A Maronite chorepiscopus, rector for more than two decades of the main Lebanese Marian shrine in the United States and a figure appreciated in traditional Mass circles, has been removed from his post after being charged with public indecency and procuring. According to the Warren (Ohio) police, he was caught in broad daylight in a public park while a registered sex offender performed a sexual act on him. The case, still in the judicial phase, is also an uncomfortable warning: liturgical sensibility does not immunize against sin or scandal.
The facts, according to the police report covered by local media in the Youngstown valley (WFMJ, The Vindicator, Tribune Chronicle, WKBN), occurred on July 31 in Perkins Park, a public park in Warren, Ohio. Around five-thirty in the afternoon, a couple walking their dog alerted the police that two men were engaging in a sexual act outdoors, next to the baseball fields. One of them, kneeling on a black mat, was performing oral sex on the other, who stood smoking a cigar. According to the complaint, one of the two even offered money to the couple to stay and watch.
The kneeling man was identified as Kenneth Kopp, 53, a level III registered sex offender—the highest in Ohio—sentenced in 2011 to ten years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of raping a minor. Officers found him in his car in his underwear, with wigs, female breast prostheses, and three drug pipes, and arrested him on the spot. The other man, who denied knowing Kopp, was allowed to leave that afternoon. He was Chorepiscopus Anthony Spinosa, 75, rector since 2002 of the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon in North Jackson.
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