Controversy
Of the approximately 625 St. John's graduates to be ordained by the Los Angeles Archdiocese between 1950 and 2005, 65 had been accused by 2005 of molesting the underaged, reflecting a rate higher than what studies have found for U.S. priests in general. A seminary spokesman noted California's then-extended statute of limitations on molestation lawsuits, and suggested that a wave of publicity on molestation by priests had made their graduates targets of such accusations. Four days after the Los Angeles Times reported this information, the paper ran a letter to the editor from St. John's rector Helmut A. Hefner. He stated that reforms had been implemented in the seminary, and that from 1985 to 2005, of the 155 priests ordained at St. John's Seminary for the archdiocese, 2 had been accused of sexual misconduct.
Further, the lede to a 2002 Newsweek article entitled "Gays in the Seminary" opened by interviewing a recent alumnus: St. John's "may be one of the country's gayest facilities for higher education. Depending on whom you ask, gay and bisexual men make up anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent of the student body at the college and graduate levels."
Read more about this topic: St. John's Seminary (California)
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)