A legal resolution to an old case. A priest of the Fall River diocese has pleaded guilty to stealing more than $500,000 from his Cape Cod church. He’d already paid $1.5 million restitution to the diocese for money taken from several parishes where he’d served.
Fr. Bernard Kelly, now retired, admitted to stealing the money from St. Joseph’s Church in Falmouth, and among other things gave some of it to men with whom he’d had “questionable” relationships and who he’d hired to work and allowed to live at the church. One of those men was Paul Nolin who was convicted in the 2003 murder of Jonathan Wessner, a 20-year-old man who had rejected Nolin’s advances. Nolin was a convicted sex offender who was treated at a state institution by a priest who was also a therapist, Fr. Donald Turlick. When Nolin got out, he went to live with Turlick, and the two of them were friends with Kelly.
If you want all the details, go to my blog search page and enter “Wessner” as the search term.
Note how often we see these connections between financial misconduct, violation of celibacy, and homosexuality. There is a definite pattern.
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