Priest

Pope Benedict XVI today appointed a priest from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to become an auxiliary bishop for the Diocese of Rockville Centre in New York Monsignor Nelson J. Perez, 50, currently is pastor of St. Agnes Church in West Chester. He also is founding director of the Catholic Institute for Evangelization and has been heavily involved in ministry to Hispanic Catholics, the archdiocese said in a statement. The Diocese of Rockville Centre covers the suburban counties of New York's Long Island and serves about 1.5 million Catholics, a growing number of them Hispanic.

MIAMI - A Miami jury returned a $100 million verdict yesterday against a retired Roman Catholic priest accused of sexually abusing dozens of boys over many years - an amount unlikely to ever be collected, but one a victim's attorney said sends a strong message to child predators. "Now we know what a jury thinks about these cases," said Jeff Herman, who represented Andres Sousana in the case against the priest, Neil Doherty. "No. 2, it sends a message that we hope will protect other children.

CHICAGO - The Rev. Andrew Greeley, 85, an outspoken Roman Catholic priest, best-selling author, and longtime newspaper columnist who criticized the hierarchy of his church over the child sex-abuse scandal, died Wednesday at his Chicago home, according to his publicist, June Rosner. In a statement released Thursday through Rosner, Father Greeley's niece, Elizabeth Durkin, praised her uncle as a loving individual who "tremendously enriched" people's lives. "He served the church . . . with a prophetic voice and with unfailing dedication," she said.

The Catholic priest stood yesterday in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia, blessed his prosecutor, asked other priests and friends to pray for him, and thanked the judge who found him guilty of using the mail to buy child pornography. "Nothing is wanting to those who possess God," the Rev. Edward M. DePaoli, 42, told U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Scirica, moments before the judge placed him on one year's probation for his crime. "I don't believe I've had a more difficult and troubling case than yours," Scirica told the priest, who plans to appeal the verdict.

A priest from a Northeast Philadelphia parish was arrested last week for allegedly trying to pick up a prostitute in Kensington. Rev. Patrick McCormick, the parochial vicar of St. Timothy's Church, allegedly approached a police officer posing as a prostitute as part of a citywide vice unit operation on Kensington Avenue near I Street around 11 p.m. on Feb. 23, police said. After offering money in exchange for sexual favors, McCormick, 48, was arrested on the spot, according to police.

The two Roman Catholic priests who hear the confessions of their parishioners in Priest have committed sins of their own. Antonia Bird's engrossing film dissects the resulting moral dilemmas with a cool precision that resists the temptation to turn problems into sermons. Priest arrives today with the kind of free-speech controversy - many Catholics are outraged at the perceived assault on their faith - that makes movie publicists salivate. The collision of the sacred and the secular that begins when a priest hears someone confess to a serious crime is a dramatic situation that the movies have explored - and exploited - before.

An Audubon youth testified yesterday that the Rev. John J. McElroy had been his friend and comforter in troubled times but that he eventually realized that "something wasn't right between me and Father Jack. " "Father Jack was doing things to me and touching me in places where he shouldn't," the youth said as testimony began in the child-molestation trial of the Barrington priest. Father McElroy, 30, was indicted in November on seven counts of sexually assaulting the youth from the time he was about 12 or 13 years old to age 14. The priest, who has been relieved of his duties as director of youth ministries at St. Francis de Sales Parish, is charged with molesting the teenager at least six times during a period from December 1985 or early January 1986 to March 25, 1988.

A day after a priest was named in a sexual-abuse lawsuit, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia sought yesterday to temporarily remove the accused cleric from ministry in the mountains of Peru, where he has been working with homeless children since the early 1990s. In a statement issued yesterday by spokeswoman Catherine Rossi, the archdiocese said it had "requested that the Diocese of Abancay, Peru, release Father Donofrio from his current ministry pending an investigation.

FOR A second day, the lawyer for an Archdiocese of Philadelphia priest battled Thursday with a man who claimed that the priest molested him when he was 14, once suggesting that the accuser concocted the allegation because his mother had been spending so much time with the cleric. "What better way to get the subject of her attention out of your life than to come up with a story?" said the attorney, William Brennan. The question came amid a tense cross-examination as the lawyer sought to expose cracks not just in the allegation, but also in the landmark abuse-and-endangerment case against his client, the Rev. James J. Brennan, and a former Archdiocese official, Monsignor William J. Lynn.

Violence has stalked Paul Trinh like a plague. He escaped the bloody chaos of Vietnam that killed his parents and a brother only to land in the dangerous streets of America, where he has been mugged four times. An elderly member of the parish of the Swedesboro, N.J., church where he is an associate pastor was murdered last year. And most recently, Trinh, a Roman Catholic priest, found himself counseling the family of 14-year-old Maureen Lavin, mortally wounded in the Deptford Mall armored-car shootout Monday.