Tony Rodrigue admits to 5 victims a year in 20 years, 2 prison terms, rehab with the Paracletes in SB, yet in 2003 the diocese did not know his name
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By Kay Ebeling
What organization in America is allowed to systematically obstruct justice? Margaret Schettler tried for the entire year of 2003 to light a match under the San Bernardino diocese, and could not even get the last name of a serial perpetrator, a pedophile priest who’d been convicted twice as a child molester.
When I put up The Paraclete Documents last week, we reported there may have had another Paraclete center in the San Bernardino area, as well. An email came minutes after saying: “It was in Cherry Valley.” Then she emailed that twice convicted pedophile priest Tony Rodrigue’s assignment history includes a stay in 1983 at an “Outside Institution” at 39100 Orchard, Cherry Valley, CA 92405.
A phone call to the emailer, Margaret Schettler, uprooted another reason we need Senate or Congressional hearings on pedophile priests in the Catholic Church: Obstruction of Justice. It took Margaret Schettler a year to get the last name of a priest the church knew was a predator as far back as 1979.
Systematically the church refused to give out names of known pedophile priests.
In the case of Anthony Rodgrigue, the diocese outreach director had to have known the church practically fed altar boys to this particular problem priest for years, including his stays at recovery centers in New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Cherry Valley CA. Rodrigue preyed in the area east and south of LA that is now called the inland empire,
“I knew if I knew about this guy in the seventies, it must have been pretty bad,” Schettler said, “but I couldn't remember his last name."
For one whole year the outreach director at the diocese of San Bernardino told Margaret Schettler he had no idea what priest she was talking about.
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Rodrigue is the priest in the news report from 1979 scanned in at right (click to enlarge and read). Up to the 1970s areas like Coachella Valley and Calexico where the diocese transferred around Rodrigue, were way out in the desert, little towns, typical breeding grounds and festering territory for the church to send its pedophile priests.
“It took me a year to get his last name, I spent so much time doing research and then found out that the diocese had known all along,” said Schettler, who is a priest sex crime victim advocate, in LA. “I think they always knew but they weren’t telling me,” Schettler said. Until she did enough research to file a 7-page report. Then the diocese told her Yes, they knew the name of the priest.
And “he had been arrested in fact,” she finally learned.
“When I got the name, I went online and found the newspaper article from the late 90s where he describes four or five kids a year.”
Actually it was five or six children that Rodrigue admitted to having sex with a year:
EXAMINER: Until the time that you stopped actively being a priest, how many boys would you say you had contact with during all that time that you had trouble dealing with? Best guess.
MR. RODRIGUE: Best guess? I would say around five or six per year.
In context, they are discussing boys Rodrigue “screwed.”
