We don’t know if he married a woman, only that there is a “wife” which could mean anything by today’s definition.
What was the reason he was removed since it wasn’t known until afterward that he was married?
It’s a woman (almost certainly).
“Melinda Anne Rivera Harlow”
Interestingly, he had a judge marry them, this guy only gets more troubling.
Well, he couldn’t get married at all and remain a priest. Clearly, he was hiding it.
We had a priest in a parish I lived in years ago in PA who had secretly married a woman, a nurse he had met while he was hospitalized for some kind of back or knee problem. He married her across the state line in Ohio, and they actually lived not too far from the rectory...you could never reach him there, oddly enough, and one of the things that finally provoked his discovery was the fact that people who called him for emergency hospital visits could never get in touch with him, and in one case the patient died without the last rites because the priest was off at his other home.
At that point, someone came forward and said that he didn’t live at the rectory, but that he was married and lived elsewhere. The bishop called him in. Still, he denied it, even though the parish council members came to him as a group and asked him if the rumor was true. If it was, they weren’t going to do anything but simply leave it to the bishop, and if he told them it was not, they were going to defend him. He told them it was not true.
They went to the bishop in a group, prepared to defend this worthless creature, and the bishop showed them a copy of the marriage certificate from Ohio.
He was cynical and self-centered and I simply have no respect for somebody like that. He knew what the rules were. If you don’t want to abide by them, leave.
But the worst thing was that he had lied to the people, and many of them left the Church at that point.