PENNSYLVANIA
The Times-Tribune
CHRIS KELLY: Trust shattered again by charges against well-known Father Philip Altavilla
BY CHRIS KELLY (COMMENTARY)
Published: April 11, 2014
I met the Rev. Philip Altavilla 14 Palm Sundays ago. He was the pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Taylor, where my wife was raised in the Catholic faith.
I was brought up Presbyterian, but he never held it against me. Father Phil agreed to marry us in the church when many priests wouldn’t. I received communion during the ceremony, plain sacrilege to the Old Guard.
Jean Terruso, a wonderful woman scheduled to be my mother-in-law, died of lung cancer a dozen days before the wedding. She was buried in the dress she bought to wear on Her Little Girl’s Big Day.
Words are my trade, but I can find none to relate how caring and thoughtful Father Phil was as we mourned Jean’s death and celebrated the beginning of our life together. When Dad passed, Phil was there for us. When Phil’s father died, we went to the viewing. It was the right thing to do.
Knowing the right thing to do is suddenly complicated. Father Phil has been arrested, accused of giving alcohol to a 13-year-old and touching her inappropriately after a midnight Christmas Mass in 1998. Police say he confessed in a recorded conversation.
It is cliché to say an arrest sent shockwaves through the community, but this time it fits. Father Phil had multitudes of friends, religious and secular. As a stunned parishioner told a local TV station: “If there were a hundred priests, he’d be the last one” you would suspect.
Yet here we are. Again. Another priest, another child, another ugly reminder that supposedly sacred values are situational for some who preach them, that our yardstick for character may be too straight for accurate measurement.
Diocese of Scranton Bishop Joseph C. Bambera wasted no time throwing Father Phil under the public bus:
“I am both angry and demoralized to think that, yet again, a priest has been involved in such inappropriate, immoral and illegal behavior,” he said in a press release. “It is particularly distressing that the pastor of our Cathedral Parish, who is known to countless numbers of the faithful and has served in so many positions of trust and responsibility in the Diocese of Scranton has betrayed that trust in such a manner.”
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