Still waters run deep, as the saying goes, and you just never really know what people are up to in their private lives. Which is none of our business.
Until, that is, they decide to display their private lives in a public place, like a certain New Orleans priest did when he had a threesome with two dominatrixes on the altar of his church.
Yes, you read that right.
And now he’s been arrested on obscenity charges.
It all began the night of September 30 in Pearl River, Louisiana when a passerby noticed the lights in Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church were on later than usual.
The passerby peeked into the church to see what was up and found a most impious scene unfolding on the church’s altar. The priest, still half-clothed in his priestly vestments, was having sex with two corseted women.
An assortment of sex toys and what local news outlet Nola.com called “stage lighting” were also a part of the scene along with a cellphone on a tripod that was recording the whole thing.
The witness called the police, who arrested the priest, Father Travis Clark. The two women he was with were also arrested. One of them, a sex worker, had posted on social media the day before that she was en route to New Orleans to “defile a house of God.”
All three were charged with obscenity for public sex because the altar on which they were having sex was clearly visible from the street.
While this may smack of puritanical responses to sexuality many consider outdated—and sex work is work so no shame there, we can probably all agree if you’re a priest, you pretty much could not possibly pick a worse setting in which to be in flagrante delicto—even in notoriously free-spirited New Orleans!
Plus there’s that whole vow of celibacy thing.
In Catholic tradition, the altar of a Catholic church is among the holiest sites in the church because it is where the Eucharist is prepared. It must be restored by “penitential rite” after being “desecrated” by something like Clark’s antics.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Clark has been suspended by the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
Oh my….
Well, isn’t that just a hypocrisy filled chalice of Christian special?