Word: priestly
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Until last year George Augustus Stallings Jr. was one of the most visible black priests in America's Roman Catholic Church. Today the flamboyant Washington preacher is the church's leading renegade. Stallings last July spurned church orders and formed his own African-American Catholic Congregation. This week he plans to push his defiance one step further by having himself consecrated a bishop. What's more, the 42-year-old priest has just become embroiled in scandal: a series in the Washington Post last week accused Stallings of questionable financial dealings and homosexual improprieties with three persons, one of them...
...that James Cardinal Hickey had insisted he undergo psychiatric treatment. According to the Post, Hickey made the demand after years of frustration over Stallings' Lone Ranger tactics. Especially disturbing to Hickey, said the Post, were Stallings' refusal to live in a rectory and questions about whether the priest's expensively decorated private residence had been partly funded by church offerings. The archdiocese also received repeated allegations about homosexual activity but was unable to substantiate them...
...satellite congregations in Norfolk, Va., Baltimore and Philadelphia. To date he has attracted several thousand disciples, both ex-Catholics and ex-Protestants. Stallings says he gives eight or ten speeches a month around the U.S., and each time he speaks, local blacks want to set up churches. But the priest of a second African-American congregation in Washington forsook Stallings last year...
...widespread in the U.S., even as the notion of Satan loses currency in the seminaries. Father Richard Rento of Clifton, N.J., who frequently speaks about Satanism among the young, first became involved when a 15-year-old student attempted suicide, saying he wanted to meet Satan. Explains the priest: "It has become my work to inform parents and children that Satanism is not a lark. It often means tragedy and death for the child and for others." In January 1988 a fixation upon Satan played a part in a New Jersey matricide-suicide case...
...there, however, a direct causal relationship between heavy-metal music and Satanism, as Cardinal O'Connor contended? Father Rento, the New Jersey expert, does not make such a claim. But he does provide carefully couched support for O'Connor's concern. Music, says the priest, "is one of the factors helping to create a climate in which the hitherto unthinkable becomes thinkable...