Police Say Seymour Priest Embezzled From Church

Rev. Honore Kombo

A 50-year-old local Catholic priest is facing charges after police say he embezzled more than $20,000 from St. Augustine Church.

Police charged Honore Kombo, the former pastor of St. Augustine Church on Washington Avenue, with first-degree larceny after they say they were alerted to funds missing from the parish in April of 2015.

The investigation revealed that Kombo deposited an annuity left to the church by a deceased parishioner into a church account but then wrote a check to himself for a “large sum of money” and deposited it into a personal account in his name.

Police said that Kombo also opened a line of credit in October of 2013 under the church’s name and would deposit funds from the line of credit into his personal account.

A charge of first-degree larceny is a Class B felony for a dollar amount more than $20,000, police said. Kombo was released after posting a $10,000 bond and will appear in Derby Superior Court on the charges March 14.

Complete Article HERE!

A Brief History of the Relationship Between Mexican Drug Cartels and the Catholic Church

By Brian McManus

Pope Francis waves upon his arrival at the stadium of Morelia, Michoacán State, Mexico on February 16.
Pope Francis waves upon his arrival at the stadium of Morelia, Michoacán State, Mexico on February 16.

In May 1993, just outside the airport in the west Mexican city of Guadalajara, Juan Jesus Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was sitting in his parked white Mercury Grand Marquis when three vehicles packed with gunmen pulled up alongside and opened fire. The cardinal’s car was riddled with 26 bullets, and a nearby vehicle was apparently hit 20 more times.

Cardinal Posadas, his driver, and five others were found dead.

The high-profile assassination of one of the Mexico’s two Roman Catholic cardinals offers a window into the complex relationship between the Vatican and Mexico’s drug cartels. Cardinal Posadas was an outspoken critic of the groups and the violent terror they use to control Mexico’s illicit drug economy. Though the government ruled that his death was a case of mistaken identity, many still believe the killing was deliberate—that is, a successful attempt to silence him.

The man was wearing his clerical robes, after all.

Since Posadas’s death, and in particular over the past decade or so, the church has exercised top-down dealings with the cartels—condemning them in public, but, critics charge, colluding with drug criminals on the ground. Pope Francis spoke to that fraught dynamic during his historic visit to Mexico last week. In a sermon in the Michoacán state capital Morelia, which has been hit hard by cartel violence, he cautioned bishops, priests, nuns, and seminarians against shirking away from the unique challenge posed by the cartels in their area.

“What is the temptation that we face in environments dominated by violence, corruption, drug trafficking, disrespect for personal dignity, and indifference to suffering?” he asked, before answering his own question. “Resignation. Resignation terrifies us and makes us barricade ourselves in our vestries.”

That alleged resignation has long plagued the Catholic Church in Mexico, and though they weren’t named directly by Francis, no discussion of the cartel-church relationship would be complete without mention of “narco alms”—or blood money supposedly offered by cartels to help fund public works and other church activities. Cartel influence in the church was condemned by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 shortly after he began his papacy, but the Vatican’s emphasis on the problem seems to have waned since. In 2010, a minor scandal erupted when it was revealed that a church with a stunning 65-foot high metal cross in the working-class barrio of the central Mexican city of Pachuca bore a plaque thanking Heriberto Lazcano, alleged kingpin of the Zetas cartel, for its construction.

As a result, the church began looking more carefully into “narco alms,” as the New York Timesreported in 2011.

It can be hard to resist the money and the help from cartels, particularly when murderous kidnappers are involved. Take for instance, the tale, also about the Zeta cartel, from Brooklyn-born priest Robert Coogan, who used to run a tiny prison chapel in the northern Mexico. As he told the Guardian in 2012, when Zeta prisoners offered to help paint his modest chapel, he declined, telling them a leaky roof would surely ruin their work. They not only completed the job but waterproofed the building too. “Making a fuss,” he said, “could have triggered reprisals against other prisoners.”

Today, it’s still awful hard being a church figure in a region where cartels wield so much power and influence; Mexico has replaced Colombia as the world’s most dangerous place to be a priest, according to the Catholic Media Center. After speaking out against the cartels, one priest named Gregorio Lopez received so many death threats he famously began wearing a bulletproof vest during mass.

Francis also addressed the citizens of Mexico on his trip, warning them, “Don’t let yourselves be corrupted by trivial materialism, or the seductive illusion of deals made below the table.” He urged ordinary Mexicans not to fall prey to the trap of pursuing money, fame, and power. “These are temptations that seek to degrade and destroy.”

The pope clearly recognizes that the downtrodden are particularly vulnerable to the temptation of violent crime in hopes that it might better their own lives.

“Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, we have the massive divide between the rich and poor,” Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Buffalo, told VICE. “In Mexico and other places, the economy does not produce sufficient jobs for people to make ends meet. So most of them are forced to work in the informal economy—or in the clandestine economy. In those countries, corruption and bribery have been interwoven into the daily life and culture.”

Taylor Jr. believes you can’t stop stop the violence in places like Michoacán without radically changing the economy and offering alternatives. “In places where the cartels are entrenched, I don’t think the authorities are willing to do this.”

A couple years ago, armed vigilante groups emerged that seemed to take on the cartels before being at least partially infiltrated by them, as the in-depth Oscar-nominated documentaryCartel Land (which VICE helped distribute) shows.

“The pope expressed the views of so many people in Mexico,” Cartel Land director Matthew Heineman tells VICE. “But the tragedy is that their views and hopes for order and security have been ignored for so long by a government that has allowed the cartels to operate with impunity, resulting in a vicious cycle of violence for so many.”

Some believe the Catholic Church still needs to do more, perhaps even excommunicating those who affiliate with cartel members. After all, Pope Francis did travel to southern Italy to excommunicate members of the mafia in 2014. “The hierarchy of the church in Mexico has been timid when it comes to narco traffickers but that could change,” religious scholar Elio Masferrer told TIME earlier this month. “An action such as excommunicating them could have a significant impact.”

One might argue Mexican cartels are much more powerful—or at least more brazen—than the Italian mafia in 2016. But it’s not insignificant that the church’s top figure, a man who commands respect in Mexican cities plagued by drug violence, is speaking plainly and forcibly about the cartels. (At one point, Pope Francis went so far as to dub them “dealers of death.”) What remains to be seen is whether a relatively new pope and a government that did manage to recapture Sinaloa cartel boss El Chapo after his escape from prison this summer can put some real distance between spiritual matters and the drug money coursing through Latin America.

Complete Article HERE!

Priest paid his male ‘sex master’ from collection plate: lawsuit

By Julia Marsh

Miqueli​​:Crist
Rev. Peter Miqueli​​ (right) and his “master” Keith Crist.

A Catholic priest swiped collection-plate donations to pay for drug-fueled sex romps with a heavily muscled S&M “master,” a new lawsuit charges.

Parishioners claim the Rev. Peter Miqueli has stolen at least $1 million since 2003 while leading churches on Roosevelt Island and in The Bronx, where he is currently pastor of St. Frances de Chantal in Throggs Neck.

Peter Miqueli
Rev. Peter Miqueli in 2003.

Their suit alleges he used the money to act out unholy fantasies as a sexual “slave,” blowing $1,000 at a time on bondage-and-discipline sessions where a “homosexual sex ‘master’ ” — identified in court papers as Keith Crist — “would force Father Miqueli to drink Keith Crist’s urine.”

Miqueli also spent $60,000 in 2012 alone for “illicit and prescription drugs” he used with Crist, bought a $264,000 home in Brick, NJ, and paid $1,075.50 a month for his master’s East Harlem apartment, court papers say.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer Michael G. Dowd also said that Miqueli at one point had Crist living in the rectory at St. Frances de Chantal but that Crist had since been kicked out.

The suit, which was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court Thursday, also charges that the Archdiocese of New York and Timothy Cardinal Dolan knew about Miqueli’s “illegal scheme” and did nothing to keep it from growing into “the monster it is today.”

“This lawsuit seeks to finally put an end to this truly sinful conduct so that St. Frances de Chantal parish can regain the strength, spirituality and faith it once had before Father Miqueli arrived,” the court papers say.

St. Frances de Chantal
St. Frances de Chantal Roman Catholic Church in the Bronx.

The suit says that during the summer of 2014, maintenance workers at St. Frances de Chantal saw “several unstacked piles of cash, each approximately one foot high, scattered throughout Father Miqueli’s rectory residence.”

In addition to skimming $20 bills from the collection plate there, Miqueli ripped off money raised to buy a new pipe organ at his former church, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini on Roosevelt Island, according to the suit.

He also put Crist in charge of the Cabrini thrift shop, where Miqueli “misappropriated and diverted money . . . for his own personal use” and destroyed financial records to cover up the theft, the suit says.

An on-and-off girlfriend of Crist’s, Tatyana Gudin, told The Post that the hulking bodybuilder once hurt his knees while having sex with Miqueli in a bathtub.

The suit seeks unspecified damages from Miqueli, Crist, Dolan and the archdiocese on grounds that include negligent supervision, breach of fiduciary duty, fraud and unjust enrichment.Crist

Dowd said, “I feel really bad for the parishioners,” and he estimated that Migueli “had to have taken $1 million from each parish.”

“We’ve done a lot of homework. This is a bad guy,” Dowd said.

He added, “The thing that’s really amazing to me is: How could this guy be acting this way for nine years or so and the archdiocese does nothing?”

A spokesman for the archdiocese said it “has . . . taken these allegations seriously and has been investigating them.”

Crist hung up on a reporter, and Miqueli declined to answer a call through a church receptionist.

Complete Article HERE!

Pope Orders Audit of Church’s Wealth as Whistleblowers Pursued

By 

st peters

Pope Francis, galvanized by a scandal over Vatican finances, has ordered the most powerful bodies in the city-state to launch an unprecedented audit of its wealth and crack down on runaway spending.

At the suggestion of his economic chief, Cardinal George Pell, Francis has set up a “Working-Party for the Economic Future” which brings together the Secretariat of State, or prime minister’s office, the Vatican Bank and other agencies.

Francis has told the panel “to address the financial challenges and identify how more resources can be devoted to the many good works of the Church, especially supporting the poor and vulnerable,” Danny Casey, director of Pell’s office at the Secretariat for the Economy, said in an interview.

The pope’s initiatives come as five people stand trial in the Vatican over the leak of confidential documents in two books published last month that described corruption, mismanagement and wasteful spending by church officials. Those on trial deny wrongdoing.

Francis, 78, has pushed for more openness and transparency in Vatican financial and economic agencies but he has faced resistance from the Rome bureaucracy.

Seek Corruption

On the flight back to Rome on Monday after a visit to Africa, Francis told reporters that the so-called Vatileaks II scandal was an indication of the mess that he’s trying to sort out. The trial of two former Vatican employees alongside the books’ authors highlighted Church efforts “to seek out corruption, the things which aren’t right,” he said, according to a transcript provided by the Vatican.

The working group, which held its first meeting last week, will study measures to cut costs and raise revenue as part of a long-term financial plan.

“This will include comparing actual expenditure against budgets at a consolidated level, which is a new initiative,” Casey said.

As officials try to drag the Vatican’s financial management into the 21st century officials will appoint one of the world’s top-four accounting firms to review the Church’s processes, Casey said. The audit will look at financial investments, real estate and cultural assets. The four biggest firms are PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Deloitte & Touche LLP, EY LLP and KPMG LLP.

Assets that would never be sold and thus have no market value — including St Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel and priceless art treasures by Michelangelo — will be included in financial statements though the Vatican is still considering whether and how they should be valued.

While Casey declined to speculate on overall asset values, Pell, his boss, said earlier this year that the Vatican’s total assets were worth more than $3 billion. Separately, the Institute for the Works of Religion, better-known as the Vatican Bank, has 6 billion euros ($6.4 billion) in deposits, and assets under management and custody for clients.

Real Estate

According to the two books which triggered the latest scandal — Avarice, by Emiliano Fittipaldi, and Merchants in the Temple, by Gianluigi Nuzzi — the Vatican’s assets are massively under-valued. For Fittipaldi, its real estate holdings alone are worth an estimated 4 billion euros, four times as much as their book value.

The two volumes relate that Francis himself has denounced costs as being “out of control” and that St Peter’s Pence donations go not to the needy but to Vatican departments. Many cardinals live in apartments of some 500 square meters (5,400 square feet) waited on by aides and surrounded by Renaissance art.

The Australian Pell, prefect at the Secretariat for the Economy, has been drawn into the controversy. Avarice alleges that Pell and three aides, including Casey, accumulated expenses totaling 501,000 euros between July 2014 and January 2015 for costs including business class flights from Rome to London, Munich and Malta.

Resistant to Change

Pell, who denied the allegations when they first surfaced in the Italian magazine L’Espresso in February, declined to respond to a request for comment. Casey said it was “ridiculous” to suggest the spending was for personal expenses.

“The Cardinal is committed to cost-management as is his whole team,” he said. “Unfortunately every leader working on the financial reforms has at some stage been criticized either personally or professionally — this is a classic diversionary tactic and perhaps a sign that good progress is being made.”

While Francis recruiting experts from outside the Church is a step in the right direction, the pontiff may not be around long enough to see through his reforms, according to papal biographer, Austen Ivereigh. Francis has told his entourage that he plans to remain pontiff until 2020, Ivereigh said — an indication he may then resign, like his predecessor Benedict XVI.

The Vatican can be reformed “but it will take a generation because the existing practices and mindset are so well-established,” Ivereigh said. “The Curia is built to resist change. Historically it was designed to be impervious to outside influence.”

Complete Article HERE!

The Monsignor Who Took Money From the Poor and Binged on Ecstasy and Champagne

By 

 

Rev. Pietro Vittorielli
Rev. Pietro Vittorielli

Italian officials say Rev. Pietro Vittorielli stashed church donations for the poor in an account that paid for ecstasy-fueled Rio trip, oysters in London, and a Ralph Lauren wardrobe.

At least it is safe to assume that is the case with Monsignor Pietro Vittorelli, the head of Roman Catholic Benedictine abbey of Montecassino, which was made famous when it was destroyed in Allied bombing in World War II when Britain and the U.S. destroyed it in search of Germans who were thought to be hiding there. The abbey was rebuilt, but the hillsides nearby are dotted with the graves of fallen soldiers.

Vittorelli, who gave up his post at the abbey in 2013, was arrested this week on suspicion of siphoning off nearly $540,000 that was donated under Italy’s “Eight per Thousand” tax break, whereby kind-hearted people donate 8 percent of their income to a religious institution. The funds are an oft-used tax break for Italians and almost always go to Catholic entities.

Instead of reaching the poor, the funds that Vittorelli was supposed to distribute to worthy church-sponsored causes ended up in his personal Italian bank accounts, transferred from the Institute for Religious Works, otherwise known as the Vatican Bank. From those personal accounts, Vittorelli paid a personal credit card on which he charged luxury hotels and expensive meals from Brazil to the U.K., according to Italian investigators.

One entry in his credit-card statement included in the criminal dossier against him was for a $7,000 hotel bill in London, which included room service and hotel meals consisting of oysters and Champagne. On that trip, he is alleged to have spent $740 on one meal alone and more than $1,800 on designer duds from Ralph Lauren.

Another charge shows an extravagant holiday in Rio in 2010 on church funds, where, according to testimony by Italy’s Guardia di Finanza to Judge Virna Passamonti, he paid cash for ecstasy tablets he shared with a variety of suspicious friends.

In one month alone, the partying priest spent $34,800.  The other months he averaged expenses around $5,000.

He also owned four apartments in Rome and two storage facilities, which police claim he rented out as part of an intricate money-laundering scheme to keep the embezzlement hidden. Police say he enlisted his brother Massimo, a financial consultant who allegedly shared the wealth and the keys to safe deposit box No. 236 at Deutsche Bank in Rome. His brother would apparently stash cash that was withdrawn from the abbey’s Vatican Bank account in the secret deposit box until it was safe to deposit it in personal accounts without raising suspicion over having both transactions in the same bank statement period. “The sequence of operations unequivocally proves the intent to hide the path of the sums withdrawn from the accounts of the abbey,” Judge Passamonti wrote in her arrest warrant. “The examination of the financial flows directly documents the accurate operating systems meant to defraud.”

Italian police confiscated property, computers, and belongings found in all of the residences tied to the Vittorelli brothers.

Vittorelli left his post at Montecassino in 2013, citing health problems, and retired in Rome on his substantial, albeit ill-begotten, savings. In 2014, an organization hired by the Vatican Bank to audit its books discovered the money trail and started unraveling the fraudulent behavior that apparently began in 2008.

The latest scandal comes on the heels of two recent books published by Italian journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, who were fed by Italian laywoman Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui and Spanish Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda, who were on a panel meant to clean up the Vatican Bank’s messy accounting system that has been long embroiled in scandals ranging from money laundering to ties to organized crime. Both journalists are under investigation by Vatican authorities, but the Vatican has no jurisdiction to make arrests outside its fortified walls. Vittorelli, however, will join Vallejo Balda in the Vatican jail while both await trial.

Pope Francis has not commented specifically on the latest scandal, but this week he alluded to the problems in Rome. “God save the Italian Church from any form of power, image, and money,” he said on a visit to Florence.  “I prefer a church that is bruised, hurting, and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.“

Francis will embark on a five-day apostolic voyage to Africa on Nov. 25 before returning to Rome to open the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica on Dec. 8 to kick off the Jubilee year of mercy.

Complete Article HERE!