Abuse list has 5 N.M. priests

The Albuquerque Tribune/November 15, 2002
By Joline Gutierrez Krueger

Five Roman Catholic priests with New Mexico ties are listed on an Internet database of more than 600 U.S. clergy members who have faced public accusations of sexually abusing children.

The list, released Tuesday, was assembled by a Boston-based group call Survivors First, an advocacy group for victims of priestly sexual abuse. Names on the database were culled by 10 volunteers during the past three months from newspaper articles and court documents.

Among the priests from the Archdiocese of Santa Fe is the Rev. Robert Malloy, who was sentenced in September to five years minus five days of probation after pleading no contest to five counts of attempted criminal solicitation to commit tampering with evidence.

Malloy, the former pastor of Queen of Heaven Catholic Church and a one-time Albuquerque Police Department chaplain, is accused of writing letters of a sexual nature to five teenage boys between 1997 and 1998.

He is permanently banned from working at a parish or identifying himself in public as a priest.

Also on the database's list:

Arthur Perrault, a former pastor of St. Bernadette Church and a teacher at St. Pius X High School who disappeared after being accused in several lawsuits in 1992 of molesting seven boys and girls.

Robert Kirsch, a former Abiquiu priest who admitted in a deposition to having sex with a 15-year-old girl. The victim's 1991 lawsuit against the archdiocese set off an avalanche of similar civil actions, exposing New Mexico's disturbing history of priest sexual abuse long before the issue resurfaced nationwide last year.

Vincent Lipinski, a former Questa pastor and priest at Albuquerque's Our Lady of Fatima Church who pleaded guilty to two sex abuse counts in June 1993 in connection with a 14-year-old boy.

Lipinski continues to serve as a priest at an Albuquerque parish that is part of a different sect of the Catholic Church.

A fifth Archdiocese of Santa Fe priest, whose name is withheld, is listed as resigning in 1993 after allegations of abuse surfaced.

Dozens of other onetime members of New Mexico's Roman Catholic clergy who have been accused of sexual misconduct do not appear on the list.

News reports indicate that as many as 150 lawsuits have been settled with the archdiocese over sexual allegations against its priests.

Paul Baier, spokesman for the database project, said the group was "incredibly cautious" about choosing the priests it would name from a list of 2,100 clergy members in its files.

The database will continue to be added to or corrected as necessary, he said.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meeting this week to approve a sex abuse policy, has not undertaken a complete count of molestation cases since victims began going public in 1985.

Members of Survivors First say their list provides a more realistic number than one published last year by The Associated Press, which listed a total of at least 325 priests who have either been removed or have resigned because of abuse allegations.