By Tim Rohr
On November 16, 2017, the Guam Daily Post reported the death of Fr. Raymond Cepeda, a priest of the Archdiocese of Agana who was removed from the priesthood in 2009 due to what the news report termed “serious allegations of abuse,” abuse which allegedly had occurred over the course of at least two decades, the 1980’s and 1990’s.
In the same news story, it was reported that Apuron’s attorney, Jacquiline Taitano-Terlaje, reported Cepeda’s death “during a hearing for sex abuse cases involving her client, suspended Archbishop Anthony Apuron…at the District Court of Guam.”
In reading this, I thought it odd that Terlaje, during a hearing for her client, Apuron, would report Cepeda’s death to the court. Terlaje did not represent Cepeda, and smart attorneys are usually very careful not to provide information irrelevant to the case at hand. And since Terlaje is generally considered a smart attorney, we have to assume that Cepeda’s death was relevant to Apuron’s case. But how?
We can only guess, but since, as the record would show for the next ten years, one of the main prongs of Terlaje’s defense of Apuron was his health and his age, it is quite possible that Terlaje used the announcement of Cepeda's death to provoke sympathy from the court in order to have the lawsuits against Apuron dismissed, a motion that the court was then considering:
“The chief judge is also taking a motion to dismiss the lawsuits against Apuron under advisement.”
However, if Terlaje’s intention was to evoke sympathy for Apuron, the same news story functionally argued against it:
“Cepeda has been named in more than 10 cases of child sexual abuse from the 1980s and ’90s. One accuser claimed he endured eight years of sexual abuse by Cepeda and reported it to Apuron, who reportedly told him during a meeting to “pray about these types of evil in the world.” Court documents also allege Apuron told the boy he would “get over it, if he prayed about it.”
Recently, Lester Gonzales shared his story of clergy sexual abuse in a Substack post. Lester wrote that he reported the abuse to church officials, and the answer he received was a question: "What do you want to do about it?" Lester rightly wondered why "the church" was asking this question when the real question was "What are YOU (the archbishop, etc.) going to do about it?
Of course, the archbishop, Apuron, the Vicar-General, David C. Quitugua, et. al were not going to do anything about it. To do something about it would have opened the can of worms that Apuron et. al were desperately trying to keep a lid on for decades, a can that would eventually be forced open in 2016 by a band of lay people who were finally sickened by "these types of evil" that Apuron had told that poor boy mentioned in the Post story above.
The "types of evil" that Apuron et. al, for decades, simply shrugged off are cruelly illustrated in the account of Cepeda's alleged rape of 9-year-old Timothy Shiroma as reported in the Guam Daily Post on March 16, 2017:
A former Catholic school student is the latest victim to come forward and file a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Agana alleging sexual abuse at the Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral-Basilica in Hagåtña. All of the 28 lawsuits filed thus far alleged incidents of abuse at parishes around the island in the 1960s and 1970s.
The new case filed by Timothy Ryan Shiroma, 37, alleges sexual abuse that occurred in the late '80s.
According to court documents, in 1988 Shiroma was attending Cathedral Grade School, next to the Hagåtña cathedral. After school, Shiroma would pass the time playing football with other kids near the cathedral until his grandfather picked him up, or he walked over to his office nearby.
On one occasion, Shiroma stopped by a nearby hotdog stand before heading to his grandfather’s office. When he noticed his grandfather’s car wasn’t in the office parking lot, Shiroma returned to the cathedral, looking for him there.
While near the garage of the cathedral, Shiroma encountered Father Raymond Cepeda, who was a priest at the cathedral. Cepeda was scolding other kids for leaving trash and reminding them to clean up after themselves because the area was “God’s house,” court documents state.
Shiroma asked Cepeda to use the phone to call his grandfather and was told he could only do so after he helped collect the trash. After picking up trash, Cepeda took Shiroma to use the phone in an office of the cathedral, but he was unable to get a hold of his grandfather.
The lawsuit alleges that when Shiroma got off the phone, the priest threw him to the floor and pinned him to the ground belly down.
The 9-year-old began to cry, and Cepeda unzipped his backpack and shoved Shiroma’s head inside, then took off the boy’s pants and sexually assaulted him, the lawsuit states.
Shiroma struggled to fight Cepeda, but the priest had all his weight on him, court documents state.
The incident left Shiroma scarred and afraid to see Cepeda or be anywhere near him, the lawsuit states. Shiroma rode the bus home and feigned sickness when the school had Mass at the cathedral.
This was the kind of stuff that Apuron not only did himself (see Walter Denton's testimony) but also, for decades, oversaw, enabled, and, by his "shut up and pray" advice, promoted.
This is the real reason why Apuron never really wanted his "day in court." Even if he could have discredited his public accusers - and he well could have at the outset - there were hundreds of stories like Lester's and Timothy Shiroma's waiting in the wings. Apuron and his attorney could not risk a "day in court," and if I were Apuron's attorney, I would tell him to shut up and stay away, rather than trot him out to proclaim his innocence at every opportunity.
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