St. Sebastian's Angels priest out in Texas

A Dallas TV station reports that Fr. Art Mallinson has resigned from St. Michael's Catholic church in McKinney after reports of his past involvement in an online group for gay priests called "St. Sebastian's Angels" came to light. From the story:

The Diocese of Dallas said Father Arthur Mallison has done nothing that violates church policy, but e-mails have circulated about a picture of the priest that appeared on a website set up as a support site for homosexual clergy. The site is called St. Sebastian's Angels and was created in 1999.

"There was a faction in the parish that had started a nationwide campaign to put pressure on Father," said Annette Gonzales-Taylor, a Diocese of Dallas spokesperson.

Mallison was assigned to St. Michael's in McKinney just weeks ago. Some members discovered the website and started writing about it on blogs in Illinois and Georgia.

[snip]

The diocese said even though Mallison didn't violate church policy, he resigned because he didn't want misinformation and perception to hurt the parish nor the diocese.

This story could mislead you into thinking that Fr. Mallinson was pressured to resign because he is gay. In fact, as a Catholic priest familiar with the SSA website through past news stories about it wrote me last night:

But no one visiting that sick site could POSSIBLY argue that this is just an "alternative way of being sexual." That catty, vicious site was, alas, not a place where priests took off their collars to hang out; it was a place into which they dragged their collars and soiled them in the filth.

The SSA website -- some representative pages from which you can view here, through an anti-SSA activist group's site (Warning! Not suitable for work!) was not "discovered" by Catholics who complained about Fr. Mallinson's involvement. It was uncovered a few years back by activists with the group Roman Catholic Faithful, who wrote to every bishop who had a priest involved with the group and told them they should do something about it. When none would, RCF exposed the site publicly.

The Channel 8 report makes it sound like this was an innocent chat group for gay clergy. Hardly. Some members spoke, in crude, explicit terms, about their sexual exploits. They posted pornographic pictures of men. One, a Dallas priest named Cliff Garner (who has since left the priesthood), wrote about going on a mission trip and lusting after a hot Hispanic youth minister. A South African bishop wrote about his excitement over the possibility that John Paul might die, and how he wanted to poison Cardinal Ratzinger. Its members routinely trashed the Church's teachings on sexuality, and denounced the Vatican in hysterical terms.

I am not aware of anything Father Mallinson wrote on the site, aside from allowing his photo to be published, but the very fact that he was part of a group as rancid as this one raises very serious questions about his judgment. Though Mallinson's defenders will no doubt try to spin this as a gay-bashing witch hunt, it should be perfectly obvious that if a heterosexual priest had participated in a grotesque site like that for straight clergy, the objections would still stand. The idea that most Catholic parishioners would be fine with a straight priest who'd been part of a group like this is ridiculous.

The news story says the diocese could reassign him to another Dallas parish. Which parish would want this guy, at least absent a fuller accounting of his participation in that site? Can the bishop really be confident about entrusting the spiritual care of a parish to a priest so angry and immature, both emotionally and sexually, as to get mixed up with a nest of vipers like SSA?