What happened to you in a Diocese of Orange parish or school was not okay.

If a priest, or a teacher, or a coach did something to you that you've never quite put down, and it was here (you were an altar server, say, or at Mater Dei or Santa Margarita or Servite, or a kid at a parish school in Costa Mesa or Santa Ana or Anaheim), then yes, this page is about you. One county. Sixty-four parishes and centers, 42 schools, 1.3 million Catholics, and a list the Diocese itself keeps: 18 priests it calls credibly accused.

Free
Confidential
No obligation
You never pay a dollar

6 questions. Your answers are private and go to one person.

This applies to you no matter what

Forty years ago? So was the Callahan complaint, more or less: 1984. The Ramos case, the $10 million one settled in 2024, reaches back to 1979. Whether the clock has run for you turns on your birth year and on when you first connected what happened to the harm. Details below.
The priest is dead. Six of the 18 men on the Diocese's own list are. The cases were never really against them. They're against the Diocese, which is still there, on Chapman Avenue in Garden Grove, still settling: $10 million in January 2024, $3.5 million that December.
It wasn't a priest. It was a coach, a counselor, a choir teacher, a dean. Most of the Mater Dei complaints on this page are about lay staff, and the Diocese was the defendant in every one.
His name isn't on the Diocese's list. That list is priests only, 18 of them. Of the 90 suits settled in 2004, 29 were about three priests. The other 61 were about everyone else. A list is a floor, not a ceiling.
You told someone at the school, years ago, and it went nowhere. One of the women who sued in 2019 says exactly that about Mater Dei. It is part of her case, not a mark against it.
You live in Nevada or Arizona now, or anywhere at all; the people who grew up in Santa Ana mostly aren't in Santa Ana anymore. Or it isn't you you're asking for but someone who can't ask for themselves. Reach out anyway. Plenty of people do.

The Diocese of Orange lawsuits: what the public record says, and when

None of this is ours. It's the Orange County courts, the District Attorney, the Diocese's own statements and list, and the reporters who covered them, and every line links to where it came from. We don't add to it. A complaint is an allegation, a name on the Diocese's list is that list's finding, and the Diocese has not admitted liability in any pending case. Two of the men below were convicted; the rest were not, and Michael Harris was never charged. And because it matters for the first question above: the records here name Mater Dei, Santa Margarita, Servite, St. John the Baptist in Costa Mesa, Immaculate Heart of Mary in Santa Ana and St. Bonaventure in Huntington Beach. Every other parish and school on this page is listed because the same Diocese ran it. No separate record on them is cited here.

September 30, 1986

Father Andrew Christian Andersen was found guilty in Orange County Superior Court on 26 counts of molesting four altar boys at St. Bonaventure Catholic Church in Huntington Beach, February 1985 through March 1986. Judge Luis A. Cardenas: "Very sadly but necessarily so, I must find you guilty of the 26 counts in the information." Andersen is on the Diocese's list today, returned to the lay state. Los Angeles Times.

January 3, 2005

The terms of the Diocese's $100 million settlement came unsealed: 90 lawsuits, a record for the church in this country at the time, agreed the previous December 2. Half came from the Diocese, half from eight insurance carriers, and the deal called for the release of nearly all of the accused priests' personnel files after a judge's review. Bishop Tod Brown: "Let this be what everyone remembers from today: that nothing is more important than the protection of our children and our youth." Associated Press, via Fox News.

October 5, 2007

The Diocese settled four more cases, the first filed since the 2004 deal, ten days before the first was due for trial and a week before Bishop Brown faced a contempt hearing. Three lay teachers at Mater Dei High School and Santa Margarita High School, and a priest at a neighborhood parish. One plaintiff, Sarah Gray, said she was molested by her choir teachers at Mater Dei in the late 1990s. Nobody said what the amounts were, not that day. Associated Press, via NBC News.

March 23, 2012

Back in April 2003 Lyons had been charged over a St. John the Baptist boy, 1978 to 1981, and that case was thrown out on the limitations rule of the time; the District Attorney's release says so. This time it held. Denis Lyons, 78 by now and a retired priest of the Diocese, pleaded guilty in Orange County Superior Court, People v. Lyons, case 09HF1289, to four felony counts of lewd acts on a child under 14: a second- and third-grader at St. John the Baptist Catholic School in Costa Mesa, 1992 to 1995, twice in the rectory, twice in the sacristy. That August he was sentenced to a year in jail. Orange County District Attorney.

January 20, 2022

A woman who had been a student assistant to the Mater Dei football team filed in Orange County Superior Court against the school and the Diocese, named as Doe 1 and Doe 2, over track and football coach Patrick Callahan, 1984 to 1987. The complaint says she reported it as an adult to Mater Dei and to the Diocese's chancellor. Two other Mater Dei complaints had gone into the same court in the last week of 2019: one by a woman who says counselor Bernie Balsis abused her in 1995 and that school officials refused to report him, one by a man about Harris. Los Angeles Times, via AOL.

June 22, 2022

Servite High School isn't the Diocese's; the Order of Servants of Mary runs it, and it has a row here only because this complaint names the Diocese of Orange as one of four defendants, with the school, the order and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Father Kevin Fitzpatrick was the school's priest and its swim coach, 1970 to 1992, and he died in 1997. Twenty-five years after that a former student went into Orange County Superior Court and said Fitzpatrick had abused him from the spring of 1976 through his senior year. Orange County Register.

January 26, 2024

A $10 million settlement to one man, who says he was 5 when Father Eleuterio Ramos began abusing him at Immaculate Heart of Mary in Santa Ana (1979 or 1980) and 10 when Father Siegfried Widera did, around 1984 and 1985. The Diocese of Orange paid $9.5 million; the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the remaining $500,000. There is a treatment counselor's statement in the case. Diocese leaders, it says, had referred Ramos for "sexual impulses related to sexual abuse of minors", got back a recommendation that he not return to ministry, and overruled it. Both priests are dead. Orange County Register.

December 17, 2024

This one comes from the Diocese itself: a $3.5 million settlement with John Doe OG 1003. He alleged Harris abused him once, in 1978, at Mater Dei, where Harris was then vice principal. The statement doesn't soften it. "The Diocese vigorously defended this decades-old claim and was prepared to take it to trial." Its insurers funded the settlement entirely. Harris had been laicized in 2003. A day later, plaintiffs' lawyers counted 63 cases still pending against the Diocese, bellwether trials set for 2025. Diocese of Orange statement.

We checked this on September 13, 2026, and the newest thing in it is from December 17, 2024. When something new gets filed or decided, it goes in here within 72 hours, with the link.

Who can be held responsible in a Diocese of Orange lawsuit

Not the priest, or not only him. The defendant in every case above is the Diocese, which in a California courtroom is The Roman Catholic Bishop of Orange, a corporation sole. The one on Chapman Avenue that assigned these men, moved them between parishes, hired the coaches and counselors at its high schools, kept the files and, so the complaints say, kept quiet. The theory isn't complicated. Put an adult in charge of children and you have to watch him. When a kid says something, you have to act. The filings allege the Diocese didn't. The Ramos case turned on a counselor's statement that the Diocese had been told what he was and put him back in a parish anyway. The Balsis complaint says Mater Dei officials refused to report him. Where the record shows what the Diocese knew, the case is against the institution. California's statute goes a step further: a defendant proven to have covered up childhood sexual assault can be made to pay up to three times the damages. Proven is the word. That is a lawyer's job, not a promise on a web page.

And it has the money. The Diocese of Orange has not filed for bankruptcy. Not in 2004, when it said it didn't expect to, and not since, while Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Sacramento, San Diego and Fresno all did. Its insurers paid half of the 2005 settlement, and all of the Harris one in 2024. Then, on June 1, 2026, a federal judge in Santa Ana ruled that Westchester Fire Insurance owes the Diocese a defense in the pending abuse cases, 63 of them by the December 2024 count. So the payer is there. Mater Dei is on this page with its own record; so are Santa Margarita, Servite and the parishes named above. If yours isn't named, answer the questions anyway and say where. The Diocese ran it. That is the point.

Your deadline: the California statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse in a parish or Catholic school

You have until you turn 40. Or five years from the day you understood what it did to you, if that comes later. That's the California rule for anything done to a minor before 2024; the section is Code of Civil Procedure 340.11, if you want to look it up. It's also the reason there's a birth-year question on this page. Born in 1987 or later, and the door is open on age alone, at any parish or school the Diocese ran. Born earlier, and it turns on discovery, which is a conversation, not a date. The Diocese isn't a public body, so there is no government claim to file first, and the statute says none is needed anyway.

Here is the catch, and it is why the birth year matters so much. The same law opened a window, January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2022, when anyone could file, any age. That window is closed. So today, if you were born before 1987, the fortieth birthday has come or is close, and what remains is the discovery rule plus one more thing the statute asks of a plaintiff over 40 suing an institution: a showing that the Diocese knew or had reason to know, or failed to take reasonable steps. Plus certificates of merit from your lawyer and a licensed therapist before the Diocese is even served. That is a real path; the 2024 settlements were both over-40 claims. But it is a path a lawyer has to look at first. (None of this applies to anything on or after January 1, 2024, by the way. The newer section, Code of Civil Procedure 340.1, sets no deadline for that at all.)

So, plainly: a Diocese of Orange parish or school in the 1990s or later, and you almost certainly still have time. The 1980s or before, and you may. It's worth one call to find out, and a lawyer decides it, not us.

Your situation still qualifies even if

You never said it out loud. Not to your wife, your husband, a priest. Nobody.
You don't have a word for what it was. Half of you is convinced it wouldn't even count.
You stayed in the Church. Went back to that parish. Sent your own kids to that school.
It was a lay teacher, a coach, a counselor, another student. Not a priest.
The man's name is on nobody's list. Neither was Patrick Callahan's, until January 2022.
You already got something from the Diocese, years ago. Say so on the call, first thing. It changes what a lawyer can do. It doesn't end the conversation, though.

Parishes and schools covered

Any parish, any parish school, any diocesan high school the Diocese of Orange runs or ran in Orange County, and any year since 1976, when the Diocese was created. (Before that the same parishes belonged to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles; a lawyer sorts out who answers for those years.) Six places show up in the records on this page, and they are Mater Dei High School and Immaculate Heart of Mary, both in Santa Ana; Santa Margarita Catholic High School out in Rancho Santa Margarita; St. John the Baptist Church and School in Costa Mesa; St. Bonaventure in Huntington Beach; and Servite High School in Anaheim, which the Servite order runs, the Diocese being a named co-defendant there. Others are here only because the same Diocese ran them, and we cite no separate record on them: St. Joseph in Santa Ana, St. Justin Martyr in Anaheim, St. Edward in Dana Point, St. Boniface in Anaheim, St. Norbert in Orange, and the rest of its 64 parishes and centers, 37 elementary schools and other diocesan high schools. Yours isn't here? That means nobody has filed yet, or we haven't found it. It does not mean nothing happened. Answer the questions and say where.

Questions people are asking

I was born before 1987. Has California's statute of limitations for child sexual abuse run out on me?

Not necessarily, and here's the shape of it. For anything before 2024 you've got until your 40th birthday, or five years from the day you discovered the harm if that lands later, and for anything on or after January 1, 2024 there's no time limit at all. The window that let anyone file, any age, shut on December 31, 2022. And if you're over 40 and suing the Diocese rather than the man, there's one more showing, that it knew or should have. A lawyer decides that part.

Can I sue the Diocese of Orange?

People do, and have for 40 years. Ninety suits settled at once in 2004, four more in 2007, and 63 were counted as still pending in December 2024. Whether you can depends on when you were born and, if before 1987, on when you connected what happened to the harm and what the Diocese knew. That's what the questions above sort out.

The priest is dead. Can I still bring a claim?

Yes. The claims that matter are against the Diocese, and it is very much still here and not in bankruptcy. Ramos and Widera were both dead when the Diocese paid $10 million over them in January 2024. Fitzpatrick? Dead 25 years by the time the Servite complaint naming the Diocese went in.

What if I already got a settlement from the Diocese?

Then say so on the call, first thing. Eighty-seven people were paid in 2005, and a settlement comes with a release. A release usually closes the door on the claim it covers, not on everything, and a lawyer has to read it before telling you anything. It doesn't make the call pointless.

How much is a Diocese of Orange settlement?

We won't put a number on yours. Be wary of anyone who does. What's on this page is public: $100 million, split among 87 people, in 2005; $2 million in 2012; $10 million in January 2024; $3.5 million that December. Each was one set of facts. Yours is another, and a lawyer will tell you plainly after they've looked.

How much does a sexual abuse lawyer cost?

Nothing, here. Every case is on contingency. The lawyer is paid only out of what is recovered, and if nothing is recovered you owe nothing. Not for the call, not for the review, not for the case.

Who sees your form

Kerim Eravci · Survivor Advocate · Not a lawyer

I was a victim, and I waited. Not because I didn't know what happened to me (I knew every day), but because I'd decided it was over, mine to carry, nobody's business. When I finally went looking for a lawyer, the answer came back in two words I'd never thought about: statute of limitations. My time had run out while I was busy getting through it.

What that has cost me since is a long story, and I'll tell you the whole thing in private, if you want it. The short version is the reason my name is on this page: I'm here to help people do what I wish I'd done, which is find out where you stand while the door's still open.

I'm not a lawyer. I read what you send, I call you once, on your terms, and nothing gets filed unless you say so. Ask sooner than I did.

Kerim Eravci is not an attorney. He's a survivor.

What happens next. Three steps, nothing more until you say so.

You answer 6 questions. Nothing is filed. Nothing starts.
A survivor calls you, once. Not a robot, not a call center. Someone who has been where you are.
You decide. You find out your options. If you want to stop there, you stop there.

How this works

ME2 Survivors Alliance protects the heart. Licensed California attorneys do the legal work. We are not lawyers and we don't pretend to be.

You never pay a dollar

Every case is on contingency. There is no charge for the call, the review, or the case. The firm is paid only out of a recovery, and if there is no recovery you owe nothing.