proclaims with a beatific
2015年1月8日abuse scandal at North Beach church the latest dust
Examiner The National Shrine of St. Francis Assisi, located in North Beach, has become the focus of worldwide attention not for its shrine to the patron saint of San Francisco, but for accusations of lurid sex happening within the church.
In a time of trials that have tested the will of the faithful worldwide, the Roman Catholic Church in San Francisco has emerged relatively unscathed.
The sex abuse scandals staining archdioceses in Boston, Los Angeles and now Chicago have had no parallel in San Francisco. Instead, the local archdiocese reputation has recently been sullied across the world by lurid claims of sexual battery and harassment, all allegedly committed within one of its most sacred spaces.
A lawsuit filed late last month by a 33 year old woman formerly employed by the church accuses her ex bosses of harboring a veritable den of sin underneath the roof of a shrine dedicated to The City patron saint. Jhona Mathews alleges that one of the men, who is in his 60s, hired and used her for sex. And a charming and popular priest who wielded significant influence as the archdiocese second in command let it all happen, the suit claims.
The lawsuit contains lurid details, including paddling the woman bare bottom, and comes after years of chaos at the North Beach church, including a fight over interring dead pets and a holy order dismissal from the chapel.
HOUSE OF WORSHIP RICH IN HISTORY
Catholics have worshipped at what now the corner of Columbus Avenue and Vallejo Street since the Gold Rush days. Once a thriving parish for the Italian Americans who still lend their culture to the area, damage from the Loma Prieta earthquake and the steady exodus parishioners from the church led the archdiocese to close the Church of St. Francis in the 1990s. It was reborn a few years later in with a new mission, and special status, from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops as the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi the namesake and patron saint of San Francisco.
On a hill that allows it to greet the daily gaggle of guidebook clutching visitors hiking up to North Beach from downtown, the shrine includes the Norman Gothic church parts of which date to 1849, and survived the 1906 earthquake and fire with interior frescoes that depict St. Francis life. The shrine also includes in an adjoining building the Porziuncola, a scaled down replica of the tiny stone chapel that St. Francis himself adopted as his own in the early 13th century and that still stands inside a cathedral in Assisi, Italy.
It was at the shrine that Mathews, a 33 year old single mother who had worked as a clerk at a carpet company in Marin, was hired as an administrative assistant in 2012. Despite having no training and little formal education, she held the job for about a year.
click to enlarge Courtesy photo Bill McLaughlin, right, with Father Harold Snider, the National Shrine wholesale nfl jerseys of St. Francis Assisi’s current rector.
Mathews was fired last November, she alleges in a lawsuit filed Jan. 29, after refusing to continue to submit to the sexual demands of Bill McLaughlin, a 67 year old Marin construction contractor and volunteer chairman of the shrine board of trustees, who allegedly made Mathews submit to routine "oral, anal, and vaginal sex" as conditions of her employment.
(Scroll down to read the full text of the lawsuit.)
These acts were allegedly consummated in the church sacristy, a private area behind the altar generally only open to priests and select attendants. "Punishments" were delivered to Mathews via bare bottomed spankings with a wooden paddle when she resisted, the lawsuit claims.
That fraternity initiation style paddle, according to the lawsuit, was given as a gift to McLaughlin by Monsignor James Tarantino. Tarantino was named to the position of vicar general, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone chief deputy, after Cordileone arrival in San Francisco in 2012.
click to enlarge Courtesy photo A fraternity style paddle with initials that reportedly stand for "Boys’ Night Out," was allegedly used in the abuse.
A legend in Catholic circles in Marin County for his leadership at the helm of Marin Catholic High School and St. Hilary Catholic Parish in Tiburon, Tarantino received the honorific title of monsignor and held significant power over the archdiocese day to day operations after arriving in San Francisco in 2010. When not working 12 hour days at the chancellery near St. Mary Cathedral, he resided in the refurbished rectory next door to the shrine. The lawsuit claims that he knew about the quid pro quo sexual relationship between McLaughlin and Mathews but did nothing to stop it.
Church leaders as well as parishioners who remember Tarantino from Marin deny most of the allegations in the cheap nfl jerseys lawsuit.
Mathews was fired from her job Nov. 6, church leaders say, but for allegedly embezzling a "substantial" amount of money eight months prior to her firing. It wasn immediately reported to police. The investigation is now with the District Attorney Office, according to the San Francisco Police Department.
And church brass ousted McLaughlin that same month after they learned of his alleged "inappropriate actions," according to Larry Kamer, a crisis communications expert who was brought on to the shrine board of trustees in May 2013. Kamer is now serving as the church spokesman during the lawsuit.
"She was fired for issues of financial impropriety and for no other reason," said Kamer, who added that "the church acted quickly and responsibly" in removing both individuals from their posts.
Neither archdiocese officials nor Kamer would give details about what actions resulted in McLaughlin removal. They also would not elaborate on how Mathews could have embezzled such a large amount of cash months prior and why Father Harold Snider, the brown robed Capuchin friar who serves as the shrine current rector, waited until Nov. 13 to file a police report at nearby Central Police Station about the alleged theft.
A STRUGGLE TO SAVE SOMETHING SACRED
The current imbroglio implicates the church Angela Alioto, the daughter of a former mayor, calls her own. But it does not vex her, though perhaps it should. Catholicism is at the heart of the former San Francisco supervisor identity. The trial attorney and daughter of one of The City most famous mayors, her sons, daughter and grandchildren are all named after popes and saints.
Alioto has family ties to Tarantino, whose father worked with her uncle at the Alioto Lazio Fish Co. near Fisherman Wharf. They share Sicilian heritage. But San Francisco is a small town and North Beach is a smaller village. Upon Tarantino arrival at the shrine, which Alioto considers her home turf, they tangled almost immediately. Examiner Angela Alioto, a trial attorney and former San Francisco supervisor, launched in the late 1990s a campaign to reopen the shuttered church as a shrine to St. Francis, helping to raise more than $2 million for the effort.
Alioto has a special, unique love for St. Francis, to whom she fondly refers to in conversation as "Francesco." She tells why: Away at school in Italy at the age of 15, with a period of partying among the fashionable boys of Florence ended by her parents, a sulking Angela arrived in Assisi. On a cold, windless day, she made an unwilling pilgrimage to the church where St. Francis is laid to rest and was greeted by a warm breeze that she said was the breath of the Holy Spirit blessing her.
Since then she has considered herself not merely Catholic. "I am a Franciscan," she proclaims with a beatific wave of her arms. This means charity to the poor and homeless, medical care for all and honoring the patron saint of her hometown.
It was Alioto in the late 1990s who began the campaign to reopen the shuttered church as a shrine to St. Francis, she said, raising more than $2 million from Dede Wilsey and others among The City gentry. And it was Alioto who formed a volunteer group dubbed the Knights of St. Francis to watch over the Porziuncola and the church, to welcome visitors and shoo away vandals.
The knights would also have some dominion over the rest of her vision for the area: A planned pedestrian piazza on the block of Vallejo Street that would be closed to traffic and link the church with nearby Caffe Trieste, and a Franciscan University of Political Thought in the run down rectory next door.
Examiner The National Shrine of St. Francis Assisi, located in North Beach, has become the focus of worldwide attention not for its shrine to the patron saint of San Francisco, but for accusations of lurid sex happening within the church.
In a time of trials that have tested the will of the faithful worldwide, the Roman Catholic Church in San Francisco has emerged relatively unscathed.
The sex abuse scandals staining archdioceses in Boston, Los Angeles and now Chicago have had no parallel in San Francisco. Instead, the local archdiocese reputation has recently been sullied across the world by lurid claims of sexual battery and harassment, all allegedly committed within one of its most sacred spaces.
A lawsuit filed late last month by a 33 year old woman formerly employed by the church accuses her ex bosses of harboring a veritable den of sin underneath the roof of a shrine dedicated to The City patron saint. Jhona Mathews alleges that one of the men, who is in his 60s, hired and used her for sex. And a charming and popular priest who wielded significant influence as the archdiocese second in command let it all happen, the suit claims.
The lawsuit contains lurid details, including paddling the woman bare bottom, and comes after years of chaos at the North Beach church, including a fight over interring dead pets and a holy order dismissal from the chapel.
HOUSE OF WORSHIP RICH IN HISTORY
Catholics have worshipped at what now the corner of Columbus Avenue and Vallejo Street since the Gold Rush days. Once a thriving parish for the Italian Americans who still lend their culture to the area, damage from the Loma Prieta earthquake and the steady exodus parishioners from the church led the archdiocese to close the Church of St. Francis in the 1990s. It was reborn a few years later in with a new mission, and special status, from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops as the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi the namesake and patron saint of San Francisco.
On a hill that allows it to greet the daily gaggle of guidebook clutching visitors hiking up to North Beach from downtown, the shrine includes the Norman Gothic church parts of which date to 1849, and survived the 1906 earthquake and fire with interior frescoes that depict St. Francis life. The shrine also includes in an adjoining building the Porziuncola, a scaled down replica of the tiny stone chapel that St. Francis himself adopted as his own in the early 13th century and that still stands inside a cathedral in Assisi, Italy.
It was at the shrine that Mathews, a 33 year old single mother who had worked as a clerk at a carpet company in Marin, was hired as an administrative assistant in 2012. Despite having no training and little formal education, she held the job for about a year.
click to enlarge Courtesy photo Bill McLaughlin, right, with Father Harold Snider, the National Shrine wholesale nfl jerseys of St. Francis Assisi’s current rector.
Mathews was fired last November, she alleges in a lawsuit filed Jan. 29, after refusing to continue to submit to the sexual demands of Bill McLaughlin, a 67 year old Marin construction contractor and volunteer chairman of the shrine board of trustees, who allegedly made Mathews submit to routine "oral, anal, and vaginal sex" as conditions of her employment.
(Scroll down to read the full text of the lawsuit.)
These acts were allegedly consummated in the church sacristy, a private area behind the altar generally only open to priests and select attendants. "Punishments" were delivered to Mathews via bare bottomed spankings with a wooden paddle when she resisted, the lawsuit claims.
That fraternity initiation style paddle, according to the lawsuit, was given as a gift to McLaughlin by Monsignor James Tarantino. Tarantino was named to the position of vicar general, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone chief deputy, after Cordileone arrival in San Francisco in 2012.
click to enlarge Courtesy photo A fraternity style paddle with initials that reportedly stand for "Boys’ Night Out," was allegedly used in the abuse.
A legend in Catholic circles in Marin County for his leadership at the helm of Marin Catholic High School and St. Hilary Catholic Parish in Tiburon, Tarantino received the honorific title of monsignor and held significant power over the archdiocese day to day operations after arriving in San Francisco in 2010. When not working 12 hour days at the chancellery near St. Mary Cathedral, he resided in the refurbished rectory next door to the shrine. The lawsuit claims that he knew about the quid pro quo sexual relationship between McLaughlin and Mathews but did nothing to stop it.
Church leaders as well as parishioners who remember Tarantino from Marin deny most of the allegations in the cheap nfl jerseys lawsuit.
Mathews was fired from her job Nov. 6, church leaders say, but for allegedly embezzling a "substantial" amount of money eight months prior to her firing. It wasn immediately reported to police. The investigation is now with the District Attorney Office, according to the San Francisco Police Department.
And church brass ousted McLaughlin that same month after they learned of his alleged "inappropriate actions," according to Larry Kamer, a crisis communications expert who was brought on to the shrine board of trustees in May 2013. Kamer is now serving as the church spokesman during the lawsuit.
"She was fired for issues of financial impropriety and for no other reason," said Kamer, who added that "the church acted quickly and responsibly" in removing both individuals from their posts.
Neither archdiocese officials nor Kamer would give details about what actions resulted in McLaughlin removal. They also would not elaborate on how Mathews could have embezzled such a large amount of cash months prior and why Father Harold Snider, the brown robed Capuchin friar who serves as the shrine current rector, waited until Nov. 13 to file a police report at nearby Central Police Station about the alleged theft.
A STRUGGLE TO SAVE SOMETHING SACRED
The current imbroglio implicates the church Angela Alioto, the daughter of a former mayor, calls her own. But it does not vex her, though perhaps it should. Catholicism is at the heart of the former San Francisco supervisor identity. The trial attorney and daughter of one of The City most famous mayors, her sons, daughter and grandchildren are all named after popes and saints.
Alioto has family ties to Tarantino, whose father worked with her uncle at the Alioto Lazio Fish Co. near Fisherman Wharf. They share Sicilian heritage. But San Francisco is a small town and North Beach is a smaller village. Upon Tarantino arrival at the shrine, which Alioto considers her home turf, they tangled almost immediately. Examiner Angela Alioto, a trial attorney and former San Francisco supervisor, launched in the late 1990s a campaign to reopen the shuttered church as a shrine to St. Francis, helping to raise more than $2 million for the effort.
Alioto has a special, unique love for St. Francis, to whom she fondly refers to in conversation as "Francesco." She tells why: Away at school in Italy at the age of 15, with a period of partying among the fashionable boys of Florence ended by her parents, a sulking Angela arrived in Assisi. On a cold, windless day, she made an unwilling pilgrimage to the church where St. Francis is laid to rest and was greeted by a warm breeze that she said was the breath of the Holy Spirit blessing her.
Since then she has considered herself not merely Catholic. "I am a Franciscan," she proclaims with a beatific wave of her arms. This means charity to the poor and homeless, medical care for all and honoring the patron saint of her hometown.
It was Alioto in the late 1990s who began the campaign to reopen the shuttered church as a shrine to St. Francis, she said, raising more than $2 million from Dede Wilsey and others among The City gentry. And it was Alioto who formed a volunteer group dubbed the Knights of St. Francis to watch over the Porziuncola and the church, to welcome visitors and shoo away vandals.
The knights would also have some dominion over the rest of her vision for the area: A planned pedestrian piazza on the block of Vallejo Street that would be closed to traffic and link the church with nearby Caffe Trieste, and a Franciscan University of Political Thought in the run down rectory next door.
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