Ch.7 Franciscan Neverland: Santa Barbara was dumping ground for pedophile priests in 1960s and...

USA Sided with pedophile priests, and soon after, the nation fell Ch 7 Santa Barbara [based on court documents and interviews]

Kay Ebeling

In an L.A. courthouse hallway in 2009, Tim Hale is talking into my recorder on the fly as I run alongside him, still the only reporter covering 660 lawsuits against the Archdiocese for pedophile priests. 

Hale: "Basically, they sent these... per- 'troubled' Franciscans to parishes in the outskirts of San Diego County. And after 13 years of that, the Bishop down there finally noticed what was happening, and, amazingly, he expressed his concerns in a letter to the Vatican. We have a copy of that letter. Apparently, he got the Franciscans expelled from San Diego, and next thing you know we have a perp explosion in Santa Barbara in the 1960s. Lucky us." 

Outside, Hale, attorney for several Plaintiffs in Santa Barbara, says, "Sorry to run I gotta catch a train" and, in a smartly tailored suit, gets on a bicycle and rides towards the downtown Metro to catch an Amtrak north.

(work in progress)

For this chapter I am making a narrative out of blog posts I wrote a while back and others about Santa Barbara Franciscans and the Boys Choir: 

Thursday, August 19, 2010

PROOF: Santa Barbara was Dumping Ground for problem priests. PROOF: Franciscan sex crime ploys continue in 2009

Part One: The bishop of San Diego used the words "dumping ground" in 1950 when he wrote to the Vatican that too many problem priests were ending up in Banning, Beaumont and other towns in the developing (Series Continues with Part Two "A New Sex Crime Ploy by Franciscans" Part Three no longer timely Part Four "Franciscan Grabbed Freshman by the Genitals" Part Five: "Pedophilia is a Privacy Right for Franciscans" and Part 6 is here "Priests Take Boys on Drunken Camping Trip." Part 7 is here "First Year in Seminary, Assaulted by two Franciscans")

Now in late Sept 2024, I am reading over all these blog posts and legal docs that were sent to me and I hope to fashion them into a narrative, a story that reads like a novel, about the Santa Barbara... attack on families and children by Franciscan negligence. I'm diving in now, check back in a week or so to see progress... -ke

***

Van Handel

[The Santa Barbara Boys Choir, "was clearly my choir, and the fulfillment of one of my fondest dreams," writes ex-priest Robert Van Handel in an attachment to his probation report called "Sexual Autobiography." In this 9-point type single-spaced memoir, Van Handel admits, “Now I understand that the choir was also a constant supply of attractive little boys.”]

Van Handel mugshot

CATALINA: One time van Handel brought in this young boy. They walked right past me like I wasn’t even there- hmph- through the living room and straight into his study, his private study. I knew what went on in there. But since I'm just a servant, they don’t even try to hide it from me. He’s pushing the little boy into his den and looks at me with that look that makes me shiver, then closes the door and I keep cleaning then [hesitates, breath] I heard the kid through the door say "Father Robert" And his voice sounded- it had an exclamation point after it, Father Robert! I stopped, thought about calling the friar, again, nobody's believed me so far when I try to tell them their Doctor of Music Franciscan choir director is a pervert. So I just let it go and keep cleaning. But my memory kept it. "Father Robert! Father Robert!" 

Van Handel's psychologist: "He could easily have abused 150 boys.”  

***

Me: Now living in South Lake Tahoe, I'm not writing about pedophile priests anymore, when once again I experience, "angelic intervention" by my "eternal journalist" handlers who've driven this project since 2007. By happenstance, the one and only time I went to Taste of the Sierras here in town, I met Catalina, who had once been a housekeeper at St. Anthony Seminary in Santa Barbara. [Catalina is a fictionalized character based on 2009 interviews for CofA blog] 

Cat had first hand experience with boys choir leader Robert van Handel, so I asked her, now in her eighties, to talk to me into a tape recorder. 

CofA Blog: So, Cat, what was it like working around Father van Handel at the Franciscan seminary? 

Catalina: I'm taking my break, been working hard all day, and Father Robert rushes in and changes the channel of the TV I'm watching, to “The Wonder Years” 

Me: that weird show where Fred Savage relives his childhood.

Cat: Yeah, he could never miss the Wonder Years. Or he'd just put in a VHS of the boys choir and just watch it over and over. 

Me: Gaze at it?

Cat: You know, priests are supposed to take a vow of poverty, well when Father Robert ran the boys choir for the Fransciscans he had a photo lab, lots of children's toys hmph-  a dog that he used to get the attention of the boys; a late model VW van; plus he could use a brand new 15 passenger van for his choir to take them places like Magic Mountain;  the seminary property was at his disposal for boys choir stuff; he had several offices, the S.B. Boys Choir office; his own office across from that office.

He would use dormitory rooms for Boys Choir camp, he let the boys stay there for some kind of boys camp; at one time he owned a large station wagon he used to take boys to Lake Cachuma. 

Oh and also an audio visual room for boys choir, or whatever, the windows were blackened so I couldn't see inside, two music rooms for boys choir practice; the Rector's Lounge back room was a costume room for boys choir. 

Tons of stuffed animals were stashed in a tiny space under the stairs in the restroom in the main building. No one ever explained that to me. 

Oh and also- Van Handel had a secretary for that boys choir office; lots of parking spaces where Van Handel would play tag with the boys after their practice in the tower. 

Plus credit cards; a mountain bike; stereo equipment; lots of tobacco for his pipes. Trips to England with the boys choir every four years. Tons of booze located in a pantry next to the kitchen at the Casa; ice cream and cookies for the choir boys in the kitchen fridge; VCR- television; camera equipment.

To sum it all up, all 16 acres of Santa Barbara Franciscan property was Robert van Handel's Neverland. 

[work in progress]

NEXT: more about the SB Boys Choir

***

Van Handel Probation Officer: Not a month went by that van Handel did not molest members of the Santa Barbara Boys Choir,

Arresting officer to press: “It should be noted that the Catholic Church has done nothing to assist this department in this investigation.” 

***

I don't know if I can continue this segment. This creep would Want to be made into a famous perpetrator freak and I don't want to fill my head with his sick thoughts. Anyone can read the posts at my 2010 era blogs about him linked above, including one with his sexual autobiography pages scanned in…. I'm going to find another way to approach the entire Santa Barbara story. After I take a break, as just reading a few pages of van helsing here- he's detestable. 

***

Sept 30

I have to stick to the original theme, that the reaction people had to my blog about pedophile priests ran right alongside the rise of the right, especially the hate and misinformation of MAGA qanon et al. there were so many similarities it made me write this entire project. Because whatever USA catholics and supporters did wrong by siding with the pedophile priests and rejecting the victims as after-money liars, it set off a kind of energy on the world, or it just set an example for the world, and here we are now with Trump coming close to taking over America along with whoever is behind him.

October 3, 2024

I had to stop writing this. I've mentioned a kind of spiritual presence that pushes me to write. Well, last Sunday I must have misidentified whatever was driving me. I wanted to immerse myself in the stuff I’d written a decade ago but I got So Confused, it was as if things were swirling around me, I’d click on one story and then I’d go no not thi9s one and click on another.  At one point I had more than ten windows open on the laptop and I’d go from one to the next going, where is the sexual diary? Or where is the initial complaint? Or where- if it was a scene in a movie, there’d be wind noises, wing-flap sounds, and a sense of an evil presence-

I can't keep writing, there is nothing more to write, except to fll in the holes where I was bullied in Chicago then bullied in South Lake Tahoe, both times after letting one  person know about my blog and realizing later I shouldn't have trusted that person.

And in almost every case where I got bullied because of my blog for victims of pedophile priests, those same bullying individuals segued into Donald Trump supporters years later. I'll finish that part of the story in "Thousands of Victims" chapter.

Meanwhile anyone can read all the docs I linked here, but I need to leave the story of St. Anthony’s Seminary in Santa Barbara behind me.