Naughty Priests

As of 2014, the Catholic church had defrocked 848 priests over the previous decade, and doled out lesser punishments to another 2,572 .....

Priests And Money Can Be Bad Mix

These priests had nearly all been accused of committing the most serious of charges, namely of raping and molesting children or other concerning behaviours, but there were also some others defrocked for crimes. 

Those figures include punishments handed down by three Popes, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, and included more than 50 Catholic priests in England and Wales, according to the Vatican's U.N. Ambassador Archbishop Silvano Tomasi.

Of course the Vatican only began to require bishops to report cases of child abuse to Rome in 2001, and not until 2010, did the church finally tell Bishops to also report those cases to the police .... a little bit late in the day some might say .... but at least they take that particular matter more seriously now. But even so, a report in 2019 by NBC News in the USA found that about 1,700 priests with credible abuse allegations outstanding were unsupervised on a day to day basis, with another 76 unaccounted for.

Fr. Marcin Garbacz, a 42 year old priest in the Diocese of Rapid City, was sentenced in Novemeber 2020 (convicted in March), to almost eight years in federal prison, after being convicted of 65 felonies related to stealing donations from Catholic parishes. The charges included wire fraud, money laundering, and tax fraud. All crimes he committed while serving as a chaplain and Catholic school teacher in the Diocese of Rapid City, between 2012 and 2018.

He was ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution. He claimed that he stole the money in part, because he disagreed with Catholic doctrine on homosexuality. Which might explain the fact that he was also facing federal criminal charges related to child sexual abuse and possession of child pornography.

Alex Crow, a young priest who was defrocked by the Archdiocese of Mobile Alabama USA in August 2023, was later found in Italy, with an 18 year old American girl, who told the relative who found her, that she had travelled with him voluntarily (and that no sexual activity had taken place) .... but the Bishop was taking no chances and had him defrocked as soon as he and the girl disappeared together. The police later said that the priest may have been grooming the girl before she reached the age of 18 and investigations are still ongoing.

But this is not the only reason a priest may be defrocked, for example, Edward Bolognini, who used to be a high-ranking New Hampshire priest named 'Edward Arsenault' started his crime career in 2014, when he plead guilty to the theft of $300,000 from a Catholic hospital, his diocese and even a dead priest’s estate, in New Hampshire at the Manchester diocese. He did it to treat his 'lover,' musician Luke Parkin, by paying for expensive meals and trips to San Francisco and New York, according to reports. He only served 4 years in prison for this offence (some of it on home confinement), before eventually being released in 2018, but was defrocked by Pope Francis in 2017 ..... however upon his release he got a well paying job in the Non Profits sector in New York city (to the alarm of some).

In June 2019 the Rev. Oscar Diaz, 56, was caught stealing at least $95,000 in church collections after bags of cash were found in a car crash. But he may not be charged, because of police “reluctance” to pursue a criminal probe because of the loose rules about church collections and donations made it difficult to prove a case, according to his Bishop Robert Vasa in a letter to a parishioner (however that might not have been the end of the matter, as the police said they would contact the Bishop).

Mind you, he would not be the only thieving priest who got away with it. In 2015, an  Ontario priest guilty of stealing up to $234,000 from his own church retained the title of priest despite being found guilty in December, with a jury needing just a few hours of deliberation to find Rev. Robert Couture guilty of theft over $5,000.

Catholic Diocese of London Spokeswoman, Emma Moynihan, said that the Diocese wouldn't start a  move to have the former pastor of Tecumseh’s Ste. Anne Parish defrocked, but they also didn't plan to put him back in a church. The diocese has a policy of only trying to defrock priests in sexual abuse cases because the process is so difficult, and ultimately requires the Popes approval.

So, something of a mixed bag when it comes to criminal Catholic Priests .... however one priests purely criminal activities make him something of a stand-out from the veritable congregation of criminal priests. 

Luca Mori was a Catholic priest in the village of Pontasserchio in Tuscany, Italy until he carried a series of criminal activities that led to him being sentenced in February 2022, to seven and a half years in prison. The crimes he was convicted of included extortion after he blackmailed a Bishop. But he was also convicted of masquerading as a judge (that  wasn't going to help matters in court), while hiring prostitutes. 

However its the charges that he was acquitted of that make the mind boggle. The court acquitted him of charges of extorting a nun, drug dealing, and money laundering. He was defrocked rather quickly. The kicker at the end of the small story, was that his parishioners in the village of Pontasserchio had nicknamed him "Don Euro" because of his insistent demands for donations from them.

He apparently had spent all the money he raised during this period, on parties, diamonds, luxury holidays with sex workers and visits to swingers parties .... he had been a busy boy.