Father Knows Best: Priest Who Fathered a Son Was Allowed to Stay and Preach Church Doctrine

A Catholic priest who says one thing and does another. Now I’ve heard everything.

A prominent American priest of the Legion of Christ religious order has decided to leave the priesthood after admitting he fathered a child years ago.

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The Legion said Saturday the Rev. Thomas Williams, a moral theologian, author, lecturer and television personality, had asked Pope Francis to be relieved of his celibacy and other priestly obligations. A friend, the Rev. John Connor, wrote in a Legion blog that Williams wanted to care for his son and the mother.

After Williams’ admission, the Legion’s then-superior acknowledged he had known for years about the child, yet allowed Williams to continue teaching and preaching morality.

He could be having kids for religious reasons, of course — perhaps answering the call from a European colleague who says more Catholic babies will stave off the demographic offensive of fast-breeding Muslims.

[image via the New York Daily News]

Christ-Loving Blogger Mom ‘Stabbed Man in the Ear and Slit His Throat’ During Drug Deal

The Kansas City Star describes Clara Jean Rector as “a sweet, small-town mom of three, churchgoer and author of a Christian blog complete with testimonials, prayer requests, and photos of sunsets.”

Ms. Rector’s blog is called Pray Read Live and includes earnest instructions on “How To Live As a Christian.”

Blog advice from Clara Jean Rector

Above: great moral advice from Clara Jean Rector

The blog doesn’t offer any particular wisdom on stalking or murder, as far as I could tell, but those are the charges Rector now faces.

In reverse chronological order:

Late last month, Jerry Sousley, pastor of the Camdenton Bible Baptist Church [in Missouri], contacted the Camden County sheriff’s office, alleging that Clara Rector had been stalking him and sending him messages “regarding inappropriate matters of a sexual nature,” according to court documents.

When Sousley rebuffed her advancements, the messages escalated, some even showing up on the windshield of his car, the court documents allege. Sousley also found a notebook at the church in which Rector had allegedly written an account of a fictitious sexual relationship between her and the preacher.

Woman confesses to Camden County cold case murder - KCTV5

During the stalking investigation, Rector unexpectedly blurted out that she’d butchered a man named Tommy Hope nine years earlier. She was a “person of interest” in the murder case after it became clear that she and Hope had been lovers and that he’d supplied her with drugs. But the detectives couldn’t make their suspicions stick, and the Hope case went cold. Until now.

During recent questioning, Rector said she left her house in the middle of the night of April 24, 2004, to go to Hope’s residence to buy drugs. When he told her he didn’t have any, she grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen, “jumped on his back and cut his throat,” documents say. “I was high and not thinking,” she told detectives.

On the other hand, she could really wash the fuck out of dirty windows.

“She’s a great mother, a hard worker, and she’s always cleaned my windows and taken care of my garden,” said Gerry Rector, the longtime principal at Camdenton Bible Baptist School.

So there’s that.

Pastor In Court On Cat-Chucking Charges

Pastor Rick Bartlett of Bastrop, TX, was charged with animal cruelty in January of last year. In a few hours, he’ll be getting his day in court.

The trial of a Bastrop pastor who has been charged with animal cruelty in the abuse and death of a cat last year is set to begin at 9 a.m. Monday in the Bastrop County Court of Law.

On January 15, 2012, Bartlett trapped Moody, his neighbors’ pet, on his property. He put Moody in a cage in the back of his pickup truck. The reverend later admitted that he left the feline trapped in the cage for two days without giving it food or water.

An animal control officer, contacted by Bartlett, noticed Moody’s collar and name tag; she told the pastor to return the cat its owners.

According to Bastrop Police Detective Sarah Moore, Bartlett told the officer “he would just go home and release the cat in the neighborhood.” Later that evening [the animal control officer] was told about a dead cat that was found underneath the Hwy 150 bridge. It was Moody [photo, in better times]. He had fallen some 50 feet to his death.

moody 03 300x155 Criminal trial for accused cat killer and Bastrop pastor Rick Bartlett nearing

When investigators caught up with Bartlett, he stated that Moody had escaped from the cage and he didn’t know what had happened to him.

Bartlett later confessed that he was “extremely stressed and angry because of personal issues” and he “untied the bungee chord the cage was attached to and opened the door to the cage and drove off with the intention of the cat jumping out of the vehicle while he was driving off.”

Little about that explanation makes sense. Let’s see if the court can tease some truth out of him.

Bartlett is the former pastor for the Bastrop Christian Church. He was let go from the church after his arrest, only to set up a new house of worship in his own home — the Riverside Christian Church.

Bible Copier Copies Everything But Its Meaning

Over the last four years, Phillip Patterson, 63, wrote out every word in the Bible by hand, spending as much as 14 hours a day on the project.

According to the AP, he inked the final two verses of the King James Bible yesterday, said “amen,” and concluded with satisfaction that

“Every single curly-q, every single loop, it was all worth it.”

(An aside: The AP, it appears, doesn’t know the spelling of the word curlicue, preferring to render it as a commercial paint cleaner.)

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As pointless exercises go, Patterson’s Bible-copying is up there with Most Live Rattlesnakes Held in Mouth and Walking Across the U.S.A. Backwards — but a little worse. The rattlesnake-defying daredevil is at least a bona fide crowd pleaser, and Backwards-Walking Guy is a fitness advocate who raised money for the Youth Development Foundation.

What’s Patterson’s excuse?

Maybe, for ten seconds here and there, he entertained some people in a you-don’t-say kind of way when they learned about his Bible project. Is that good enough to justify blowing spending four years of your life on?

But honestly, for me, it goes beyond that. If Patterson had copied the AMA’s Complete Medical Encyclopedia, or the entire Harry Potter series, that would have made him a shrugworthy eccentric. But to hand-copy the Bible, the book that is supposed to inspire Christians to go out and do good, seems to miss the point of the Biblical message that Mr. Patterson says he’s so attached to.

If you had four whole years to spend, and you wanted to honor Christ, what would you do? Might helping out in a soup kitchen be objectively better than scribbling all 921,820 words from the Bible in longhand?

Other suggestions: You could donate your time to working in a public library, or organize a few clothing drives, or write letters to try and free political prisoners, or volunteer to drive elderly patients to hospital checkups, or set up a bi-monthly neighborhood swap meet, or start a fundraiser for any charitable goal that impassions you. You could sow neighborly kindness, build a community, and help the disadvantaged.

Hand-copying a holy book proves nothing, sacrifices nothing, and signifies nothing — other than, perhaps, a failure of imagination.

[image via the Wall Street Journal

High Priest

Yay, spiritual rehabilitation!

A Western Cape (South Africa) pastor has been arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle drugs at the Buffeljags correctional services centre in Swellendam, the department of correctional services said on Sunday.

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Department spokesman Simphiwe Xako said the guards discovered dagga, Mandrax tablets and six sachets containing tik on Saturday night.

The pastor was one of the clergymen granted access to prisons in the Swellendam area, as part of a spiritual rehabilitation program.

[image source]

‘Happy Mother’s Day, I Got You This Knife’

Theology is hard. In this case, should the praise go to the Christian god, or the Islamic one?

Egyptian security officials say a Coptic Christian who stabbed his wife for converting to Islam has killed himself by jumping out of a fourth-story courthouse window.

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The officials say Romany Amir committed suicide on Sunday as he was waiting to be interrogated by police at the main court in the southern city of Assiut. …

Amir’s wife remained in hospital in critical condition following the stabbing on Saturday.

[image via Escape to Reality]

Pastor Dishes Out Kindness With a Loaded Gun

Father’s Day in the Shuck family is going to be a little awkward this year.

Madisonville Police say area pastor Jay Shuck was arrested after he pointed a loaded gun at his family.

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MPD says Shuck struck an officer while being arrested and was Tased.

Shuck is the pastor at Parkview and United Methodist Church in Madisonville, Indiana. He has been charged with wanton endangerments, third-degree assault, second-degree disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.

It’s Fish Friday in Utah!

Catholics continue their covert conversion of Mormons:

About 75,000 pounds of frozen crab meat — more than 37 tons — spilled out of a truck leaving Salt Lake City.

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The trailer toppled over near dawn Friday, spilling most boxes of crab and some of the meat onto I-15 near Spanish Fork.

Utah Highway Patrol Cpl. Todd Johnson says a similar spill happened about 15 years ago when a smaller truck hauling seafood dumped its contents onto a Utah road.

[image via NPR]

Ariel Castro: Lover of Springtime, Children, & God

It’s good to know that Ariel Castro, America’s most infamous child abductor, rapist, and torturer, has a soft side.

The web clipping is from today’s Metro New York:

Castro

Pastor Raped Women to ‘Purify Their Sins’

We told you yesterday about famous Brazilian pastor Marcos Pereira, freshly accused of raping six women (his church kinda shrugs the whole thing off).

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We just learned that the Reverend Pereira may have had nothing but good intentions when he forcibly stuck his dick into the women’s orifices: The Huffington Post claims that Pereira told his victims

they were possessed and could only be purified by sex with a holy man.

Maybe the reverend, once convicted, will be repeatedly cleansed of his sins by a burly biker cellmate, in much the same fashion.

[image via the Huffington Post]

A Little Experiment

…with interesting results.

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[source]

No Doubts, No Curiosity, No Educational Gain

If the ‘Dayton’ mentioned in the voiceover is Dayton, Tennessee, then that would be the same town where the famous Scopes Monkey Trial took place 88 years ago. How we’ve progressed! [hat tip: Holy Shit]

P.S.: The defense attorney in the Scopes trial, Clarence Darrow, is remembered in part for his observations and aphorisms. Here are a few:

“Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas.”

“The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.”

“I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.”

He also once exclaimed, “Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt!”, and that is a sentiment that I hope Bible Belt teachers, parents, and students will one day take to heart.