Top priest banished

NEW YORK
New York Post

By DAN MANGAN

Last Updated: 4:34 AM, February 2, 2012

A disgraced Harlem priest who arranged Pope Benedict XVI’s 2008 Mass at Yankee Stadium has been sentenced to “a life of prayer and penance” by the Vatican for his alleged molestation of up to 10 kids decades ago.

Wallace Harris, the former popular pastor of the Church of St. Charles Borremeo, also now by order of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan is living in a Catholic-run residence “under very, very close supervision,” said Dolan’s spokesman Joseph Zwilling last night.

Zwilling pointedly said that Harris — once the archdiocese’s top-ranking black priest and chairman of the senate representing all of the archdiocese’s priests — is not living in a location near families, and is barred from ever publicly acting as a priest.

In 2008, Harris, 64, both gave the invocation at former Gov. David Paterson’s and arranged for the Pope’s triumphant Mass in Yankee Stadium.

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