The Los Angeles Archdiocese assigned two priests to northern Santa Barbara County parishes, even after the men were accused of sexually abusing children, documents released Wednesday revealed.

Though both men previously were named in civil suits filed by alleged victims of abuse, the documents were the first to show they had access to young parishioners after complaints surfaced. Neither man has publicly admitted abusing children.

The Rev. Willebaldo Castro was made associate at St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Santa Maria in January 1976, just four months after he was accused of molesting a 16-year-old boy, according to the documents.

Castro, who left the archdiocese and returned to his native Mexico in 1980, also faces a lawsuit alleging he molested a minor at St. Mary's in 1977.

Church officials received three complaints about the Rev. Michael Buckley before his 1987 transfer from Catalina Island to a pastor's position at Immaculate Conception in New Cuyama.

Prior to his assignment in northeast Santa Barbara County, a parent of two boys complained to church officials in 1959 that Buckley exposed himself to the youths, according to documents.

The papers also show that someone placed an unspecified phone message to church officials in 1983 ”indicating that Fr. Buckley engages in inappropriate sexual conduct with children."

Buckley remained in New Cuyama, even after an adult male complained in 1991 that the priest kissed and hugged him when the accuser was 13 or 14.

His career ended in February 1994, when two separate complaints alleging sexual abuse of young boys during the 1960s and 1970s were reported within days of each other.

”Adult male reports that he and his brothers were sexually abused by Fr. Buckley over a five-year period from 1971 to 1975," one claim reads.

Buckley was removed from his post in New Cuyama and suspended from the priesthood on Feb. 25, 1994. He retired in 1997 to a Los Angeles nursing home, and now faces eight claims of child-sexual abuse.

The documents, which drew criticism from some victim's rights activists for not being complete enough, also listed several other priests with northern Santa Barbara County ties.

The Rev. Brian Bernard Hanley worked as an assistant pastor at La Purisima Conception Parish in Lompoc from October 1963 until he left the archdiocese and returned to his native Ireland in October 1965.

The Rev. Christopher Kearney was transferred from St. Francis High School in La Canada to San Lorenzo Friary in Santa Ynez in 1995, the same year allegations that he inappropriately wrestled with a student during the 1970s surfaced.

In 2002, an anonymous male phoned church officials and alleged that Kearney touched him as they wrestled. An anonymous caller made similar accusations to a talk radio show in 2002.

Another priest, the Rev. Donald Patrick Roemer, served in the mid-1970s as chaplain for Santa Barbara Juvenile Hall and as special ministry at Los Prietos Boys Camp. He was later convicted of three counts of molesting a boy while working in Thousand Oaks.

Included in the list of 126 priests accused of sexual abuse were two men who worked at St. Mary's during the 1930s. The Rev. Albert Joseph Duggan and Monsignor George M. Gallagher were accused during their career, though the documents did not go into specifics. The Rev. Raymond Tepe, who was a pastor at La Purisima from 1948-1949, was also listed in the papers, though no reason was stated. All three men are deceased.

The newly released documents detailing sex abuse allegations against Roman Catholic priests could help speed hundreds of lawsuits toward settlement as the Los Angeles Archdiocese faces potentially damaging developments on other fronts in the abuse crisis.

The archdiocese said it released the summaries to help victims heal and to make good on a deal made with plaintiffs during nearly three years of settlement talks. An appeals court ruling last month made it possible for the church to post the summaries, said Michael Hennigan, an archdiocesan attorney.

”I think what we have here is a church that is embarrassed, that is contrite, that is ashamed of what happened in the past and is committed to reforming it to the extent that it is humanly possible to do so," he said.

But critics who have been following the case called the release of the summaries a ”public relations ploy" designed to move 560 sex abuse cases closer to a settlement before damaging testimony in the upcoming sex abuse trial of former priest Michael Wempe and the possible release of personnel files to the Los Angeles County district attorney, who is investigating clergy abuse in the nation's largest archdiocese.

The state's 2nd District Court of Appeals recently rejected the archdiocese's attempt to keep those files from prosecutors. The archdiocese has appealed to the state Supreme Court and expects to learn within weeks if the high court will hear its case.

District Attorney Steve Cooley did not address the latest document release in the civil cases, but said in a statement issued Wednesday that his office was ”looking for ... evidence and investigative leads, not institutional mea culpas" from Cardinal Roger Mahony, head of the archdiocese.

The clergy abuse litigation in Los Angeles is the largest such litigation that remains unsettled nationwide - and that, too, increases pressure on Mahony and the archdiocese, said Marci Hamilton, a professor at Cardozo Law School at New York City's Yeshiva University who consults with plaintiffs on constitutional law.

”The handwriting is on the wall. I think what's going on is the Los Angeles Archdiocese knows that it's either settlement or very extensive trials with extensive damages," she said. ”They're trying to manage the crisis by releasing these descriptions. Then they have deflated some of the news coverage at that point."

”I am totally committed to settlement but we believe at this point we may need some trials and the rush of preparation for trial to get there," he said. ”We will need their enthusiastic participation and so far that enthusiasm has not been as strong as we would like it to be."

The papers released Wednesday summarize confidential personnel files but do not go into some of the wrenching detail that other dioceses - notably Boston, where Cardinal Bernard Law was shamed into resignation - were forced to make public. A total of 245 priests have been accused of abuse in Los Angeles, Hennigan said, and about 30 remain in the ministry because the allegations against them weren't credible.

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