Category:Texas Dioceses General

From Eurêka

Texas Dioceses General

(alphabetical listing)

Anon priest I Victim was an 11-year old altar boy at Saint Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Sebastian. He says he spent the night with other altar boys at the home of a trusted priest. The priest took him into another room and asked him to get something behind the desk. It was at that moment the priest attacked him and he raped him. It continued continuously for six more years and he was paid to keep quiet. The victim says he never told anyone while it was going on for fear he would bring shame on his family.

Anon priest II Rev. John Robert Skeldon was touched inappropriately by a priest, twenty years his senior, who was his teacher and friend, a moment that nearly caused him to leave the seminary where the priest taught. Skeldon felt betrayed and confused, but he decided to continue in the seminary after the older priest was asked to leave.

Anon priest III West Texas prosecutor agreed to let the church send a priest candidate home to Spain after the man admitted to church official in 2000 that he had pulled down a boy's pants, touched his buttocks and taken his underwear. Police closed their investigation without questioning the suspect.

Bagert case Rev. Matthew Bagert (1969-), a former Grand Prairie, Texas, priest accused of downloading child pornography on a church computer in 2005 pleaded not guilty Monday in federal court 24 November 2008. A federal indictment accuses Matthew Bagert of using the Internet to download four photographs "depicting the lascivious exhibition" of a nude minor.

Feit affair Rev. John B. Feit, who heard schoolteacher Irene Garza’s confession in 1960, was questioned extensively by police at the time of Garza’s death, after she was found raped and bludgeoned in a McAllen canal. He has never been charged in relation to her death. No longer a priest, Feit moved to the Phoenix area. McAllen police thought they had cracked the old murder case and finally could make an arrest. They thought their new witnesses might finally mean bringing John Feit to justice, but Hidalgo County District Attorney Rene Guerra, who refused to prosecute 2004.

1. Feit rape Incident less than a month prior to Garza’s death, Feit was charged with attempting to rape a female college student, 1960.
2. Garza murder Unsolved murder case of Irene Garza, a McAllen teacher and former beauty queen, whose body, which had a blow to the head and showed evidence of rape, was found 21 April 1960, in a McAllen canal. She had been reported missing five days earlier, on 16 April 1960, after she failed to come home from making confession at Sacred Heart. Dale Tacheny, a former priest, said he counseled former priest John Feit in 1963 and claims Feit revealed to him how Garza died but he did not contact police investigators until 2002. Feit is the only person ever considered to be a possible suspect in the slaying.

Greene case Admitted child molester Samuel Greene Jr. (1944-2007), investigators descended on the hilltop monastery outside Blanco in July 2006. The raid resulted in the arrests of Greene, and four other monks on sex abuse claims by former novice monks who lived there in the 1990s.

1. Christ of the Hills Monastery Opened by Samuel Greene in 1981 after a career as a real estate pitchman.
2. Greene fraud Samuel Greene committed fraud by applying "tears" of oil to a painting of the Virgin Mary - seized as evidence in the 2006 raid - which had drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors and lots of donations since the monks claimed it miraculously began weeping in 1985.
3. Plea deal Greene pled guilty to nine counts of indecency with a child, but avoided a criminal conviction by agreeing to pay a $10,000 fine and serve 10 years' deferred adjudication, plea struck 2000.
4. Greene suicide Greene had been drinking heavily and was very depressed by the prospect of being ordered to prison, killed himself with an overdose of pills, 16 September 2007.

O'Brien affair Theresa Gomez went to her priest Rev. Michael O'Brien of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Selma, for counseling but instead he used her frail state to sexually abuse her. Gomez says he showered her with sympathy in order to approach her in a sexual manner. The affair lasted 2 years. O'Brien wanted to keep their relationship a secret and threatened Gomez not to publicize it. He told her if it ever got out, it would be a scandal and she would be blamed because everyone always blames the woman.