PENNSYLVANIA
Philly.com
by Jeremy Roebuck, STAFF WRITER.
By the time he was in high school, Mark Haynes felt called to devote his life to the Catholic priesthood.
But from a much earlier age, his lawyer said Wednesday, Haynes realized something else that set him apart – an unshakable feeling that by some accident of genetics he had been born a woman stuck in the body of a man.
Haynes’ therapist would later conclude the dissonance between his vocation and the condition he came to view as an affliction led him to an addiction to child pornography and a series of predatory sexual encounters with children that have now landed 56-year-old suspended prelate in prison.
But federal prosecutors balked at that explanation Wednesday as Haynes, most recently of SS. Simon and Jude Parish in Westtown, was sentenced to 20 years incarceration in a case as notable for the charges he will never face as those to which he pleaded guilty last year.
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