July 23, 2007
Just Another Priest Pilfering the Collection Plate for a Gay Stripper Story
It is news, ‘though, as the object of this closeted priest’s obsession was over 18.
Reports the Chicago Sun-Times:
The Rev. Mark Sorvillo loved taking his parish’s money and spending it on himself. Trips to Rome, Venice, Paris. And $900 meals at New York restaurants.
In 1999, Sorvillo found someone else to lavish his parishioners’ collection-plate donations on — a male stripper.
Sorvillo — who pleaded guilty Friday to stealing nearly $200,000 from St. Margaret Mary parish on the North Side — gave cars, plane tickets and thousands of dollars in cash to James Sosnicki, a married Louisville man who stripped frequently at gay clubs in Chicago, law enforcement sources said.
Reached in Louisville, Sosnicki told the Chicago Sun-Times he paid Sorvillo back — and said their relationship was never sexual.
. . .
Sorvillo resigned from St. Margaret Mary in February 2006 after parishioners caught him stealing from the collection bags. He had been under suspicion since threatening to close the church’s school because of the parish’s strained finances. An investigation revealed he skimmed more than $40,000 from collections, wrote checks from parish accounts to himself and his creditors, and charged more than $62,000 at Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s and Marshall Field’s to the parish. In October 2006, prosecutors charged him with felony theft.
Filed under: Catholicism, Crime, Illinois
