A reader sent me the photo above of a priest viewing, in the company of children, the relic of St. Jude the Apostle, which has been touring the country with Father Carlos Martins. That priest should have been more careful; he shouldn’t have touched a child’s shoulders like that. If he did rest his hands on the girl’s shoulders, I don’t think the priest did a thing wrong. But priests can’t be too careful these days. Father Martins, custodian of that relic, was kicked out of a parish hosting the relic, and his tour shut down, because he touched a little girl’s hair inside the church, in full view of hundreds of people, and her father went ballistic? If only that priest knew what he was risking, right?
Well, here’s news: he’s the very priest who saw to it shortly after that photo was taken that Father Martins was kicked out of his parish church (the one pictured above). That priest, Father Michael Lane, then humiliated Father Martins by releasing a press statement worded such that most people would read as if Father Martins had been accused of some sort of sexual wrongdoing with a child. Those children seen above are from the Queen of Apostles parish school (zoom in on their badges).
RELATED: Smearing Fr. Martins
Here, from the Queen of Apostles church website, is the priest in question (“moderator” is what they’re calling “pastor” these days, in merged parishes).
It’s a good thing that the little girl on whose shoulders Father Lane has his hands does not have a father who flew off the handle and called the police because a Catholic priest put his hands on her shoulders while viewing a sacred relic in church. It does make one wonder, though, why Father Lane trashed Father Martins, not only by cancelling the exposition of the relic, but — far, far worse, in my view —turning this into a crypto-sexual incident by alerting the Safe Environment office, and putting out a press statement under his name that Father Lane had to have known would be interpreted as thinking Father Martins had been accused of doing something sexual to a child, instead of only touching a lock of her hair as he was joshing with a group of schoolkids about his own baldness.
Continue reading at Rod Dreher’s Diary