Mary, Kiesle was sentenced in 1978 to three years' probation after pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges of lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two young boys in a San Francisco Bay area church rectory.

When his probation ended in 1981, Kiesle asked to leave the priesthood and the diocese submitted papers to Rome to defrock him.
(see 'the document trail' above)

In his earliest letter to Ratzinger, Bishop John S.Cummins warned that returning Kiesle to ministry would cause more of a scandal than stripping him of his priestly powers.
He informed the Vatican that the priest took a leave of absence and met with a therapist and his probation officer during the three years.
It's not clear from the file where Kiesle lived during those years, but Cummins mentions temporary assignments in neighboring dioceses that never worked out.

Kiesle was ultimately laicized on Feb. 13, 1987 but continued to volunteer with children

After leaving the priesthood he married but was arrested and charged in 2002 with 13 counts of child molestation dating from from the 1970s.
All but two of these were thrown out after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a California law extending the statute of limitations.

In 2004 he pleaded no contest to a felony for molesting a young girl in his Truckee home in 1995 and was sentenced to six years in state prison.

Now aged now 63 he is a registered sex offender and his address islisted on the Megan's Law sex registry.

Bishop Cummins is now retired - he described the situation under the previous Pope as ....

"These things were slow and their idea of thoroughness was a little more than ours. We were in a situation that was hands-on, with personal reaction."