VATICAN CITY
Court convicts man posing as a priest
ROME (AP) — A fake priest was caught trying to hear confessions in St. Peter’s Basilica and was tried by a Vatican tribunal, a Vatican judge said in an interview published Saturday.
Judge Gianluigi Marrone, who is a member of the court system of the independent Vatican city-state, said the man was wearing clerical garb and carried documents asserting that he was a priest.
“He was caught by surprise in the basilica while he was trying to take his place in a confessional. He was wearing clerical garb, but the expert eye of our [basilica] personnel didn’t need much to sense something strange in his behavior,” Marrone told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
Marrone didn’t say when the incident happened, what the tribunal’s verdict was or if the man received any punishment.
