Catholic Priest

Wendelin Bickler is a dead farmer. Mark Carlson is chairman of the Greater Rugby Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. Father X is a phony Catholic priest. The U.S. Geodetic Survey is a government agency concerned with maps. What they all have in common is an obscure latitudinal-longitudinal coordinate. It's right here in Pierce County, and there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. We're talking about the Geographical Center of North America. "If you take a map of the continent . . . and you put a pin through Rugby, it will balance perfectly," says Carlson, a Rugby city father and publisher of the Pierce County Tribune.

Sister Joan Scary said she got one clear instruction when the Rev. Edward M. DePaoli arrived at St. Gabriel Catholic Church in September 1995: Don't ask questions. Though she had been director of religious education at the Pottstown-area church since 1989, Scary told a Philadelphia jury Monday that St. Gabriel's pastor, the Rev. James Gormley, warned her that if she talked about DePaoli, "I could pack my bags and leave. " But Scary testified that she remembered that DePaoli had been arrested for something 10 years earlier and kept trying to find out what.

Sister Joan Scary said she got one clear instruction when the Rev. Edward M. DePaoli arrived at St. Gabriel Catholic Church in September 1995: Don't ask questions. Though she had been director of religious education at the Pottstown-area church since 1989, Scary told a Philadelphia jury Monday that St. Gabriel's pastor, the Rev. James Gormley, warned her that if she talked about DePaoli, "I could pack my bags and leave. " But Scary testified that she remembered that DePaoli had been arrested for something 10 years earlier and kept trying to find out what.

Philip Thomas Young, one of two brothers who have accused a Catholic priest of sexually abusing them as teenagers, testified yesterday that he stopped going to church years ago because such visits triggered flashbacks of the assaults. Young, 36, of Wilmington, said that although he grew up in a household steeped in the rituals of Catholicism, he no longer practiced the faith. Church lawyers are hoping those admissions will help them undercut Young's claim that his devotion to the church prevented him from suing until many years after the alleged abuse.

When the Rev. Gerald Dennis Gill tried to complete a four-day sentence at Chester County Prison for criminal trespass, he said, he was told to go home. So he did. Little did the Catholic priest know that doing so would land him in the slammer four years later. That's what happened Friday evening when Father Gill was stopped in Bucks County for a minor traffic violation. A police check of his license showed that he was wanted on a warrant issued in 1992 by Chester County Court.

It used to be a lot easier to honor the Lord's Day - the mall used to be closed. Now that God has so much Sunday competition - from stores, sporting arenas, cinemas, restaurants and bars - Pope John Paul II felt the need to remind Roman Catholics to keep the day holy. In a 100-page letter to the world's one billion Catholics yesterday, the pope urged his flock to rediscover Sundays by attending Mass regularly, as dictated by church law, and to dedicate the day to God, the family and healthy entertainment.

It sounds like stupidity, the federal judge said: stealing $2 million to hide a two-bit indiscretion - but Kathryn Hock must pay with prison. "This is not . . . a run-of-the-mill type of embezzlement or theft," Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Broderick said yesterday as he sentenced Hock, 48, a wife and mother of two, to 16 months in prison. Her crime: betraying the public trust over phantom pens and a cheap tape recorder. Hock, former business manager for the tiny New Hope-Solebury School District in Bucks County, admitted she stole more than $2 million from the school district over four years.

A retired Catholic priest has pleaded guilty to sexual assault in a June incident involving two teenage boys at his Lower Township home. On Monday, William C. O'Connell, 73, admitted to a Cape May County Superior Court judge that he touched himself in front of the two boys as they washed his car. "He was touching himself in their presence for his own sexual gratification," Cape May County Proscutor Stephen Moore said yesterday. Under state law, subjecting children to visual sexual acts is considered assault and carries a jail term of up to 10 years, Moore said.

Recently, a new movie with the brief title "Priest" came to Ben Franklin's quiet town, Philadelphia. It caused an uproar in the Catholic community - well, not really in the Catholic community but in the Catholic hierarchy. Aside from the bishops, very few ordinary Catholics were outraged by the film that Cardinal O'Connor of New York lambasted as "the kind of thing kids used to take delight in scrawling on the walls in men's rooms. " Was it really an exercise in scatology? I don't think so, at least not the version of the film I saw recently.

Not many traditional Catholics would have recognized yesterday's ceremony in West Philadelphia's Imani Temple West as a Mass, nor its berobed female celebrant as a priest. But the leader of the breakaway congregation - part of the African American Catholic Church founded in 1989 by former Catholic priest George A. Stallings Jr. - was calling it the first Catholic Mass to be celebrated by a female priest. "In 2,000 years of history, this will be the day that a woman will celebrate the Catholic Mass for the first time," said the Rev. Rose Vernell, a former nun and school administrator who was ordained earlier this month by Stallings in Washington.