Posted on 07/06/2010 8:58:23 AM PDT by JoeProBono
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) -- A Roman Catholic priest in Connecticut was charged Tuesday with stealing $1.3 million in church money over seven years to use for male escorts, expensive clothing and luxury hotels and restaurants.
The Rev. Kevin J. Gray, former pastor at Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazon Parish in Waterbury, was arrested and charged with first-degree larceny, Waterbury police said. Arraignment was expected Tuesday in Waterbury Superior Court....
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
This July 6, 2010 booking photo released by the Waterbury, Conn., police department shows the Rev. Kevin Gray, 64, former pastor at Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazon Parish in Waterbury, who has been charged with stealing more than $1 million in parish funds to use for male escorts, expensive clothing and luxury hotels and restaurants
It took them seven years to figure it out?
A Connecticut priest with a reputation of caring for the poor has shocked his parishioners after being accused of faking a terminal illness to cover up the alleged theft of $1 million from his diocese. The Rev. Kevin Gray, a 26-year veteran of the Hartford Catholic Diocese, is being investigated by the Waterbury, Conn., police department for allegedly taking money over a seven-year period from a savings fund established for the Sacred Heart parish, money that was to be used for building renovations and church debt, according to the police.
Look on the bright side - at least he was leaving the kids alone. That’s gotta count for something, right?
/do I need it?
Interesting, he wasn’t ordained until he was 38. I have more faith in the younger ones who’re currently being ordained but their predecessors are leaving them with a bad legacy.
Stole my words
That is so horrible and so sad. My son says what is really bad about this, is that it is driving people from religion. Satan is alive and well in the world, be aware, do not let him in.
Members of the Latino community at Sacred Heart Parish rallied in support of their former priest Sunday, a day after allegations surfaced that he embezzled $1 million from church coffers and lied about having a life-threatening form of cancer.
The rot that is being reaped by post-Vatican II “reforms”
I’ve often wondered if sexual excesses in the church would drop if priests were allowed to marry?
Only if they were allowed to marry teenage boys, since 95% of these clerical predators are homosexual pederasts.
You trade one set of problems for another set of problems. One saying in the military goes, “If Uncle Sam would have wanted you to marry, you’d have been issued a wife in your seabag!”
I think the same is true with clergy. I think it is best that they don’t marry, because the job is 24/7.
Why gays would want to be Roman Catholic? Beyond me, really.
Also, being married and monogamous is no guarantee. Divorces are inevitable, and uglier in the Roman Catholic church than in other ‘protestant’ denominations.
You also have to differentiate between sexual excesses, and sexually related crimes, such as pedophilia, which is more about power and control.
I’ll tell you what fascinates me - that liberals can tar and feather the RC Church with homosexual incident after homosexual incident, and it doesn’t impact in any way their efforts to mainstream homosexuality.
Every single pedophile priest was first a homosexual, and then a pedophile.
I knew a married Protestent high ranking clergyman that did essentially the same thing on a smaller dollar level. Being married did not immunize him to deviant desires that he acted upon and theft covered up the involved criminality.
A pillar of his community in all other regards with a double life due to compulsions carried his whole life.
Judgement is the Lord’s. Danbury has a prison.
/s
No accounting controls of any kind?
“Members of the Latino community at Sacred Heart Parish rallied in support of their former priest Sunday, a day after allegations surfaced that he embezzled $1 million from church coffers and lied about having a life-threatening form of cancer.”
This concerns me as much as the alleged crimes of the priest. We have become a people who no longer demand or expect integrity in our associates. So long as that person does what we like—entertain us, run our businesses, government, parish, educate us, inform us—we no longer care if other people are hurt along the way. All we have to do is look at celebrities, sports figures, ex-Presidents, financiers and more to see persons whose moral behavior is reprehensible but who all have their fan base to support them regardless (and sometimes because).
Time was, we expected our leaders and those honored by us to have integrated public and private lives, or at least hide that reprehensible behavior and be ashamed when it was revealed. While this priest apparently isn’t doing this, now too many people celebrate their hedonism and immorality and we continue to go to their concerts, their movies, their sports contests, and buy their products. That these people can rally to someone who is alleged to have engaged in long-term major theft and immorality while preaching the opposite (I imagine) to the flock is scary.
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