Gregory Ingels, A Former Priest Credibly Accused of Abuse, Still Works for Catholic Tribunals
Gregory Ingels is a former priest who has been credibly accused of molesting a 15-year-old boy in California, a scandal that led to his departure from public ministry in 2002. His story is fairly well known within Church circles. What’s not publicly known is that Ingels continues to work for the Church. I found this out by simply calling him up at his home in Minnesota.
He does “occasional” work on tribunals, he admitted to me. A long-time canon lawyer, he says dioceses call him up from time to time to seek his counsel. I asked him if he gets paid for some of this work. He said he does. But he insisted that he is “basically retired.”
That a credibly accused abuser still works for Catholic tribunals contradicts the “zero tolerance” message sent by the U.S. bishops. It is also an obvious violation of canon law, which requires that those who work on tribunals be upstanding members of the faith.
It would appear that the same culture of cronyism that protected Theodore McCarrick for so long has also protected Ingels, who once lived with the checkered San Francisco archbishop John Quinn. They shared a mansion together on the grounds of St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California, an arrangement that appalled James Jenkins, a psychologist who served on the San Francisco archdiocese’s abuse review board. Ron Russell of the San Francisco Weekly wrote in 2005,
At about the time Ingels was arraigned on criminal charges, Jenkins and other members of the review panel learned that he was living with former San Francisco Archbishop John R. Quinn at Quinn’s residence on the campus of St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. Quinn moved to the century-old mansion on the seminary grounds after his unexpected retirement as archbishop in 1995. Ingels has been liv...
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