November 12, 2020 at 8:08 pm

The Catholic Diocese of Stockton released the names of 29 clergy members credibly accused of child sexual abuse on Thursday, an expansion of a list first published in 2017. The 29 had served at some point in Stockton, but had been accused of misconduct in other dioceses.

“It is not enough to merely publish a list and think our work is done. The process of atoning for the horrible sins of clergy sexual abuse requires us to continually revisit this list and seek to make it as thorough as we can,” said Bishop Myron J. Cotta in a video address. “A thorough, honest, and open accounting of the sins of the past are necessary if our church and the many victims/survivors of clergy sexual abuse are to find healing.”

Of the 29 clergy members, 18 of them are deceased, and the rest have left or been removed from the church in some way. Three of them have worked in the Stockton Diocese within the last ten years: J. Patrick Foley (a very brief tenure in 2014 at St. Patrick’s in Sonora), Timothy F. Keppel (St. Joseph’s in Mammoth Lakes, 2012), and Neil McMenamin (St. Mary’s High School, roughly 1971-2010).

The updated version of the list was prepared after Kinsale Management Consulting reviewed the diocese’s records. The firm is led by Dr. Kathleen McChesney, a former top FBI official who currently heads the Office of Child Protection for the United States Catholic Bishops’ Conference.

A 30th clergy member, Manual Pascual, was considered for the updated list, but was removed after discussion with Kinsale Management and the Diocesan Review Board. Pascual died last year.

The diocese was pressured last year by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), a national support organization for abuse survivors, to add seven more names to the list. Four of them (Mario Cimmarrusti, Raymond Devlin, James Cairns, and Theodore Feely) were named on Thursday.