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Cross-dressing, porn-selling priest guilty of heading up Connecticut meth ring

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Father Kevin Wallin aka “Monsignor Meth’”

A cross-dressing, gay priest buys an adult bookstore and uses it as a front to sell meth? You couldn’t make it up!

And before you ask, no, it’s not an April Fool’s joke. From Irish Central:

Monsignor Kevin Wallin, a Connecticut priest now being nicknamed Monsignor Meth, is expected to plead guilty next week to participating in a conspiracy to distribute crystal methamphetamine in Connecticut.

The Connecticut Post reports that court papers filed on Tuesday show that 61 year old Monsignor Wallin is expected to enter a guilty plea, which will have him facing a mandatory 10 years in federal prison.

The Associated Press reports that Connecticut authorities said the Wallin had meth mailed to him from co-conspirators in California, and made more than $300,000 in drugs sales out of his Waterbury apartment in the second half of last year.

Wallin had also purchased a bookstore - one that sold primarily pornography and sex toys - which he used as a front to launder money.

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Wallin served as the pastor of St. Augustine Parish in Bridgeport for nine years until he resigned in June 2011 citing health and personal problems. Prior to that, he served six years as pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Danbury until 2002.

While still serving as a priest, many noted his “off-kilter” behavior in early 2011. One church worker said that Wallin had grown “disillusioned with the bureaucracy of the Church.” The same worker, along with others, said the priest had long had sex with men and was a cross dresser.

On January 3, federal agents arrested Wallin, and on January 15 a grand jury indicted him and four other people on drug charges. All are charged with one count of conspiracy to distribute 500 grams or more of a substance containing meth and 50 grams of actual meth, a crime that carries 10 years to life in prison upon conviction. Wallin plans to plead guilty to that charge.

This would be funny if it weren’t also creepy and sad. As if the Catholic church needed any more scandal!

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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04.01.2013
05:47 pm
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Italian women unite to defend their priest lovers

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The sex lives of Catholic priests takes another controversial turn today with this story from Rome.  39 women who have engaged in longtime romantic relationships with priests have just penned an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI:

denouncing compulsory celibacy as a “torn up shroud.”  In the letter, the women describe the closeted lives they lead as companions to priests and ask the pope to consider that, perhaps, their men can only fulfill their priestly duties with their lives fulfilled by marriage.  “In order to become effective witnesses to the need for love, they need to embody it and experience it fully, in the way their nature demands it,” the letter said.  “Is it a sick nature?  A transgressing one?”

While the Vatican has declined comment, one of the letter’s authors, Stefania Salomone (above), is hardly afraid to voice her opinions.  The 42-year old, who’s been romantically involved with a priest on at least two occasions, points out that reconciling faith with sexuality wasn’t always so difficult, “most of the Apostles were married, and so were the presbyteroi, the elders who exercised priestly authority in the first Christian communities, as described in the Act of the Apostles and St. Paul’s letters.” 

To better help others like her, Salomone has launched a site for women romantically involved with priests.  The group letter to Pope Benedict was recently translated into (often moving) English.  You can read it in its entirety here, but it ends, stingingly, with the following quote from church critic, Eugen Drewermann:

The God that Jesus spoke about wants precisely what the Catholic Church today fears more than anything: free, happy and mature human life, which is not born of anguish, but of obedient trust and which is free from the limitations of the tyranny of a traditional theology that prefers to seek the truth of God in sacred scripture rather than in the sanctity of human life.

My Father, My Lover: Priests Struggle With Celibacy

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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05.28.2010
02:25 pm
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