Do you remember Fr. Alberto Cutie, the prominent Florida priest who got caught smooching his girlie in public and then just as prominently abandoned the Catholic Church?

As if that wasn’t jerky enough, this certainly is.

As some sort of self justification for his leaving the Church, he writes a despicable article for the Huffington Post in which he claims to detail the reasons (read Big Bad Catholic Church) for many prominent priests who have been “disappeared.”

He lists some of the recent goings on of which we are all familiar, but tries to cast some in a disingenuous light to hurt the Church. For instance, he says this of dog John Corapi:

He developed an incredible media ministry to promote the Church’s message, but when he was accused of wrongdoing with an adult female, there was no due process, and Fr. Corapi just got fed up and moved on. He describes his disillusionment in a recent video, which every devout Roman Catholic should watch.

I am sure Berto thought that Corapi was a disgusting right wing nutjob right up until he got caught with a woman. He then jumps to unknowable conclusions about the Pavone situation.

Then he drags up priests who have been caught in various levels of wrong doing that have been disciplined and/or have left the Church. Of course, if the Church did nothing about these people they would be guilty of coverup. When they act swiftly they are guilty of, you guessed it, coverup.

Yet, while all this seems to be happening now, we seem to have a bad memory and we forget this apparent animosity of the Church toward priests that are well known, charismatic figures and strong leaders has been going on for a long time. Regardless of the crimes they may or may not have committed, let’s look back to the 1980s, 1990s and into the year Boston seems to have made the whole thing explode in 2001-2002.

He then lists several priest who are credibly accused or even admitted baddies and classifies it as animosity toward prominent and charismatic priests.

If anything, I think that most of these cases show that the Church has been too lenient and granted too much independence to prominent and charismatic priests including Berto himself.

Fr. Cutie was a bad priest. Berto is a bad man.