By Tim Rohr
In HE'S NOT GOING TO TELL US, Anonymous complains that I am making more out of "the incident" than necessary and that the Archbishop's letter closes the matter.
My main contention about "the incident" is not the incident itself - since abuses of all kinds abound in this archdiocese and said "incident" is hardly a blip on the abuse graph - but rather the delay in addressing the incident, a delay which provoked speculation that chancery officials were either delaying in hopes the story would go away, or buying time to figure out how to cover it up.
Even this "delay", on its own, would have been little cause for me to care save for the several years of hell I and others suffered during the Collapse of Apuron.
The fall of Apuron was unthinkable, and he himself liked to proclaim "no one can get me." He was right of course. A bishop is the absolute power in a diocese. He can't be recalled, impeached, voted out, or even "FOIA'd." A bishop has total impunity and immunity.
Thus, as the unthinkable began to be thinkable, and as brick by brick Apuron's neo-clad wall began to crumble, Apuron's gestapo began an all out war on me, and eventually my family. Threats of law suits by Apuron against "Tim Rohr" and accusations of my involvement with a real estate and Chinese gambling conspiracy made local and even international headlines:
"In 2012, a blog called “Jungle Watch” was created online, attacking Archbishop Apuron and the Neocatechumenal Way, accusing them of manipulating the prelate and “colonizing” the entire Agaña diocese. The site is managed by Tim Rohr, a real estate agent employed by Msgr. Benavente and involved in the projected sale of the seminary. The online attacks became more and more violent..." - LA STAMPA
The reason I was singled out was because even though there were many others working behind the scenes, it was this blog where the battle began, a battle which led to a year long picket in front of the Cathedral and calls for Apuron's "defrocking," and ultimately a canonical trial which found Apuron guilty.
It was after the Vatican found Apuron guilty that all hell broke loose. The fall of Apuron's Reich was the fall of a central piece of "Kiko's Kingdom" - Kiko Arguello, the founder and leader of the Neocatechumenal Way which had made massive inroads into the halls of Catholic Church power.
With such power, one might wonder why little Guam mattered. I've spelled this out numerous times, but I'll spell it out again here.
Power in the Catholic Church government, like most governments, is synonymous with numbers: the more supporters the greater the power. In the Catholic Church, numbers = vocations, especially ordained ones. The more priests a bishop has, a religious order has, an organization like the NCW has: the more power.
However, the only way to "get a priest" is for a bishop to ordain him. And while Kiko was successful in recruiting vocations and funneling them into his many seminaries, he still needed bishops to ordain them. For some reason, he had particular success with U.S. Capuchins, namely Sean O'Malley, Charles Chaput, and Anthony Apuron.
However, O'Malley and Chaput appear to have been discerning about who they ordained. Kiko needed a bishop who would ordain who ever Kiko wanted ordained, namely all of them. And that's where Apuron came in. And it is also where the now "defrocked" Adrian Cristobal comes in.
For years, many local Catholics knew that Adrian had designs on succeeding Apuron, and that these designs were more rooted in his competition with - and dislike (to put it mildly) for - some other members of the local clergy than any desire to serve the Church and its flock.
Apparently, this "competition" hearkened back to the days when they were all in seminary together, a competition that was gravely exacerbated when Apuron passed over Adrian for the title of "Monsignor" and conferred it on Adrian's immediate competitors.
Adrian responded by promptly disappearing from Guam for several years, and then returned in 1995 with the Neocatechumenal Way in tow, in the person of a mysterious monk named Pius. Pius moved in with Apuron and the NCW takeover of Guam began.
However, the "takeover" was really Adrian positioning himself, by building a power base, to oust his competitors for the "Chair of Apuron" and coronate himself as Guam's next archbishop. This is why Adrian's Barrigada parish, where he kept himself ensconced as pastor, became, and still is, "Neocat-Central."
Enter John Toves
The late-John Toves, who, in addition to being one of the altar boys at Mt. Carmel in the 1970's when Apuron was helping himself to the bodies of John's friends, Toves, later, was also in the seminary with Adrian and others and knew "what was what."
So when John showed up in 2014 and knocked on the door of the Chancery, it was clear that he scared the hell out of Adrian.
By 2014, when John showed up, Adrian was totally running things and Apuron was pretty much hiding in a closet.
The backstory is this.
Adrian, like just about every other member of Guam's clergy as well as many lay Catholics, knew of Apuron's history of molesting boys. However, Apuron, relying on fear, misplaced respect for his office, and the dirt he had on other clerics, had so consolidated power that no one dared challenge him let alone "out" him.
But the tell-tale heart of Apuron's sordid past never stopped thumping beneath the chancery floorboards.
At first, Apuron put his confidence in "David the Tall" (after sending him to canon law school for many years), to keep him out of trouble should any of the ghosts from Apuron's past appear.
But "David the Tall" was a too thin line of defense, so Apuron was looking for a lot more protection as well as an escape plan if he needed one.
Functionally, protection and escape was what Pius and the neocat machine offered Apuron, and offered it in return for his rubber stamp, a rubber stamp on everything from ordinations to gifting away a mega-million dollar property into their control.
Bottom line for Kiko et. al was that they now had a bishop who would ordain whoever he was told to ordain, including rejects from the other Neocat seminaries.
And this was the path to power for both Adrian - who had local designs on power, and the Neocat generals - who had universal designs on power. And so the Neocat seminary swung into overdrive with locals - believing this was a "Seminary for Guam" - contributing millions. Perfect, the Neocats had a bishop in their control and a funding source: us.
SMEAR Tim Rohr: Object No. 1
So you can see why all hell broke loose when it became obvious around 2016 that Apuron's wall was breeched, and breeched initially by this blog and the tens of thousands of comments. Thus "Tim Rohr" became "Tim Rohr and his associates" and smearing me became Object No. 1.
I was okay with the smearing. I expected it. Welcomed it actually. Because I knew that they, Apuron's gestapo, was heading right for a cascade of mistakes - which in fact happened. However, my family didn't take it so well. Some of them were embarrassed by all the negative attention. I understood it but didn't know what to do about it. I had hopes that those who had promised to support my family when all hell broke loose would actually be there. They weren't. And my family suffered and they're still suffering.
At the center of the planned attack on me and my family were certain members of the clergy, including Adrian. I know who they are, and, if you were following the action back in those days, you do too.
After Apuron was found guilty by a Vatican tribunal in March 2018, Apuron's goons immediately began planning for his appeal. As already set out in La Stampa, the path to a successful appeal lay in proving that Apuron was the victim of a conspiracy led by "Tim Rohr, a real estate agent employed by Msgr. Benavente and involved in the projected sale of the seminary..."
However, their problem was that they had no evidence that I was "involved in the projected sale of the seminary" (because there was none), so they had to find another way to discredit me.
In May 2018, less than two months after the Vatican's guilty verdict, my name and face was plastered all over the local media for a full week with stories of accusations that I was a wife beater and a molester of my own children.
Krystal Paco, then a reporter for KUAM, had texted me on the morning of May 9, 2018, asking for my comments on allegations made against me in court filings.
Krystal sent pictures of some of the filings. I asked her how she got them. She said she pulled them herself (from the court) after having been "given a case number as a tip."
The plan, of course, was to discredit me by getting me accused of the same crimes Apuron was accused of to pave the way for Apuron's appeal.
Enter Theodore McCarrick
It almost worked. The kiko's in Rome engineered the appeal to bypass the normal process of appeal through a tribunal, and got the pope to take on Apuron's appeal personally:
The pope explained that in considering Apuron's appeal, he is bypassing the traditional "giuria"--the council of bishops that make up a tribunal--and will be considering the appeal himself. This is because Apuron's situation is a "very difficult case." - Catholic News Agency, Aug. 28, 2018
I remember watching the pope say this on TV. Francis was on a flight back to Rome from an event in Ireland. However, the aim of the interview was not what he was going to do with Apuron, but what he was going to do about a much bigger fish, then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
The McCarrick scandal was full of hooks and traps, especially for Francis, because there was a paper trail showing a connection between Francis and McCarrick. McCarrick had already been removed from his office by Francis' predecessor, Benedict, for decades of sexual misconduct with multiple seminarians. However, Francis had restored McCarrick to a position of power and now McCarrick, in 2018, was all over the news due to a now infamous letter by the now excommunicated Archbishop Vigano.
This is all very complex, and would make a much better movie than the Da Vinci Code ever did, but bottom line is that Francis was caught with his hands in the cookie jar and he needed to do something quick to salvage his reputation for on being tough on clerics who were sexual miscreants.
This is why, when Francis was being questioned about McCarrick, Francis himself changed the subject to Apuron - when the press probably knew little to nothing of Apuron. So now, with the stage lights glaring on Francis over McCarrick, he could not let Apuron off the hook. So Francis denied Apuron's appeal and finished him off.
BUT, had it not been for the timing of the McCarrick thing, I am very certain that Apuron's appeal would have been granted by Francis and he'd be living happily ever after in Guam.
So, why do I care?
So, WHY do I CARE? Why do I care about a little liturgical abuse at a little school? Why do I care that the new archbishop took a month to say anything about it? And why do I care that when he finally did say something he ultimately said nothing.
I guess it just reminds me of the terrible price some us had to pay and are still paying for shining the light on half a century of horrors, horrors shrouded in silence. In the end though, it was that silence that helped everyone eventually hear the pounding of that tell-tale heart - or should I say "hearts"...hundreds and hundreds of hearts.
I'll stop now.
