According to police reports described on Nola.com, a random person was walking past the Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church in Pearl River, Louisiana on the evening of September 30 when he noticed that the lights were on inside the church. This person decided to investigate, and upon peering through the window, discovered this sight:
The small parish's pastor half-naked having sex with two women on the altar, according to court documents. The women were dressed in corsets and high-heeled boots. There were sex toys and stage lighting. And a mobile phone was mounted on a tripod, recording it all.
Naturally, having witnessed what was clearly a consensual (albeit sacrilegious) encounter involving a person who would logically have access to the building at night, this random person decided that the best course of action would be to … take a consensual video, and then phone the police.
The police arrested the priest and sex workers; it's not clear what the charges were, but a spokesperson for the police said they stemmed from "obscene acts [that] occurred on the altar, which is clearly visible from the street." Which sure sounds a lot like a public obscenity charge for having sex indoors on the first floor of a closed building.
The priest, Reverend Travis Clark, had recently taken over as the chaplain of the nearby Pope John Paul II High School in Slidell, Louisiana, after the unexpected resignation of the former chaplain, Reverend Pat Wattigny. And the day after Clark was arrested for having consensual sex with two women who were sex workers in the church, the Archdiocese of New Orleans conveniently revealed that Wattigny had in fact been sending inappropriate text messages to underage students, and had also admitted to abusing a minor at a previous church posting (which the archdiocese swears it knew nothing about until Wattigny told them, which also happened to be the day after Clark's arrest).
So, the good news is, it wasn't a child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church for once, until it was.
Priest recorded having group sex on altar of Pearl River church, police say; 3 arrested [Ramon Antonio Vargas, Sara Pagones, and David Hammer / NOLA.com]
Image: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
