“…I was in such shock at the viciousness and lies of what was being said about me and our (Archbishop Anthony Apuron), whom I hold in great esteem, that I was lost for words.

For the good of the Church I thought it best that I leave the country, albeit with a very heavy heart, so that these false accusations that are being leveled at me do not become weapons to use against our Archbishop or the church of Guam. Years of evidence shows that our Archbishop Anthony Sablan Apuron has been in the forefront against gambling and the corruption that it would bring; he has consistently defended marriage and the family; he is encouraging vocations to the priesthood and religious life to help in the evangelization of the Pacific. He has truly been a pastor and those who are attacking him know not what they do!

Meanwhile I will continue to pray for our Church, our archbishop as well as for those who attack him. One of the great Fathers of the Church, St. Gregory the Great, commented on the words that Job uttered In the midst of his anguish: "He, who is mocked by his friend as I am, will invoke God and He will answer him. (Job 12:4) and he said "It is the wisdom of the righteous, to pretend nothing in show, to discover what he means by words; to love the truth as it is, to eschew falsehood; to set forth good deeds for naught, to bear evil more gladly than to do it; to seek no revenging of a wrong, to account opprobrium for the Truth’s sake to be a gain. But this simplicity of the righteous is ‘laughed to scorn,’ in that the goodness of purity is taken for folly by the ‘wise’ men of this world. For doubtless every thing that is done from innocency is accounted as foolish by them, and whatever truth sanctions in practice sounds weak to carnal wisdom. For what seems worse folly to the world than to show your mind through your words, to feign nothing by crafty contrivance, to return no abuse for wrong, to pray for them that speak evil of us, to seek after poverty, to forsake our possessions, not to resist him that is robbing us, to offer the other cheek to one that strikes us?"