Mod: Some things the people need to know. From the Pasadena Star News. Support your local newspaper.Sierra Madre of too many sorrows (Pasadena Star Newslink): I used to live in Sierra Madre. That is where I started writing news, an adventure that has taken me in many interesting directions. One of them was straight out of town. Something that happened several years ago, and with only minor consequences.
One of the joys of running a local news blog is you have the honor of airing out your city’s dirty linen. Local newspapers, economically deprived and newsroom depleted ever since readers decided
Facebook stories about the neighborhood dogs were preferable, pretty much give an independent newser free rein to share the pain.
One Sierra Madre story we broke had to do with water bonds issued to purchase infrastructure needed to moisten some downtown cheese-box urban renewal. The city had to raise some cash tout de suite to take advantage of a matching federal water grant, so it cooked up $6.75 million worth of 30-year economic bondage. Sadly for these faulty financiers the residents rose up against the demolition of their beloved downtown village, put a measure on the ballot and crushed those identikit development dreams with merciless joy.
So how did the knuckleheads handle all this now unaffordable bond debt? They made interest-only payments on that
$6.75 million nut for 16 years (
link). Kind of like a college freshman might do with his first credit card. And if you live there, you’re still paying.
There is something similar going down in
Sierra Madre now. A priceless resource in the form of open land surrounding the
Mater Dolorosa monastery is about to be sold off to some out-of-town development cowboys in order to, we’re being told, fund education projects in
India.
Oddly,
Sierra Madre is not the only place
Passionists are selling the farm. A brief
Google review will take you to news accounts detailing similar moves elsewhere.
Riverdale,
New York,
North Palm Beach,
Florida and
Union City,
New Jersey are all in on the
Passionist land boom.
The
Mater Dolorosa developers are planning for 42 new homes, each selling in the seven figures. Laid out in grids, these wedged-in tract
McMansions will be generic in appearance and out of kilter with civilized norms.
Here’s the skinny. On July 16, 2007, according to
Wikipedia, “
Bishop Mahony and the
Roman Catholic Church in
Los Angeles apologized for abuses by priests after 508 victims reached a record-breaking settlement worth $660 million, with an average of $1.3M for each plaintiff.”
The
Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center, I’m sad to say, appears to have been at the heart of this pain. A letter I’ve obtained, written by
Fr. Michael Higgins (
link), the fellow now running the
Retreat and driving force behind the housing project, details the carnal fall of
Fr. Arthur Carrillo.
Carrillo was often at
Mater Dolorosa between 1970 and 1994. His known prey was an underaged girl.
On the Horowitz Law website you can read about a Fr. Henry X. Vetter (link), another Retreat resident. Vetter was there — off and on — for years. During a near-decade-long span, Vetter molested children. He later fled to Mexico where a truck collision sent him to his unhappy maker.
Bishop Accountability.org discusses Fr. John Ormechea (link), an itinerant Mater Dolorosa occupant from 1974 to 1994. He was shown to have sexually abused four boys during this period.
Building so immense a housing project will take years of construction, dust, diesel exhaust, noise and misery. The folks being called upon to suffer all that are the residents of
Sierra Madre.
If, as many believe, this is all a stratagem designed to raise money and help service $660 million in
Archdiocese of Los Angeles child sex abuse debt, people deserve to hear about it.
Mod: Blame the messenger? So says the Linkster. Beats having to think, I guess.
Have you been sentenced to Facebook Bob's 'Sierra Madre Posting Jail' yet?W'all, it seems that the reg'lars over at the Sierra Madre Facebook page, folks who have been hanging around that place since Lumpy Baldwin was a boy (Lumpy being Lucky's least likely lad), are not happy this weekend. They didn't much cotton to my latest Pasadena Star News column, and boy howdy did they make that known to anyone who dared show up and defend it.
And since most of the reg'lars lack the language skills necessary to type a complete sentence without including a picture of their dog, they weren't winning any of the arguments. So the Sierra Madre Facebook page's schmeister and social media cop, Facebook Bob Gjerde, started banning anyone who disagreed with him. Putting 'em in that Sierra Madre Facebook Jail, as it were.
If anyone knows how to bake a saw into a cake, please let us know. We're trying to free some prisoners of injustice.
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