A former Catholic pastor in Pennsylvania has pleaded guilty to stealing $30,000 from his parish.
Monsignor Joseph McLoone, 58, was suspended in 2018 and originally accused of stealing $100,000 from the parish fund of St. Joseph’s Church in Downingtown.
The church conducted an audit in 2017 and began questioning McLoone in 2018. It turned out he’d been taking double his allotted stipend from the regular mass collections and dipping into a church fund that only he had access to.
McLoone put the money into secret accounts and spent thousands on a beach house in New Jersey, paying off his credit card debts, and on funding “personal relationships” with men he met via the dating app, Grindr (on which he had a ‘Grindr XTRA’ account).
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Related: Priest arrested for spending church money on beach house, boyfriends, and a Grindr XTRA account
Last week, McLoone reached a plea deal with prosecutors, which saw him plead guilty to taking $30,892.50.
On Thursday, Common Pleas Judge Jacquline Carroll Cody sentenced McLoone to five years of court-supervised probation. The first nine months will be served under house arrest.
McLoone was suspended from his duties when the church began to investigate and later resigned from his position. Now that the criminal case has finished, the church says it will conduct its own investigation.
“It is the policy of the archdiocese not to proceed with a canonical investigation until law enforcement has concluded its work,” spokesperson Kev Gavin said in an email to DailyLocal. “Now that civil authorities have completed their procedures, the canonical investigation can commence. Any administrative penalties against Monsignor McLoone would be pending the outcome of that process.
“The archdiocese and the parish are grateful for the resolution in this matter along with the closure and healing it brings.”
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Kangol2
This story keeps repeating itself over and over. Closeted/DL gay Catholic priest steals church funds to pay for lavish lifestyle, boyfriends (including sex workers), etc. Meanwhile, instead of dealing with this problem and other obvious ones (pedophile priests) with openness and care, particularly around the serious problems with chastity and celibacy, the Catholic hierarchy spend most of their time fixating on abortion and demonizing LGBTQ people.
blackhook
lol, how can anyone be so STUPID as to $upport the bizarre Catholic Church. We need a new vocabulary to describe these medieval-voodoo-spewing freaks, as ‘hypocrites’ doesn’t begin to do them justice. It’s way beyond time to end the Catholic Criminal Empire! Good riddance to bad trash …hocus pocus dominocus indeed!