Claim Guam Catholic Church rewarded priest who protected Apuron

Transcript

DAVID SABLAN: Father Adrian Cristobal was the chancellor during the reign of Archbishop Anthony Apuron who was allegedly accused of numerous sexual abuse of young altar boys when he was the pastor prior to being elevated to bishop. I would believe that Father Cristobal knew about some of these allegations but basically did not say much about it and again that's just my opinion knowing how he interacted with the Archbishop. But our concern primarily is that he has basically lied about numerous issues and now we find that this new Archbishop, Archbishop Byrnes has basically decided to send him off to study Canon Law in Canada, which in the opinion of many in Concerned Catholics  it's basically a reward for his misdeeds, that's the only way we can look at it.

JO O'BRIEN: When you say a reward for his misdeeds, do you mean that he has effectively been rewarded for protecting Archbishop Apuron?

DAVID SABLAN That's kind of how we view it because of the fact that he has really been one of the individuals that has caused this division within our church here because he is a member of this Neocatechumenal Way, and he has been giving them many favours and, you know, he was also very instrumental in providing them resources from our Archdiocese to continue their religious practices here on the island and of course there's a seminary that was taken over by the Neocatechumenal Way and that has been funded by the Archdiocese and in the end we felt that he should be disciplined rather than being sent off to go study Canon Law.

JO O'BRIEN: But just getting back to those abuse allegations you say he lied, do you mean he lied in relation to the abuse claims?

DAVID SABLAN In the letter that I sent to the Archdiocese it's not necessarily directly connected to any of the sexual abuse issues. But there are some parts there where he prevented some of these people wanting to talk to the Archbishop about sexual abuse he prevented them from actually discussing it with the Archbishop in effect violating their own policy. So he really wasn't following any of the rules on trying to protect the victims for example in this particular instance with sexual abuse. But it went beyond just that you know he was involved in a lot of other matters within the Archdiocese where he was misleading the people.