SHELBY TOWNSHIP (MI)
Shelby – Utica News
June 3, 2019
By Kara Szymanski
A priest is charged with engaging in criminal sexual conduct in the 1980s in the rectory of a Shelby Township church with a boy who was between the ages of 12 and 14 at the time.
Neil Kalina, 63, a California resident, faces four felony counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a lifetime of electronic monitoring, in Macomb County at the 41-A District Court.
“In the last 30 hours, more than a dozen members of our investigative team have been in courtrooms in Washtenaw, Wayne, Genesee, Macomb and Berrien counties while other members of our team have been working with local law enforcement in Arizona, California, Florida and Michigan — all in a carefully executed plan to take these charged defendants off the streets,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a press release.
Kalina, who the Attorney General’s Office said had been a priest at St. Kieran Catholic Church in Shelby Township, was arrested May 23 in Littlerock, California.
According to a press release from the Archdiocese of Detroit, Kalina was ordained in 1981 for the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, which is a religious order that operates separately from the Archdiocese of Detroit, and granted faculties in 1984. He was a resident at St. Kieran Parish in Utica from 1984 to 1986 and a weekend assistant at St. Ephrem Parish in Sterling Heights from 1984 to 1986, according to the press release. He left active ministry in 1993, according to the Archdiocese of Detroit.
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