scandal

And Now the 82-Year-Old Brazilian Monsignor Is Caught on Tape Having Sex With an Altar Boy

The Catholic Church, this planet’s leading organization dedicated to covering up sexual abuse, is gonna have a tough time explaining this one: Brazil’s Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa, who is 82, was caught on video having sex with a 19-year-old altar boy, who Barbosa has allegedly been abusing for four years.

Filmed in January 2009 by a 21-year-old man who says he’s also the victim of Barbosa’s abuse, since age 12, the report aired on the Brazilian network SBT and appeared on YouTube. Armed with the footage, a SBT reporter went to Barbosa’s house:

Before raising the allegations of sexual abuse, the reporter asks if the priest had ever sinned. “Who has never committed a sin?” Barbosa responds.

The priest is then asked if the region has problems with pedophilia. “I think it is more (a problem) of homosexuality than pedophilia,” Barbosa says.

Asked directly if he ever abused boys, Barbosa says he could only answer such a question “in confession.” He then ends the interview, which was aired Thursday and posted on SBT’s YouTube page.

Monsignor Raimundo Gomes, 52, and Father Edilson Duarte, 43, are also implicated in the allegations, which the Vatican says it’s aware of. Not that they’re making any of the men available for interviews; all three men have been unable to be located by reporters.

Meanwhile, we imagine Barbosa and the Vatican’s first line of defense, besides putting distance between themselves, will be pointing out that the altar boy in the video is now 19, and while Barbosa’s homosexuality is sickening, it’s not like what he was doing, in the video at least, was criminal.

It’s that damn Devil, at it again.

[AP]

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