awkard coincidences continue

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jan 24, 2005

Ron Russell provides a pair of articles on the versatile Fr. Gregory Ingels of San Francisco.

Long a favorite of San Francisco Archbishop William J. Levada, [Fr. Gregory] Ingels had helped devise the American church's "zero tolerance" policy ... In 2001, Levada tapped him to help set up the San Francisco Archdiocese's Independent Review Board, the panel entrusted with investigating clerics against whom complaints are lodged.

But in May 2003, Ingels was in a prosecutor's cross hairs.

His alleged victim, a male student at Marin Catholic High School where Ingels taught in the early 1970s, had cooperated with police in recording some recent phone conversations. In them, prosecutors said, Ingels had made incriminating statements corroborating the former student's account of being abused at age 15 during a family outing at Muir Beach in 1972. ...

But Ingels was lucky. At his arraignment, his lawyers announced that he would postpone entering a plea. A month later, the U.S. Supreme Court -- by a 5-to-4 vote -- struck down as unconstitutional a California law that had extended the statute of limitations for prosecuting suspected sex abusers. ...

Along with many others, Ingels walked.

Russell's article dovetails with this one from the Arizona Republic, concerning the shenanigans of two high-profile priests in the Diocese of Phoenix. Both pieces paint in eight-foot fluorescent letters the fact that too many of the poachers are gamekeepers. Remind me -- who was it that assured us that the sex abuse scandal was "history"?