I can’t decide what my favorite news story of the past couple of days is. Is it the undeniably delectable Manti Te’o dead girlfriend hoax? Or the cross-dressing, meth-dealing priest who, as the Connecticut Post’s instant-classic headline put it, “liked sex in the rectory?” Show of hands? Okay, we’ll go with Monsignor Meth for now, and perhaps we’ll deal with Te’o tomorrow.
“Monsignor Meth,” aka Kevin Wallin — well, first off, you just know someone has become tabloid-immortal when they’ve already been gifted with a nickname. It’s kinda like the Mayflower Madam. Or Leona “Queen of Mean” Helmsley. I just want to know what his drag name was!
Anyway, you must, must read the article about him, because even the headline can’t really do the whole story justice. Some of my favorite tidbits: according to the article,”diocese officials found bizarre sex toys” in Wallin’s residence. What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall when that discovery was made. Also: how bizarre are we talking, here? In addition, former New York Cardinal Egan is described as Wallin’s “mentor” — so that’s what the kids are calling it these days?
Here’s my favorite detail, though: Wallin “enjoyed Broadway musicals and show tunes.”
The story of how he got caught is also quite interesting, to say the least. One of his most idiotic moves has got to be this: the cops say he laundered his meth profits by operating a shop that sold porn and sex toys. D’oh! Didn’t he bother to read Money Laundering for Dummies? You don’t launder money from an illegal activity by putting it into an activity that’s sketchy at best and bound to arouse suspicion, particularly if a priest is doing it. In fact, that’s the last thing you want to do.
Credit where credit is due to Skyler White: at least she devised a highly plausible money laundering scheme for the filthy lucre Walter acquired through his dealings with meth. She’s a smart woman who understands the need for discretion and has helped save Walt from some of his own worst instincts. See, this is why the Catholic Church needs to allow priests to marry. Having a life partner, who knows you inside out and whose counsel you seek and trust, can sometimes keep you from making terrible mistakes. Or, as my mom used to say, priests need to be able to marry, so they can have at least one person in their lives who can tell them when they’re being an a–hole.
Moving on to the far more somber news from Germany, the homeland of the current pope: the New York Times reports that this week, the German Catholic Church released a devastating report about sexual abuse in the Church. It is based on the testimony of over 1,000 victims, and it reveals that “priests carefully planned their assaults and frequently abused the same children repeatedly for years.”
Like so many men of the cloth who commit acts of sexual assault, many of the abusers told their victims that God sanctioned the abuse:
“I found particularly devastating the perpetrators’ lies to their under-aged victims that their actions were an expression of a loving bond with God,” [Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier] said Thursday. Claudia Adams, who said she was assaulted as a child in a preschool run by the church in a village near Trier, works through her trauma by blogging about the abuse scandal. The priest who abused her “told me that I was now ‘closer to God,’ ” she said in a telephone interview on Friday from her home near Trier.
The Times reports that also this week in Germany, two Catholic hospitals refused to examine a rape victim, apparently because the Church objects to the morning after pill, or something:
Germans were further outraged by reports this week that two Roman Catholic hospitals in Cologne had refused to carry out a gynecological examination on a 25-year-old suspected rape victim. An emergency doctor who had helped the woman told the newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger that the hospitals cited ethical objections to advise women on unwanted pregnancies and on steps that can be taken to prevent them, like the morning-after pill.
These stories make one thing clear: no one can questions the impeccable moral credentials of the Catholic Church as the basis of its authority to police the sex and reproductive lives of everyone else! Why, the very idea!
