This gay priest no longer a problem

Dirtbag Michael Moynihan is no longer a gay priest problem. The Roman Catholic Church has suspended him, and he ought to be defrocked. From today's New York Post:

A popular Catholic chaplain at SUNY Maritime College in The Bronx has been fired and barred from acting as a priest after The Post told church officials that he has lived with another man in a pricey Manhattan one- bedroom apartment for years. The Rev. Michael Moynihan's suspension as a cleric late last week comes a year after he resigned as the beloved pastor of a ritzy Connecticut parish amid a financial scandal there.

And it came after his Bridgeport [Conn.] Diocese bosses - who earlier caught Moynihan lying about the existence of secret bank accounts at his former parish - learned that the dapper, white-haired cleric misled them about living with a man in Midtown.

That roommate - a handsome television actor and singer named Michael Fawcett - for years was the children's choir director at Moynihan's ex-parish, St. Michael the Archangel in Greenwich, Conn.

More:

He resigned as St. Michael's pastor in January 2007, much to the dismay of many parishioners, after a probe found he had spent more than $500,000 in church funds from two secret bank accounts he had set up without being able to properly document the expenditures.

Despite losing his Connecticut job, Moynihan for the past year remained a priest in good standing and continued working as the longtime chaplain at SUNY Maritime College, a staterun school in the Throgs Neck section of The Bronx.

OK, here's what I want to know: how does a priest believed by church authorities to have swindled, or at least misappropriated, a half-million dollars still be given power to run a church institution (a question similar to the one that lots of members of my own church, the OCA, are asking of Metropolitan Herman, who is not a parish priest but the head of the church). According to the Post account, the Diocese of Bridgeport (Conn.) said it had heard rumors that Moynihan was keeping house with Fawcett, but couldn't substantiate them.

I call bulls**t. Any journalist could confirm that in an hour or less by looking at official records, or even staking out the apartment building. I don't know how the Post got the story, but chances are someone tipped them off to Moynihan, and they cross-checked property records, phone records, etc. The diocese didn't want to know what Fr. Moynihan was up to, period. And you need to ask yourself why. Why wouldn't a diocese want to know if one of its priests, a man it believes hived away a half-million dollars in a secret account, was violating his chastity and celibacy vows and shacking up with a male lover (or, if it came to that, a female lover)?

What did Fr. Moynihan have on whom, if anything? What kind of clerical culture turns a blind eye to this sort of thing -- and why? Why was Fr. Moynihan being protected?

Moynihan is a fraud, pure and simple. If he was in love with Fawcett, and felt he could not extricate himself from the relationship, he should have done the courageous thing, the only principled thing, and left the priesthood. But Fr. Moynihan didn't want to do that. He wanted the perks and the privileges of being a priest, without the call to holiness. I have no way of knowing, of course, but I'd bet cash money that his living arrangements were no secret to his bosses in the chancery, and that they moved against him only because they knew when the Post reporter called that the news was going to come out anyway.

The lingering question is: who in positions of church authority (including laymen) knew the truth about Father Moynihan, and why did they protect his secret? This is not, I think, tangential to issues raised in yesterday's gay-priest megapost.

UPDATE: Uh-oh. It ain't just da Catlicks!