An attack on Ray Boucher, a squatty SF mansion may be sold to pay a settlement, and should the Salesians still be running a summer camp for boys 7-13?

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By Kay Ebeling
When the Salesians finally admitted the guilt of one of their pedophile priests, Titian Miani, last week, the buzz around the courtroom was, “They're going to sell the mansion in San Francisco.” But as of yet there’s no settlement in writing, no one really knows how the Salesians will come up with $20 million dollars to pay 17 victims from LA. The Salesians, one religious order among hundreds in California, own about a hundred million dollars in real estate in the state, according to reliable sources.

The “Salesian Mansion” in San Francisco, the architectural squatty-body pictured above, is 15,000 square feet, with 38 rooms and 12 bathrooms on Franklin Street near Geary, which is a nebulous part of The City between the newly gentrified north Tenderloin and aging wealth of Pacific Heights, prime real estate, ready to be developed. They can get $30 million for that property alone, easy cash, considering they got the mansion free, a gift from the bishop of San Francisco 20 years ago.

Meanwhile last week the Pope who last month assured the world the church he leads would finally do something for the victims of its pedophile priest epidemic stood in his window looking out of St. Peter’s Square and said, “Faith is love and so creates poetry and music. Faith is joy and so creates beauty,” and so forth, in other words, he’s forgotten about us.

May 1, another pedophile from Salesian High School in Richmond CA was arrested and the principal posted a letter to parents on the school website saying: “Dear Families and Friends...There are times when adult behaviors by admired and respected guides break a sacred trust… This must be a moment to guide and carefully sort out factual from fictionalized perspectives…All of us have made mistakes….When painful events, surrounded by “whispers in the shadows” – rumors, speculation or gossip – are broadcast on Myspace (sic), discussed in parking lots, confidentiality and privacy can be easily breached.”

“He doesn't want people talking about sex abuse,” said Joey Piscitelli over the phone from the Bay Area where he is Northern California director of SNAP. “I’ve gotten several calls. The reason I went to the police several months ago was I got so many calls from kids that there’s a teacher hitting on girls at Salesian High. I went to the police and said why aren’t you doing something about this.”
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‘Students were discussing Rickey Bonds sexual aggression and the Salesian faculty were unbelievably ignorant’
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Joey sent out a statement Thursday with more information about the arrest of Anatomy and Biology teacher Rickey Bonds at Joey’s alma mater, Salesian High in Richmond, saying:

“The reason this new allegation was investigated by the Police, is that dozens, if not hundreds of Salesian students had been discussing the current sex abuse allegations for months on end, openly, and notoriously, while Salesian faculty were unbelievably ignorant to the landslide of activity surrounding them.”

In 2006 Joey won a case against the Salesians which now sits in appellate purgatory in San Francisco.

“They say they're doing everything possible,” Joey said. “They just had a Salesian teacher arrested at the same high school where I was molested.

“The Salesians say this all happened a long time ago, and we're doing everything possible. The guy was just arrested last week. So what have they done?”

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The Salesians Are Deeply Sorry. Their Lawyers Cry At Settlement Hearings.
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If they really want to make amends, shown at left in a Google satellite map, the Salesians own a prime piece of beachfront real estate near Santa Cruz, now known as Camp St. Francis, a recreational trap for boys age 7 to 13.

Come on, parents, you're not really going to send your young boys to a camp run by the Salesians, are you?

As it says at the Don Bosco West website under news, although the date says 2004, "The Salesians of Don Bosco are deeply sorry. We are sorry also for any of our failures to adequately respond to allegations."

Those 15 acres of secluded beach front property, with camp type cabin structures already in place, in

APTOS, CALIF.

Could easily be the:

Future Recovery Center for Victims of Sex Crimes in the Catholic Church

The Salesian Camp St. Francis outside Santa Cruz would be perfect as the first of many recovery centers the church could start setting up right now

To start really making amends for the five hundred thousand or so crime victims the Catholic Church left behind after

THE PEDOPHILE EPIDEMIC

An epidemic of pedophilia ran rampant through the Roman Catholic Church and ALL of its religious societies for more than 50 years in the US.
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The Salesians hold the record for the highest number of pedophiles in one religious order.
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So the Salesians should set a precedent and relinquish the land at Camp St. Francis to be used as a recovery center for the church’s crime victims.

They really need to get rid of the creepy picture they use to advertise the camp shown at right supposedly a rendition of Don Bosco and a young boy he kept around, Dominic Savio.

Unless a parent wants to surrender their sons to the pedophiles out of some sick confusion of sex and spirituality, I can’t see any reason to send kids to Camp St. Francis run by the Salesians the religious order with more pedophiles than any other religious order in America.

In fact someone should start a campaign to stop parents from sending their kids to Camp St. Francis.

“Does this sound like a safe atmosphere for students?” Joey asked? “Does that sound like they've done anything, changed anything?”

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Vice Provincial hits the keys and Really Tells Off Ray Boucher
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Last month, one little wimpet, a Salesian Vice Provincial, probably a resident of that 38 room mansion near the San Francisco Cathedral, got hold of the computer while the boss was out of town, and maybe distraught at the thought of giving up the mansion, he typed away and produced this:

By Fr. John Itzaina,
Vice Provincial

Confreres,

While Father David is on the mend and spending a few days away on retreat, allow me to fill in for him as his vicar for this issue, of In-Touch (May 2008, official newsletter of the Salesian Society)

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, we Salesians were characterized as “a rogue arm of the Catholic Church. They are unrepentant, uncaring and have a culture of secrecy.” Despite the fact that this comes from Raymond Boucher, the attorney for the four plaintiffs in the Father Titian Miani trial, and attorney for hundreds of the cases against the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and religious orders, the extremely uncomplimentary description gives us a teachable moment in the life of our province.

That we should be characterized as “unrepentant” doesn’t surprise me. We seem to be the only religious order to have the temerity to defend our Salesian brothers in court of law. Why should our brothers’ lives be ruined by allegation without proof? For Boucher and for those who have gotten rich on the misery of the abused, “unrepentant” means we believe that in the United States you’re innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around.

In this age of transparency, Boucher calls us Salesians having a “culture of secrecy.” By that he means that he can’t find enough evidence to prove “punitive damages.” He presumes that since the Salesians are guilty, it must be documented in our files; and since there’s nothing in the files, we must be guilty of secretly extracting damaging information.
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Ahem.

The Salesians admitted Titian Miani was guilty of pedophilia in LA Superior Court, Department 308, May 14, 2008.

These guys need to lighten up on the sherry.

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RANT
ONE REASON I’M GLAD THERE WAS NO TRIAL THIS MONTH

I was having trouble getting to Superior Court at 6th and Commonwealth because of construction going on at the nearest Metro Station. There at Vermont and Wilshire they're building “luxury apartments.” Studios start at $1729 but all the cheap ones are rented. All they have left as of May 1st are the studios that go for $1776. One bedrooms start at $1449 and go up as high as $1993.

While building these luxury one-room apartments in the slums, they didn't even bother to put a pedestrian walkway around construction site. So to transfer from the Red Line subway to a bus on 6th and get to the court, you have to walk out in the middle of the street. There is no little covered walkway, no “Danger Pedestrian in the Middle of the Road” sign. You just have to take a deep breath and dive out into traffic hoping no one hits you for a half block or so until you get to sidewalk on the other side.
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Who cares about pedestrians when you're building luxury apartments over a public transit station in the slums?
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I'm real familiar with the neighborhood around the Red Line station at Vermont as the transitional homeless shelter where I lived with my daughter in early 2005 is three blocks away. Two blocks away people stand in the street and pat tortillas with their bare hands, selling food on the street to people who sell other stuff on the street, it’s a whole third world economy going on where the LA Times, the Mayor, and most white people fear to tred.

Near this corner where “luxury apartments” construction sends pedestrians into the middle of the street, one does not venture out on the sidewalk in open toed shoes.

No, no, no, you don’t know in what you might step.

Especially on hot days. New strains of bacteria form in the puddles of human detritus you can’t always define, the urine smell could be from a human or a cat, it’s hard to say.

Almost every time I did make the connection at Wilshire and Vermont to go to the courthouse I ran into a raving insane homeless person, or there’d be a guy tearing through the contents of a trash can throwing everything out on the street, or another guy lying directly in the path where he lives on the sidewalk as I came up the hill from Wilshire to LA Superior Court

LA’s way to solve its homeless problem is build luxury apartment buildings over Metro stations. What population of persons will end up filling those high priced apartments over the human urine cloud, I don't know, but I hope they realize that the homeless were there first.

I believe the developments that went above Metro stations were supposed to be affordable housing.

But this is LA, we have short memories here.

The Pope stood in the window and said, “We must not forget that sizeable group of theologians who transformed theology into poetry."

Face it, kids, we're on our own here.

Onward . . .

PS I need $500 more for the trip to Chicago in July. Please click the PayPal button as every 5 dollars helps.
Thank you