Male Escort Blows the Whistle on Italian Priests

It's a tale stuffed with financial and sexual shenanigans, drug use and allegations of blackmail, claims of the duping of gullible victims, and, at the center of it all, a rent boy. But there's a religious twist: The powerful men exposed in a dossier of more than 1,000 pages are Catholic priests.

And here's a familiar motif: Church authorities reportedly knew about the misdeeds of the clerics, but did nothing. When they finally did act, reported Church Militant, it was to shuttle a high-living priest nicknamed "Father Euro" to a pricey new home.

The Church Militant article drew on Italian news sources for its article, detailing how the male escort - a man named Francesco Mangiacapra - had initially believed the stories that Father Luca Morini had told him about being a magistrate. When he learned the truth, Mangiacapra wondered where a priest might get the kind of money Fr. Morini spent on him. (News sources did not specify whether it is less unusual for Italian judges to spend so lavishly.)

The escort "decided to report Fr. Morini to the diocese of Massa Carrara-Pontremoli," reported PagadianDiocese.org, but to no effect; the priest's superiors seemed uninterested in reigning the priest in.

Then church authorities learned that a news program, "La lene," was investigating Fr. Morini. That's when, news sources say, they spirited Fr. Morini away, setting him up with his own villa and providing him money. News sources claimed that the house and cash were forthcoming as the result of blackmail: The priest allegedly warned that he would spill the beans on the secret activities of a number of other Italian clerics.

The news program's report gathered stories about Fr. Morini told by members of the two parishes the priest administered, including tales of the cleric claiming to see visions of a saint, Padre Pio, and using those stories to exact funds from the faithful.

Mangiacapra, a former attorney, authored a book titled "Number One: Confessions of a Male Escort," in which he talks about himself and various priests but provides no names. But he provided considerable detail, including photos, in a second project: A thick dossier on the doings of sixty priests, which he recently provided to the Archdiocese of Naples.

Mangiacapra painted himself as acting out of noble intentions, telling Italian publication Corriere della sera that he had compiled the dossier and provided it to church authorities "not to hurt the people mentioned, but to help them understand that their double life, however seemingly convenient, is not useful to them or to all the people for whom they should be a guide and an example to follow."