

AN 82-year-old Catholic priest, father Marques Barbosa, became an unwitting porn star when he was shown on Brazilian TV last week having sex with a 19-year-old altar boy.

He was the “star turn” in a report on the SBT TV programme Conexao Reporter which also included charges by three former altar boys that they had been sexually abused by local priests.

Barbosa was caught on a hidden camera in the north-eastern state of Alagoas.

After the act, the priest’s face is identified as he looks toward the camera and says:

Who’s there? Who is it?

After the show was aired, Alagoas bishop Valerio Breda ordered the removal from church work of priests Barbosa, Edilson Duarte and Raimundo Gomes.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told AFP:

One was removed from his parish and faces charges in the civil justice system.

He added that the other two had been suspended from their duties pending an investigation.

Graphic video of Marques Barbosa’s abuse a man identified as Fabiano is being sold on the streets of the town of Arapiraca, according to this report.

Elsewhere in Latin America, a Spanish religious instructor was reported to have been jailed in Chile for possession of pornographic images of children.

A prosecutor said the priest, Jose Arregui, 53, would be tried for child pornography possession on March 24.

The church sex abuse scandal unravelling at Roman Catholic-run schools and institutions across Europe has now reached Switzerland, where senior clergy admitted yesterday that 60 cases were under investigation.

Abbot Martin Werlen, of the Benedictine Abbey of Einsiedeln, said reports of abuse had been submitted to the Swiss church authorities in the wake of the disclosures in Ireland, Germany, Austria, Poland and Holland.

He said the Swiss Catholic Church was investigating the cases, but nvestigations still had to show whether all the allegations of abuse in Switzerland were genuine.

In Germany, priests holding a service in a Catholic church in the Bavarian town of Bad TÃ¶lz were shouted at by outraged members of the congregation on Sunday for defending a fellow priest who had been convicted of sexually abusing adolescents.

It emerged last week that the convicted priest had been on duty in the Pope’s then diocese of Munich-Freising during the 1980s.

Meanwhile, The Times has been accused of being “shockingly anti-Catholic” in its coverage of the sex abuse scandal. Damien Thompson, blog editor for the Telegraph Media Group, took particular exception to this Times headline:

Pope knew priest was a paedophile, but allowed him to continue with ministry.

Raged Thompson:

Let me quote my colleague Cristina Odone, former editor of The Catholic Herald: â€˜I have been shocked by the Times’s anti-Catholic coverage, which verges on the hysterical and fanatical. And I want to know: why is this happening?’

What I’d like to do is put The Times’s elder statesman, Lord Rees-Mogg, on the spot. How can he, as a former editor of the paper and a devout and distinguished Catholic, stand by as the paper he loves traduces the Holy Father?

Prize for best quote of the week goes to Christopher Hitchens. Writing for Slate magazine, he said:

The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evilâ€”a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justiceâ€”and speedily at that.

Hat tip: Name Withheld

Edit: Thanks to reddit, we found the video mentioned. It’s heavily blurred and isn’t in English, but if you have a desire to watch it, be our guest!



